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By
Joshua Mitnick, Special for USA TODAY
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. 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."
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