Trans.: We’ll shut our eyes
To what’s happening under our noses
And pretend that everything’s alright
We’ll bring out a beer from the fridge
And drive off to a different channel
How much longer?
The Boston-based expats swoon; these lyrics are their life.
Since the release of its first album in 2000, the band HaDag Nahash has been one of Israel’s most eloquent curators of left-wing disillusionment and despair in a post-Rabin era. In the small East-Mediterranean country, terms like “left-wing” and “right-wing” have nothing to do with how you feel about abortion or taxes, but instead serve as the bookends of a cultural spectrum anchored to the uniquely Israeli question: what do you want this state to be?
Israel’s modest hip-hop culture is no exception: the scene’s two predominant acts represent radically different dispositions on state and society. Most commercially successful is Subliminal, who is in political terms the Kid Rock of Israeli hip-hop–and only somewhat better musically. And then there’s HaDag Nahash, a tighter and smarter act, but something of a chimera (literally: their name, a spoonerism, means “The Fish Snake”). Despite their popular branding as a hip-hop group, they’re at least as much funk; their elegant tracks are built around choruses, hooks, and lilting saxophone solos.
The night I encountered the group, they were being featured at Johnny D’s in Somerville under the auspices of the Boston Jewish Music Festival, a multi-week affair I can only imagine was filled with schmaltz and family-friendly power pop about latkes and hamantaschen. After a few minutes of chatter from the music festival’s organizer, the band assumed positions, rubbed out a few chords, and launched into “Ma She-Ba Ba (What Goes Around Comes Around).” A relatively flat song by HaDag Nahash standards, leaderless and easily muddled through, the ditty did nothing to demonstrate the artists’ sincerity about life in the Middle East. By contrast, “Ma She-Ba Ba” is most famous for its appearance in the critically-panned 2008 slapstick comedy flick You Don’t Mess with the Zohan.
But then salvation took the stage in the form of a small number: “6”, the 2010 album that put HaDag Nahash in the league of master musical syncretists like Balkan Beat Box and Alabina, arrives in the band’s setlist. Frontman Sha’anan Street commandeers the microphone, begins croaking some occultic-sounding lyrics in English, translates them back into Hebrew, and explodes into the hook-laden, hyper-Middle-Eastern “Shir Nehamah (Consolation Song).” The casual fans, mostly American-Jewish college kids, puzzle over the novelty; “6” hasn’t yet made it into the popular HaDag Nahash canon. The equally sizable diehard crowd, on the other hand, made up of twenty-something expats and myself, goes wild. Street works through the album for a while, covering driving songs like “Ani Ma’amin (I Believe)” and “Lo Maspik (Not Enough),” the latter an invective against hi-tech consumerism. After some initial awkwardness, the dance floor becomes a meshugganah carnival of half-baked funk and Middle-Eastern moves.
The concert finally taking on an organic character of its own, HaDag Nahash heaps on the showmanship. Before the sublime, conga-inflected funk track, “Ma’arbolet Shel Hol (A Vortex of Sand),” Sha’anan explains: “Today we’re celebrating Purim. But a few hundred years before that, we left Egypt for the land of Canaan. And what continent is Egypt on? That means we all have some African deep down.” Exhorting the dancing Hebrews, he concludes, “I want to see it!” Meanwhile, in “Statistica”, a trenchant social satire assembled around fake statistics, they replace Tel Aviv with Boston when singing that one of every seven men in the city is a closeted homosexual.
By the end of the night, they take a turn for the serious–which is how I like them best. The floor breaks into paroxysms over the first chord of “Shirat Ha-Sticker (The Sticker Song),” a notorious hit penned by leftish Israeli author David Grossman stringing together bumper sticker slogans around the haunting refrain, “How much evil can we swallow?” Many fans know most of the lyrics, and there’s a special breath of enthusiasm in singing. “A halakhic state–and now the state has gone” (pun lost in English). But it is otherwise a very strange, tongue-in-cheek specimen of song. For Israeli left-wingers like HaDag Nahash, giving even an ironic voice to words of right-wing political bile is no small task–especially with lines like “Bibi is good for Jews”, “Let the army get angry”, and “Justice for the Oslo traitors!”
Joining in on the lyrical subversion is not difficult for me, especially with such punchy chords and a sympathetic crowd. Yet as soon as I know the next line that’s coming, I stop dancing and close my mouth. I can’t sing “Death to the Arabs,” no matter how overt the irony. I’m frozen out of my celebration. By the time I finish processing the experience, they’re onto my favorite song, “Lo Frayerim (Not Suckers).” It’s an uptempo song with a downbeat message of political exasperation, punctuated with calls of “How much longer?” Among slides of the trombone and cries of the electric guitar, I find I can get back to dancing.
Addendum: The correct lyric in “Shirat Ha-Sticker (The Sticker Song)” is “Death to values,” which in Hebrew is a single sound (or phoneme) off from “Death to Arabs.” Although the latter slogan is not an actual bumper sticker to anyone’s knowledge, it is how the author heard the line in the din of the concert.