I haven't had time to do a big post recently, but here's a round up of some interesting stuff:
Meshuggah Beach Party do surf music covers of Jewish standards. They're pretty shticky (they play dressed as Haredim) but the music sounds great. Maybe everything sounds good surf-style? Check out black metal surf-style
During my time doing research on the Israeli metal scene in 1998 I heard an interesting story: Apparently an Israeli metal fan was doing his military service in an undercover unit in Hebron. Every day he was woken up early by the call to prayer from a nearby minaret. So he snuk into the mosque and replaced the tape of the call to prayer with one of Sepultura's 'Beneath the Remains' and the next morning Hebron was awoken by death metal.
Now this story was never corroborated so it's possible that it's some kind of urban myth. But, assuming it is true, it raises some thought-provoking questions about the politics of metal. On the one hand, the story highlights the oppressive nature of the occupation - the ability of Israeli soldiers to create mayhem at will. You can hear echoes in this story of how music has been used in military oppression and torture in the Iraq war and indeed other wars. On the other hand, you can read the story as a kind of nihilistic form of resistance at the insanity of the religion-stoked war between Israelis and Palestinians. Let's not forget that the militant settlers of Hebron, whom the IDF is protecting, are hardly metal fans. Israeli conscripts do not stop being metal fans once they join up and the story provides a hint of the complex ways in which a love of metal can both reinforce a kind of imperialism and stoke a kind of disorder that undermines military discipline in potentially subversive ways. As ever, metal is an ambivalent presence within 'real world' politics.
This story has been on my mind again due to the viral circulation of this video, made by an IDF unit in Hebron:
Unlike the Sepultura story, this prank does not appear to disturb the daily lives of Palestinians in Hebron. The dance seems to have taken place on a back street and the music itself looks like it's been overdubbed. But there's a similar kind of politics at work: the gap between the relative freedom of the IDF to 'play' in Hebron versus the lack of freedom of Palestinian residents is still stark. Again, the IDF soldiers seem to inhabit another world, not only from the Palestinians, but from the religious Jewish settlers in Hebron. The incongruity of Ke$ha's music in this context is even greater than Sepultura's (at least death metal is a sound with resonances of conflict) and perhaps this, together with the image of soldiers performing a choreographed dance while fully armed, gives the video a kind of whimsical quality that is sort of endearing.
Are some contexts too 'serious' for pranks to be appropriate? Can the pranks be read as cynical comments by soldiers stuck between two sets of fundamentalists? Does the lack of freedom of the Palestinians to engage in such pranks neccessarily mean that no one else should either?
I'm not sure what the answers are to these questions. What I do know is that they are worth taking seriously. As ever, popular music opens doors on the complexity of the political.
Last weekend I attended the biannual conference of the UK branch of IASPM (the International Association for the Study of Popuar Music) in Glasgow. It was a fascinating conference with some really high standard papers and a great social programme. In another post I will discuss the paper I presented. I was on the same panel as Swiss PhD student called Thomas Burkhalter, who is the founder of an interesting project called Norient:
Norient – Independent
Network for Local and Global Soundscapes - focuses on experimental
and urban music and music scenes all over the world. As an international
platform it aims to understand and show the many and often contradictory
faces of cultural globalization and localization through articles
about music, urbanism and politics, «authenticity»,
«modernity», «place» and «transnational
spaces», written by musicians, scholars and music journalists
from Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe and the US. norient also
produces and co-produces larger and smaller projects and events.
Thomas's paper discussed how some Lebanese sound artists have reflected on their own experiences of war in their country. One of the artists discussed was the trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj . One of the pieces that Thomas played by Kerbaj made a big impact on me:
Starry night (an exceprt of which can be played at this link) was recorded on Kerbaj's balcony during the Lebanon war of 2006. Kerbaj produces strange, breathy and sometimes harsh sounds from his trumpet, while Israeli bombs fall on Beirut in the background. It is a haunting piece of work that explores war's soundscape in a unique way. Usually I think of war as endless noise, Kerbaj's piece reveals the eerie silences that punctuate the explosions - silences that are in some way more disturbing than the noise as the wait between explosions can be agonising. His instrument both echoes this dialectic of noise and its interruption but also counterposes it with a strange animalistic presence that reminds us of the animialistic humanity that war reveals.
I guess the piece speaks to me in part because when I lived in Jerusalem from 2001 to 2002, the nights were sometimes punctuated by Israeli bombing raids on Bethlehem, just a couple of miles down the road. Although of course I was not the target of the bombs, they did not make for a comfortable night sleep and the punctuation of night time noises with explosions was very unsettling.
Recent Comments