Hava Nawhat?

Kind, Madeline L.

HAVA NAWHAT?ISRAEL'S POP MUSIC PASSION MADELINE L. KIND A visitor to Israel could easily get the impression that the natives are the singingest people on earth. Not that they go about yodeling...

...Then there's the annual Eurovi-sion Song Contest, which Israel TV broadcasts each year live via satellite...
...Erelz Ha-Yafa gets plenty of airplay, as does Eretz, Eretz, Eretz, and I'm sure that Eretz, Eretz, Eretz, Eretz can't be far away...
...Part of this phenomenon is an expression of gratitude—Hey, Joan Baez prefers us to the PLO!—but it's also indicative of the insatiable Israeli appetite for song...
...Ultimately, Hebrew pop songs, even the worst of them, serve as a useful social glue to a beleaguered and battered society that needs all the epoxy it can get...
...But part of the boom results from the influence of rock music...
...But the Voice of Hope has proved very popular in Israeli settlements in the north, not to mention with UN troops stationed along the Litani river...
...It is the Hebrew language that is, perhaps, the saving grace of Israeli pop...
...With Kaveret, and in his subsequent group Gazoz (Seltzer) and his current band Doda (Auntie), Sanderson introduced the traditionally rather straight Israeli audience to clever and even surreal lyrics fueled by the vigors os rock...
...The country is in the Middle East but not of it, influenced by American tastes but critical of them, still drawing on a mongrel heritage as disparate as the salons of Budapest and the mellahs of the Moghrab...
...Nu, and how does your top-twenty chart look this week...
...Still, it's via the omnipresent radio that Israelis sate themselves with song...
...By this time you will have surmised that Israelis are as fond of foreign popular music as they are of the home-grown variety...
...The glamor and the promise of quick riches that attend the rock scene have certainly encouraged more Israeli kids to take up music than the old Palmachnik's accor-dian ever did (the accordian these days is heard only at kindergarten parties...
...Social problems occasionally figure in the work of one of Israel's newest and most interesting musical ensembles, Habreira Hativit (The Natural Alternative...
...And visiting U.S...
...Madeline L. Kind is the pop music critic for the Jerusalem Post...
...Goliath" tells the painful history (listeners are advised to apply Band-Aids) of the Philistine champion who spoke Ashkelonian in a voice as low as the Dead Sea, striking fear into the entire Bible and causing Jews of draft age to alter their registration cards and run home to take up flute lessons...
...All of these foreign influences of course have conspired to alter the sound of music in modern Israel...
...Israel TV features endless "specials" on army entertainment troupes, kibbutz choirs, religious school singers, musical salutes to settlements, senior citizens' glee clubs, ethnic music and of course local pop groups...
...Such verse still speaks to large segments of the population (as well as to composers), but of course it does not meet the needs and taste of the entire modern audience (imagine a top-twenty chart that includes songs by Whitman and Emerson, Frost and Roethke...
...A few songs came out of the Yom Kippur War—but nothing to equal the dreadful patriotic cockiness that found such abundant musical expression after the Six-Day War...
...the nation virtually grinds to a halt during the performance and the subsequent election nightlike ritual of polling the juries around the country to choose the winning song...
...Instead of the early authentic Zionist songs (usually based on stolen East European or Middle Eastern melodies), today's Israeli singers and songwriters—with a few interesting exceptions—generate an imitative rock and roll...
...Old-timers may mutter that Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the father of modern Hebrew, must be pin-wheeling in his grave...
...Here in my watery paraphrase is the gist of one of his simpler texts...
...They display a sort of ageless middle-aged-ness in style and content...
...Israel is in a transitional stage, from pioneer society to—anybody's guess...
...Then along came David, whose stone struck Goliath bull b'pony (smack-bang under the bangs) and the entire Bible rejoiced, telling the shepherd boy that if he'd like to be king, he should stop around tomorrow about six...
...An obvious anti-Semitic ploy...
...Young adults tend to respect her work, but don't really get turned on by it, while teenagers dismiss Shemer as too precious at, best and chauvinistic at worst...
...Always high on the charts, Milk and Honey are prone to trick themselves out in bow-ties and glitter suits, looking like nothing so much as four Jewish jerks...
...Rami Fortis, who inspired a lively if short-lived punk movement in Tel Aviv...
...Somewhat to the dismay of the Israel Broadcasting Authority, Nathan's programming, which ranges from the latest Israeli and Arabic tunes to progressive rock, is highly popular with Israeli youth...
...The fact that by international recording agreements the sale of a measly 20,000 copies in Israel merits a gold record only reinforces this clubby, exclusive feeling an Israeli gets froh his native music...
...The Hebrew hit parade is full of praises for my girl, or my guy, or tell how I met him at Frischman's cafe, or how I lost her in Eilat...
...perhaps that's why they really don't get into popular songs that much...
...It's Israelis singing Israeli songs, and that's what Israelis love to watch...
...While much of the world chooses to view the Jewish state as a pariah dog, such a Hebrew song says, whatever we are, we're us...
...Yoni Rechter, a multi-talented one-man cabaret act...
...The war of October 1973 just didn't give Israelis all that much to sing about, except maybe the blues, and the only "victory album" which I recall coming out afterwards was promptly remaindered to the budget racks...
...stars like Billy Joel, Paul Simon and Don McClean—as well as Europeans like Enrico Macias, Julio Iglesas and Ari San—sell out their concert tours on the day ticket sales begin...
...But even this is not enough to satisfy the Israeli appetite for song...
...In truth, few Israeli films of late have made money, but the musicals like Kazablan (about a Sephardi in Ashkenazi-land), Halahaka (about an army entertainment unit) and Dizengoff99 (the disco scene) keep coming back to the local houses...
...In what other country would kids go bopping around to a song about a lexicographer...
...And it broadcasts later into the night than the State Radio stations...
...I don't think this necessarily deserves condemnation...
...For many, Hebrew is still not the mama loshen...
...Its message is that the dove has come, but it has an injured wing, the hawk has been here, and we certainly don't want him to return...
...But come to think of it, an uptempo, light-hearted song called Eliezer Ben-Yehuda was one of the biggest hits of the seventies...
...israels pop musk passion madeline lkind ates three stations: the First Program (and the least popular), which features classical music...
...Shalom Hanoch and Danny Litani, who write Dylanesque folk-rock tunes (Litani is famed for actually having spent an evening at a Tel Aviv flat with Dylan...
...small wonder too that American Jewish youth groupies, nurtured at summer camp on Theodore Bikel and Shlomo Carlebach, are puzzled and disappointed when exposed to Israeli radio and TV...
...The most prolific and often most poetic celebrant of the Land of Israel is singer-songwriter Naomi Shemer...
...high school skiffle groups provide live entertainment at parties...
...For almost every love song, it seems there's one that extols the beauties of The Land...
...Indeed, despite the soaring cost of records and concert tickets, there is something of a boom under way in Israeli pop music...
...But they're still meshuggeh for music...
...Small wonder then that foreign songs are so popular in the Jewish State...
...This too explains, in part, why Israeli pop music is—well, so popular...
...Even more creditable, Israel went on to win the Eurovision contest again in 1979...
...The joy that swept Israel then was greater than the joy that greeted the winning of the European basketball tournament, and only slightly less than the Entebbe celebration...
...Another salutary influence from foreign rock is in the verbal intricacies and downright wit which often came to the fore in the work of the better pop-music progenitors like Lennon and McCartney, Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell...
...She asked me if I had seen my Inner Light...
...From the moment your El Al 747 begins its final approach to Ben-Gurion Airport and Haveinu Shalom Aleichem comes over the intercom system, music fills the air...
...Nurit Habrdra Hativit 56/Moment Gal-Ron sings Yesh lisympatia I'amanut conceptualit b'Tel Aviv— "I'm tuned into the conceptual art scene in Tel Aviv"—a song which pokes fun at the phony Dizengoff crowd that abandons its native humanity in pursuit of the fashionable avant garde from abroad...
...Despite the sabra's enchantment with all things imported, I suspect he still receives a special kick from hearing even the corniest pop lyrics in his own lingo—Hebrew...
...Granted, it's mighty weird hearing Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson warbling along the Good Fence...
...Nathan has also threatened to begin pirate color TV broadcasting, but Israeli authorities have counter-threatened to board the ship and broadcast his equipment, Boston Tea Party-style, into the sea...
...An American Christian evangelical organization has had considerable success with its "Voice of Hope" radio station in southern Lebanon...
...Zilber looks like one of the meaner Muppets, has a voice like a herniated compressor and writes tunes which are super-simple...
...Not that they go about yodeling from the hilltops or chanting in the fields like the cotton choppers at Tara...
...It was getting so that I was dying to hear at least one song about any other locale in Israel, even the dustiest development town...
...Although she has written a wide variety of songs, she is best known for those that evoke the natural wonders of Israel, and of course that focal point of Jewish heritage, Jerusalem of Gold...
...the lead is Shlomo Bar, a former construction worker from one of Jerusalem's poorest neighborhoods, and the other band members have their origins in North Africa and India...
...Israeli television meanwhile has three kinds of programming: a panel of politicos talking themselves to death, some American TV series picked up on the cheap because they got the ax in the Nielsons and singing...
...Yes, the pioneers used to do that sort of thing—but that all went out with khaki shorts...
...Occasionally, of course, they do...
...Therefore the vast number of Israelis whose origins are in Islamic countries still enjoy tuning in music from radio stations in Jordan Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia...
...Rock was late in striking roots in Israel, but once it did it developed with a vengeance...
...The impact of Kaveret's traveling show and subsequent album, Tales of Poogy, cannot be overestimated...
...country music...
...Rock has become an international property and mode of expression for singers and songwriters...
...Yehudit Ravitz, a soft-rock, folkie singer-guitarist...
...The annual Israel Song Festival is the most popular...
...To complete the musical picture, she sang in a Nahal entertainment group and later sudied music in Tel Aviv...
...No matter that the entries each year sound more dismal than the last (by popular consent, the last good Israel Song Festival was in 1967, when Naomi Shemer's Jerusalem of Gold premiered, though it didn't win...
...Israelis today, well into the television and transistor age, have become as non-participatory about their music and song as the people in any other modern society...
...And poet Yonatan Gefen does a number about a flipped-out teenybopper— 16 years old, a veteran Shelli (leftist) Party member, who is into meditation...
...Israelis of course have long held affection for popular songs based on biblical verse or on the works of the national poets like Bialik, Tcherni-chovsky, Alterman and Rahel...
...Many of their songs are based on biblical verse or even medieval Jewish poetry, But their show-stoppers are the songs that celebrate the Moroccan wedding and the virtues of large families...
...Jordan TV also shows it, but on tape, with Israel's participation edited out...
...Sure enough, pop star Gary Eckstein came through with his wry hit, which runs like this: "No electricity, no water/And all these socks to darn/But I know a place that's better than this/Where awaiting me are a thousand chicks/I'm going to Beit Shean, Beit Shean, Beit Shean...
...Kids stream to school schlepping their pocket calculators and transistor radios...
...Jordan's distress was in inverse proportion to Israel's jubilation in 1978 when the Jewish State took first prize among the 20 or so competing countries...
...Still, it doesn't matter that the songs are wretched (and they are...
...Today Litani writes mostly what he calls "kitchen-window songs," private meditations on life and love...
...Part of the reason for this, I suspect, is the desire to drown out the political and economic anxieties that riddle the country...
...Local buses are equipped with radios not only because the passengers want to hear the latest disasters on the hourly news broadcasts, but also because they demand the 55 minutes of music in between...
...Winning the Eurovision Song Contest caused such ecstatic pandemonium in Israel because it placed Hebrew up there with French and German and English and Dutch as a legitimate national medium of expression...
...budding lyricists are scribbling away verse in composition class...
...Israel TV also gives prominence to the song festivals—and Israel has countless song festivals...
...Like Israeli television, Israeli filmmakers serve up three kinds of fare: those brooding, introspective ????-Nouvelle Vague dramas, the sleazy broad comedies and musicals...
...Matti Caspi, a veritable song-sweatshop who spins out material based on everything from hora melodies to Latin American rhythms...
...Living in their cramped little slice of real estate, Israelis are mad about whatever's happening culturally abroad...
...But they always seem close to the Palmach era, where many of them began as entertainers...
...The group's very appearance is a kind of statement by the underclass...
...Similarly, President Sadat's visit to Jerusalem in November 1977 inspired a few peace songs, but none really became a hit, unless Israel's Eurovision Contest winner Hallelujah qualifies...
...A sabra who happened to have the good fortune to attend New York's High School for the Performing Arts in the 1960s (while his daddy was managing El Al's interests in North America), Sanderson returned to Israel in 1968, spent three years in the army entertainment corps, and came out with several of his buddies to form Kaveret (Beehive...
...The State Radio operhava nawhat...
...These include entertainers like Zvika Pik, an androgynous crooner who is the current rage with the kids...
...Politics and social problehs are talked to death in Israel...
...In doing so, Sanderson affirmed the proposition that popular music should be fun, and that there needn't be a total surrender of taste and intellignece for a pop song to be truly popular...
...but when the white donkey arrives, then we'll know the time has really come...
...In 1980, Israel was poised to make Hebrew once and for all the lingua franca of the Eurovision Contest, but opted out of participating when the contest organizers scheduled the event on Israel's Memorial Day...
...It may be cultural imperialism, but it can even have some positive effects...
...Polls invariably show that the army radio station also rates high with the public...
...One song was about the West Bank riots, and how Israeli troops kept firing into the air but Arabs kept falling down dead...
...Still, we know that Israel isn't quite like any place else...
...The prime local agent of this sort of "intelligent rock" hit Israel in the early 1970s, when popular Israeli music at best consisted of paeans to the pasture, with the explosive debut of Danny Sanderson...
...Israeli pop music today then is a hodge-podge of style and direction, and in this sense it accurately reflects the culture...
...And we must keep in mind that fully half of the Israeli population itself is not home-grown...
...Yet he is not without a certain charm— and he's dedicated to evolving an authentic native Israeli sound...
...Not surprisingly, any movie in which the principles break into song is a hit with the sabras...
...Recent reverses on the foreign and domestic fronts have left Israelis a rather skeptical bunch, and this is reflected occasionally in their popular music and musical tastes...
...Yes, purists are forever complaining that it's a bastardized Hebrew, disrespectful of the Holy Tongue with all its foreign borrowings and neologisms—but it's Hebrew nonetheless, and this is what connects the campfire songs of the swamp-draining generation to the groin-and-groan lyrics of the Tel Aviv disco scene...
...True, the first generation of stars, like Hava Alberstein, Yossi Banai, Yoram Gaon, Rivka Michaeli, the Parvarim and the Dudaim, still has an appreciable audience...
...the Second Program, which*plays a sort of middle-of-the-road pop, and the Third Program, which offers local and imported rock and roll—the most popular of all (and which my neighbor at this moment is blasting from her kitchen so loud THAT I CAN BARELY TYPE...
...Sanderson worked Hebrew argot into elaborately textured lyrics peppered with multiple puns and Joycean portmanteaus and sent them all skittering across a stage wired with wicked electric guitars...
...Such songs are occasionally pretty—and usually pretty brainless—but they make up the majority of what Israelis are bopping to today...
...Along with Bible messages and words of cheer for Major Sa'ad Haddad's Christian militias in the enclave bordering Israel, this station showcases U.S...
...No one else could ever pretend to claim A-Ba-Ni-Bi as his own—for it was not only Hebrew, it was kids' Hebrew pig-Latin...
...Galei Zahal provides excellent news coverage, features, interviews and culture programming, but its staple is popular music...
...It's a short step from skepticism to satire and even sarcasm...
...The more contemporary singer-songwriters pattern themselves after the musical trends from abroad...
...I said yes, each time I open my refrigerator...
...What with satellite communications, Israel inevitably is very much a member of the global village...
...and Danny Sanderson, A rye Zilber, Yigael Bashan, Shlomo Gronich and a host of others...
...Widely praised for their integration of rock riffs with Israeli, Arabic and Indian melodies, the group engages in a sort of Sephardi-is-beautiful consciousness raising...
...If not still in search of identity, Israel is at least still posing before the tailor's multiple mirrors and trying to decide on a proper suit of clothes...
...It seems every other young sabra today is schlepping a guitar onto the bus...
...Not to worry, traditionalists...
...Rather like the kibbutz where she grew up, Shemer is best loved by children and by the elderly...
...The Israeli hit parade at any given moment is an amalgam of songs sprung from the Bible, from the mountains and deserts of Eretz Yisrael, and from the world-wide Motzei Shabbat fever of the discotheque...
...A song that more accurately reflected the attitude of the averale Israeli in the Camp David era is When the White Donkey Comes, lyrics by Yoram Tahor-Lev, music by Yigael Bashan...
...Arik Einstein, 40-ish but still boyish and a brilliant balla-deer...
...Meanwhile, the horizons of the pop field seem ever wider, and if every four years offers the depressing proof that any American can be elected president, singer-composers like Ayre Zilber hold out the promise that any young Israeli can be a pop star...
...But it would be misleading to suggest that the mainstream of Israel's current pop music has much social or political significance...
...In addition, Israel also has an annual Children's Song Festival, an annual Chassidic Song Festival, an annual Sephardi Song Festival, an annual Folk Song Festival and occasional Ladino and Yiddish song festivals...
...Small wonder then that Israel's popular music is such a salmagundi of sounds...
...Great stuff, but you can't dance to it...
...The five essentials on any Israeli picnic are humus, tehina, sand, flies and a stereo tapedeck...
...Shopkeepers collect postdated checks all day to the sound of one of Israel's several radio stations...
...Peace activist Abie Nathan has had wild success with his "pirate" radio station, the Voice of Peace, broadcasting from his Peace Ship "somewhere in the Mediterranean" (actually about seven miles off the coast of Jaffa...
...In the late 1970s, Danny Litani and Gefen took a touring show around the country that was loaded with political satire...
...Thus it's not surprising that the great bulk of popular songs in Israel today deal with the same topic found in pop songs everywhere—love, usually young, and often as not unrequited...
...The majority of it, it must be admitted, is a sort of laxative rock and roll signified best—or perhaps worst—by the cloying group Milk and Honey, that croons tunes like "Don Juan" and "The Melody Lingers" and "Time Will Roll the Clouds Away...
...The latter song exhorts the audience to have five, 10, IS, 20 or 25 children, and the crowd ululates in joyful agreement...
...Israeli academies still train more classical musicians each year than the country's orchestras can absorb...
...Shemer was born on a" kibbutz, but developed an affection for Chassidic melodies from her father, who was from Vilna...
...And for a while there, I thought the songwriters would never stop oozing out those saccharine raptures about Jerusalem...

Vol. 6 • December 1980 • No. 1


 
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