Posted on 11/07/2003 9:28:31 PM PST by El Conservador
Thousands of teenagers shrieking at the sight of Israel's hottest pop idol packed a soccer field in this Tel Aviv suburb late this summer, two days after twin suicide bombings killed 15 and wounded dozens.
Wearing baggy sweat pants, a baseball cap pushed off-center and a glittering, rhinestone-studded Star of David necklace, Kobi Shimoni (known by the stage name Subliminal) swaggered on stage as if he were the Israeli incarnation of Eminem (news - web sites). With a booming rhythm track and an Israeli flag draped from the DJ stand, the show turned out to be as much a patriotic pep rally as a rapper's delight.
"Who has an Israeli army dog tag, put your hands in the air!" Subliminal called out in a mix of Hebrew and English. Hundreds of hands shot up. "Who is proud to be a Zionist in the state of Israel, put your hands in the air! Hell yeah!"
The patriotic appeal at the concert won chants of support from the rocking crowd, mostly adolescents grappling with weekly terrorist attacks and a crippling economic recession.
With sidekick Yoav Eliasi (aka The Shadow), Subliminal has parlayed nationalist themes into a chart-topping album, transformed the Star of David into a fashion statement and helped integrate the music of urban America into the fold of Israeli pop.
A voice for teens
For Subliminal, the music has generated tens of thousands of record sales. For Israeli teens, it has given voice to their outrage at the state of affairs in their country. Hip-hop, a quintessentially American art form, is helping bolster national morale in a country bruised by three years of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians.
For most of the past decade, Israeli hip-hop artists operated on the margins of mainstream Israeli music, which has generally been a mix of Hebrew-language rock and Mediterranean crooning. But when hopes for Israeli-Arab peace disintegrated three years ago amid a violent Palestinian uprising, rappers such as Subliminal moved beyond schoolyard party lyrics to rail about the turbulence overwhelming their country.
"Before I started listening to him, I wanted to move to Canada," said Eden Yair, 12. The braces-wearing youngster leaned over a police barrier in hopes of getting a glimpse of the rap star before the show. "We need something that will encourage us. He sings that there's still hope," she said.
Subliminal is not the only Israeli rapper preaching politics. Mook E, whose rap is soaked in reggae phrasing, scored a breakthrough Israeli hit with a song called Talking About Peace. The song bemoans the difficulties of rapprochement while warning about the threat of "fingers on the trigger." A funk outfit whose nonsensical Hebrew name translates to "Snake Fish" predicts the inevitability of a Palestinian state.
Filling a void
Music critics say the hip-hop lyrics have filled a void left by Israel's top pop artists, who have shied away from mixing music and politics for fear of losing their audience.
Hip-hop "made a revolution because before them Israeli music wasn't honest. It was escapist music," says Sagi Bin-Nun, a music writer for the daily Ha'aretz newspaper. "The songs talked in clues, and people hid their honest feelings. People spoke in metaphors." With hip-hop, Israeli rappers get a chance to offer their own narrative of current events, which makes the music a kind of "CNN of the people," Bin-Nun says.
Of the top hip-hop acts, Subliminal's grim prognosis seems most in sync with the nationalistic shift in Israeli sentiment over the years. On the cover of his hit album The Light and the Shadow, an inferno engulfs Subliminal's head. In the song Divide and Conquer, Subliminal and The Shadow sneer at the 1990s peace accords that aspired to create a Palestinian state, and capture the outrage over the violence that erupted three years ago:
To think that an olive branch symbolizes peace.
Sorry, it doesn't live here anymore.
It's been kidnapped, or murdered.
There was peace, my friend.
Handshakes, fake smiles.
Treaties signed in blood.
Where is God?
The angry lyrics and Subliminal's right-wing political convictions have drawn fire from Israeli cultural critics, who call him a militarist and a fascist. Subliminal, whose fluent English is peppered with slang imported from the USA, rejects the labels. He says his songs reflect the daily realities and feelings of Israeli youth.
"In America, hip-hop is the fastest way to get rich, to talk about the 'bitches, cars and money,' " he says. "In Israel the words are very militant, like the situation we're living in. You open the newspaper in the morning in Israel, and this is what you get."
The appeal of hip-hop has crossed the country's ethnic boundaries. Young Israeli Arabs alienated by the Jewish majority glorify African-American rappers as kindred spirits in the struggle against discrimination. Tamer Nafer, an Israeli Arab from the Tel Aviv suburb of Lod, was one of the first to begin rhyming in Arabic after years of listening to Tupac Shakur.
"I said, 'Damn, if we removed the word n- - - and you put (in) the word Arab, it's like singing about us,' " says Nafer, whose hybrid Hebrew and Arabic lyrics challenge Jewish stereotypes of Arabs as terrorists. "It's delivering the message to a younger generation. Politicians don't talk to our generation. But politics is the way of our life, so I'm bringing the way of our life in their language."
With a trio of best-selling albums in the last year and hourly radio play on Israeli pop radio, hip hop has established a beachhead on the local music scene.
Record companies say they've been swamped with demos from artists hoping to become the next Subliminal. But because politics has become an inseparable ingredient of the genre, record executives say they judge new talent on the manifesto as much as the music.
"There's no reason to release an album of hip-hop unless it has something to say. If the artists don't establish an identity, I won't release it," says Gadi Gidor, an artists-and-repertoire executive at Helicon, the label that produced Subliminal's album. "Let's move the debate away from the parliament and onto the streets. If we're not going to say anything, let's go back to Mozart and Bach."
Unfortunately, it's Hebrew only.
Why is that hiphop artists seem more patriotic, either here or in Israel???
You can buy their music here (and listen to the music, about 10 seconds of each track)
http://www.israel-music.com/?artist=487
It is an english language website (I am not affiliated with that site, nor do I work for it).
As already posted, their website is www.subliminal.co.il . It is in Hebrew....
"Say hello to my li'l fren'...
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