[Lancey Howard]

Somebody told me that "Matisyahu" is the Hebrew "Matthew".

He does a nice job and his stuff is very well produced. But whenever I hear one of his tunes, I can't help but grin and wonder if it's satire that nobody "got" and so he decided to play it coy and just go with the flow. Like sort of a too-subtle version of what Weird Al Yankovich does.

Matisyahu has to cash in NOW for everything he can get because I don't see this fad lasting very long. Anyways, there's plenty of regular white people who do reggae very well. Long Beach Dub Allstars (formerly backing up Bradley Nowell in Sublime) for example.

[SJackson]

Somebody told me that "Matisyahu" is the Hebrew "Matthew".

Yes, the patriarch of the Maccabee family. Some might transliterate it a little differnetly.

[SJackson]

As an irrelevant aside, though Judah Maccabee and his father Matisyahu are probably best known, his brother Jonathan was the first to definitively conquer Gaza and bring it under Israeli rule.