Zionist rapper wins fans and angers critics

Israel's hip-hop king, Subliminal, says people have told him straight to his face, "Man, you're a fascist."

In spite of - or perhaps because of - such controversy, the 24-year-old rapper's mix of hip-hop attitude and right-wing politics has become an anthem for young Israelis hungry for a secular Jewish identity and confused by three years of conflict with the Palestinians.

Kobi Shimoni and partner Yoav Eliasi - a.k.a. "Subliminal" and "the Shadow" - seldom name their enemy, but songs like "We Came to Expel the Darkness" and "My Land" are clearly directed at the Palestinians.

"The lyrics are we should never be divided again. Only together will we survive and maintain Israel. What is so wrong with that?" Shimoni says in an interview, wearing a rhinestone Star of David around his neck.

Subliminal and the Shadow's Hebrew-language gangsta rap rocks nightclubs, army bases and pizza parlors from the Golan Heights to the Red Sea resort of Eilat. More than 54,000 Israelis have bought the latest album, a runaway bestseller in a nation of just 6.6 million people.

Subliminal's popularity has set off warning bells: some parents ban the music from their homes and critics rail against the "Subliminal phenomenon" in the press.

Israeli youth adopted hip-hop at the end of the 1990s. Ethiopian Jews and Israeli Arabs have taken up rap's traditional role of giving those who feel oppressed an identity and a sense of power.

But Shimoni, like many Israelis, feels just as oppressed by Palestinian suicide bombings and shootings. He says he is using hip-hop as a weapon.

The son of Jewish immigrants from Tunisia and Iran, Shimoni says his beef is with Palestinians and not the Arab world.

His ties to and falling out with Israeli Arab rapper Tamer Nafar are the subject of a documentary, "Channels of Rage." A former Subliminal protege, Nafar identifies with his Palestinian brethren in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a sentiment that ran up against Shimoni's hard-line politics.

"They're both victims of the reality in Israel. They're children," said the documentary's director, Anat Halachmi.

Subliminal's edge is unusual in Israeli musical culture, which is known for folk guitars and upbeat disco. "There is a tradition of being rebellious, but up to a certain limit," said Motti Regev, an Israeli music professor.

Shimoni started rapping in English at age 15 in a Tel Aviv club. A visit to a Los Angeles recording studio convinced him that Hebrew would make his act unique.

The rapper has a clothing line, under the logo "T.A.C.T.," or Tel Aviv City Team. Each item, from caps to red hoodies and baggie pants, is emblazoned with a Star of David, along with stitching reading "The Architects of Israeli Hip-Hop."

"Two years back, the (Star) of David was like a mockery. Nobody would walk out like that and have been proud of it," Shimoni says.

Though Shimoni is a self-described member of the Israeli right wing, the former soldier says his family supported then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak in his efforts to win peace with the Palestinians.

The peace effort's failure, and three subsequent years of violence, convinced Shimoni negotiations don't work. Although he offers no specific positions on how to resolve the conflict, there's no mistaking his anger at the Arabs and his belief in toughness.

"If there's a conflict between two thugs in the neighborhood, they will sit down in a room and beat each other up until they almost kill each other," Shimoni says. "And then they won't fight anymore."

That message got to Elan Carter, a 19-year-old Israeli army corporal from Netanya who got a Subliminal and the Shadow CD as an army induction gift from his girlfriend. The lyrics made him proud to fight for Israel, Carter said.

The cover of Shimoni's second album, "The Light and the Shadow," shows a muddy fist clutching a silver Star of David pendant. Not all the songs are political. Some songs are bump-and-grind tracks over the whine of Persian strings. But on at least a third of the album, Shimoni focuses on the conflict.

One Subliminal song says: "The country's still dangling like a cigarette in Arafat's mouth." In the hit "Divide and Conquer," he sings: "Dear God, I wish you could come down, because I'm being persecuted. My enemies are united. They want to destroy me. We're nurturing and arming those who hate us. Enough!"

That song is "the first patriotic anthem of the second intifada," music writer Gal Ohovsky wrote in the daily Maariv, in a reference to the current fighting.

Halachmi's documentary film traces the careers of Subliminal and Nafar going back several years. As violence escalates after 2000, their lyrics move further apart.

In one scene, Nafar sings, "What's that? Another Arab's been shot," and in another tells an interviewer he can understand why a Palestinian blew himself up in a Tel Aviv club. By film's end, the two rappers nearly come to blows.

Shimoni has been called the "Israeli Eminem," but Bakari Kitwana, author of two recent U.S. books on hip-hop culture, said there are few similarities to the U.S. rapper.

"Eminem is not appropriating hip-hop and turning it back on black people," said Kitwana. Subliminal's music is "a kind of turning on the oppressed instead of being a tool of empowerment for those who are oppressed," he added.

In "Bottomless Pit," the rapper warns an unnamed enemy: "Anybody who messes with me ends up in a coffin." Guns lock, load and fire in the background while the rappers sing about shooting a pair of brothers in the street.

These are words and sounds out of the rap anthems of the gang wars of Los Angeles, overlaid with references to Israeli Merkava tanks and Tel Aviv locales.

Is he preaching violence, reflecting a grim reality or just trying to sell records? "I always put my messages between the lines," Shimoni says. "You know: 'Subliminal."'

Next time I listen to the show, I will write it down. William Levi used to play a lot of it, mostly messianic Jew stuff, but even non-messianic stuff out of Israel. Even more curious are the Palestinian kids rebelling against their parents using rap. Suicide bombing looks passe when compared to Bentleys I suppose.

"Hip Hop Breaks Out in the Middle East"
The Baltimore Sun

www.sunspot.net/features/...ug10.story

Hip-hop breaks out in the Middle East
Rappers give edgy new voice to their pride and anguish
By Loolwa Khazzoom

TEL AVIV - "I want to tell people about the racism I experience," says Tarik Malko, 16, who aspires to be a rap star. "It's hard for me to talk about it, because people don't understand. But when I sing, I say what I love, what I hate. I even curse. I get everything out of myself, everything inside me. I love this music!"

Malko and her peers from Efsharut Aheret (A Different Option), an Ethiopian-Israeli youth group from Ashdod, Israel, were among the 700 concert-goers at the recent third annual Hip Hop in the Park in Tel Aviv, sponsored by Yaga Production House, a studio promoting up and coming Israeli hip-hop artists.

"Through hip-hop, we look at black people in America succeeding,"

Malko continues, "and we know that we can succeed, too." Ethiopian-Israeli rappers Bar and Jeremy assert that scores of community youth are drawn to hip-hop for this very reason.

Like their Ethiopian-Israeli peers, Arab-Israeli rappers such as MWR (Mahmoud, Waseem and Richard), Dam, and Tammer use hip-hop as a medium for discussing their struggles with discrimination and poverty,as well as the drug and crime problems arising from these struggles.

Arapiot (a hybrid Hebrew word for Arab female rappers), the only Arab female rappers in the world, additionally sing about their struggles as young women in the Arab community: "We have families that don't give us our freedom to determine our fate, to get an education, to go out with friends, to choose whom we will marry," says Arapiot's Safa. "In our songs we demand our freedom."

Shiri and Shorti, Israel's first female rappers - together a mix of Mizrahi (Middle Eastern/North African Jewish), Sephardi
(Spanish-Portuguese/Latin Jewish) and Ashkenazi (Central/Eastern European Jewish) backgrounds -focus mostly on gender issues.

"I give my point of view as a 20-year-old girl in Israel, with her own problems," says Shorti.

Most men in Israeli hip-hop, she says, focus on general issues, such as politics and economics. "I'm talking about subjects I haven't heard here yet. I'm taking it in your face, really personal, really out there." Shorti's first single is about her experience having sex with another girl - not yet a subject of mainstream Israeli music.

The messages of Israeli hip-hop are "very individual," explains Chemi, a member of the now-defunct band Shabak Sameh, which pioneered hip-hop in Israel 10 years ago. "Hip-hop is a tool. Everyone uses it to say what he or she wants."

Chemi's new group, Haloutsei Halal (Space Pioneers), frequently works with Arab-Israeli rap artists in concerts and on recordings, promoting messages of tolerance. As the words of a recent single in Hebrew and Arabic state:

"Look into my eyes. We both have the same blood. In the end, they will bury
us both the same way. Come, let's be neighbors and not enemies. Because there is nothing more important than life."

In addition to the messages of hip-hop being diverse, hip-hop cultural norms -such as clothing and body language - also vary from artist to artist.

"Look at me, I'm dressed in a dress," says rap and soul artist Me2qa, who performed at Hip Hop in the Park. "I'm not trying to look like 'Yo, yo, whassup?' I'm being myself."

Subliminal, Israel's leading hip-hop group, strictly adheres to the bandana, baseball cap, sports jersey, and baggy pants get-up associated with mainstream rap in America. But whereas the Subliminal artists may look as if they jumped straight off the set of MTV, their message is unique:

"Are you wearing a Star of David proudly on your chest?" Subliminal bellows into the mike at the opening of a concert, as thousands shoot their hands skyward, screaming enthusiastically.

"Once it was a shame to walk around with a Star of David," says MC Hatsel, who like the other artists in the group comes from an Iranian-Jewish family.

"Jews have been ashamed of our symbol because of what we learned from generations of oppression. We, however, are not ashamed. In our CD,everyone gets a Star of David as a gift."

Whatever their message and style, young Israeli women and men of all ethnicities are finding a venue for self-expression in hip-hop.

"It's how the new generation communicates," asserts MC Remedy, who flew from New York to Israel for a tour in the early summer months.

"I think Israelis like rap music because a mike is a very powerful tool to say things," adds Momi Levi, who produces some of Israel's biggest hip-hop artists. "And here in Israel, we have a lot of things to say."

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