Metal Jew

Test

Test

Metal bands tour China

Historically, two of the main regions where metal has been most absent are Africa and China. I've tried to collect information on African metal on this blog. China though has always been a bit of a mystery to me. But I just came across (hat tip to Invisible Oranges) a fascinating post about western metal bands touring in China which features an interview with a band called Corrupt Absolute who have pioneered tours in provincial China (apparently some major metal bands have already played in Beijing and  Shanghai). There's something that really excites me about this: it's like the birth of the underground in the 80s, when playing extreme metal was new and kind of heroic.

Jewish band name shtick

Teruah has put together some highlights from a Twitter meme called #jewishbandnames. It's fairly amusing stuff, many of them based on outrageous puns: Matzah The Hoople, They Might Be Golems, and a Jewish death metal band name Jewcifer (in fact there is already a Jucifer). This is all part of the trend, particularly in Klezmer for shticky, punning band names in Jewish music. There's nothing especially wrong with this, but as I've argued before on this blog (I'm too lazy to dig out the link) it does reveal a kind of anxiety about Jewish contributions to popular music, as though we don't quite fit in this world so we need to make everything archly self-aware. Again, I'm all for irony but it can be rather limiting and can hold people back from an uninhibited exploration of the possibilities of Jewish music. We don't need to shtickify to make Jewish music - we can do it without apologies.

D.O. Dodd's 'Jew'

Disclosure: I was sent a promo copy of D.O. Dodd's new novel 'Jew'. I probably wouldn't have  read it otherwise, but I'm really glad that I was 'compelled' to do so.

The blurb gives a reasonable flavour of the book:

A MAN REGAINS consciousness to find himself naked in a mass grave, with no idea who he is. His thought is survival, but in a religious war survival depends on knowing which side you are on.

Donning another man’s military uniform, he drives off and enters a nearby town to discover that the occupying soldiers have been waiting for someone very much like him.

Suddenly, he finds himself in power.

His first act is to save a woman about to be murdered by soldiers. The woman, as it turns out, has a history with the man, and knows more of him than he knows of himself, or does she actually have the right man?

If that sounds mysterious, even Kafkaesque (a cliche, but quite an accurate one in this case), that's because the book is mysterious and Kafkaesque. It's also extremely disturbing, not just because of the explicit violence (some of  it sexual) that permeates the book, but also because of a strange, indefinable, unsettling feeling that leaves the reader (like the book's central character) adrift in a world where nothing is clear.

Jew's holocaust resonances are clear - mass graves, genocide, an occupying army - but as the book progresses the reader is increasingly wrong-footed as the actual specific historical and geographical location becomes less and less clear. At times the victims in the book appear to be Jews, but then occasional Arabic words imply a more contemporary - and for many Jews, much more unsettling - context. At the same time, many of the details seem to correspond with no 'real' war or genocide.

We are left then with a text that disturbs, that shakes the readers complacency. I put down the book (which is pretty short and I read in the course of an afternoon) knowing little more than when I started. I'm not sure that Jew is a satisfying book and it's certainly not an enjoyable one, but it's worth the attention of anyone who takes pleasure in enigmatic literature.