Going political: An exceedingly slow musical journey

Going political: An exceedingly slow musical journey
The author with poet Roni Hirsch, at a protest event organized by "Culture Guerilla"

I’m to play my music at Tel-Aviv’s Levontin 7 club on Thursday, and in one way this post is meant to let my dear readers know of this. In another, it is an all-Israeli tale that should reveal something about our state of arrested development.

So a young Israeli dreams of rock stardom and sets out to write songs. The time is the late 80s, his childhood room overlooks the city of Jerusalem. On the streets, stones are thrown, tires burn and rubber bullets are shot. How much of this will end up in his goofy early creations? The first songs I’ve written as a young teenager contained nothing of the climate, or am I mistaken? Perhaps the stones, tires and bullets were there, subtle and unintended. Take these two verses of a ditty I wrote in English at the age of 14:

Give me a nightmare and I’ll give you a dream
Give me a desert and I’ll give you a stream
Give me the cherry and I’ll give you the cream
Give me your hand.

Give me a thorn and I’ll give you a flower
Give me a shack and I’ll five you a tower
Give me the weak and I’ll give them some power.
Give me your hand.

How very hippy of me. The spirit somehow recalls “Get together” by the Youngbloods.

Come on people now Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now.

That may be no accident. The two songs have something in common. Both were written during wartime. In the case of the youngbloods its was the Vietnam war, in my case, the first Intifada. Both try to make up for the war by offering optimism and love, but show no intention of pointing out wrongdoers or offering solutions. All the goodness is simply there to make up for things that are either negative of flawed. There is a certain sense of impending revolution, (“Give me the weak and I’ll give them some power”), but to be honest, I think that was only there for the rhyme.

Later years brought more understanding and more anger. While In real time I viewed the first Intifada as having simply sprung out of nowhere, the demise of the Oslo initiaitve and gradual deterioration that followed found me in my early twenties, already concsious of the bitter history that brought us to where we were. That consciousness rendered me too angry and restless to stay in the country. For five years I traveled Europe as a street musician, running away as much as I was living the moment, singing mostly of love and of the rambling experience itself.

I was not couragious enough to express my disillusionment in song, only with my own sense of discomfort with the state of my native country. A typical attempt at composing a political song during that period kicks off thus:

A man walks into a sidewalk cafe
The waiter serves him a chocolate parfait
He tastes it but once, the spoon halts in midair
As the whole place goes up in a thunderous flare.

This is my country, barbed wire land
From the risky fruit groves to the gun-powder sand
You can’t disregard the news as it breaks in
and the next thing you know, it’s gone under your skin

Sky pry open, take me today!
I want away, I want away!
Lord have mercy, don’t make me stay!
I want away, I want away!

For I come from the land where dust is king
And where everything must die by fire
from the land of gates, from the land of rocks
And of holy lock’s made of cast desire.

This is of course just as deterministic as that old “Give me a nightmare” tune. Suicide bombings seem to spring out of a land that simply happends to be cursed. This was as far as I managed to go: detaching myself from hatred towards an “enemy” led to a general state of abstract discomfort. I was capable only of crying out my own pain. My effort at enriching the same song with a verse about Palestinian sufferings failed, mostly because I was undereducated as to the Palestinian condition and had no idea of what they suffer. My attempts at staying in the country and do something for the greater good failed as well. I was too young to be anything but emotional.

One decade later. That phase is over. I have settled here and found the capacity to be involved, at least as an artist. Counting down to Thursday’s show, I’m realizing more and more clearly how different the new material is. All of it is in Hebrew, but the song given here may ring familiar to English language audiences. It is a Hebrew version of Sinead O’connor’s “Black Boys on Mopeds”, sung on a Tel-Avivian balcony that doesn’t overlook an ancient city holy city but offers a much broader view.

Interestingly, I haven’t yet overcome the last obstacle in the journey and my protest songs are mostly Hebrew version of foreign songs, such as this one or Victor Jara’s immortal “Te Recuerdo Amanda“. What is it that makes saying a personal truth in an Israeli song so difficult? Is it a sense of taboo? Have protest songs been aesthetically delegitimized, so that my attempts at composing one always seem to produce mediochre tunes? Whatever it is, it must be overcome. Music is too strong and too precious to be idle.

An English translation of the lyrics follows. Then a link to O’Connor’s original for comparison. The show will take place at 8 PM, Thursday night, at 7 Levontin street, Tel-Aviv.

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyD6Wp3UPv4[/youtube]

Netanyahu on channel 2,
shocked by diabolic Mahmoud
It seems strange that he should be offended
That guy is his bearded twim
I’ve said this before now
You said I’m just another delusional kid
Remember what they told you.
You’ll end up arrested as well.

Israel is not a holy land
of salt fish on rye
It’s a place where they shoot
third grade girls
I love my daughter,
that’s why I can’t take it
I don’t want her to be aware that there’s
any such thing a grieving.

Single mother of three
scavenging remains of leek at the market
They walk next to her peacefully
They know how to say:
Spare some change!
These are unfogiving days
Say what you think
and you dig your own grave
Remember what I told you
and feel pity for me
because I wasn’t careful.

Israel is not a holy land
Of salt fish on rye
It’s a place where they shoot
third grade girls
I love my daughter,
that’s why I can’t take it
I don’t want her to be aware that there’s
Any such thing a grieving.

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n14lwdpYkAA[/youtube]