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Arts: To Be Young, Gifted and -- a Jewish Rapper
Liel Leibovitz New York
Several months ago, a plump, blue-eyed New York Jew in his early 30s climbed up the stairs to the mammoth stage six feet above the floor of a spacious Munich nightclub. The third act in an evening featuring several budding rappers associated with the Wu-Tang Clan, a successful American hip-hop group, he was the only white man to take to a microphone that evening. Towering over the crowd, he opened up with several of his better-known tracks, darting from one end of the stage to the other. When his set was almost over, he stood still, surveying the audience. In front of him were more than 2,000 German youth, dressed in the international hip-hop style: baggy jeans, oversized sweatshirts and conspicuous golden chains. The rapper clutched the microphone, and said: "Do you know what year this is?"
The crowd shouted in unison. "It�s 2002!"
"That�s right," said the rapper. "And do you know what happened in these streets in the 1940s?!"
There was silence. The rapper continued.
"I�m here for revenge, motherf---ers!!!" he screamed.
The crowd knew exactly what was coming next. "Never again!" they shouted, "Never again!"
And then it began: "Never Again," an epic hip-hop song about the Holocaust, which incorporates Hatikvah as well as traditional Jewish music, prayers and even sound bites from the movie "Schindler�s List."
"There�s nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide," the rapper sang. "Tossed to the side / access denied / six million died / for what?" and then the chorus, "Never again / shall we walk like sheep to the slaughter / never again / shall we sit and take orders."
If the young Germans felt any discomfort, they were far from showing it. For them, the man on the stage, Remedy, was the essence of cool, a man who had recorded with one of the world�s most prominent rap groups. For Remedy, however, that concert was what his musically schizophrenic identity was about -- an American Jew singing to the Germans, a white boy in an all-black crew, an artist who strives for universality yet is constantly pegged into slots of race, color and creed.
A similar conflict is experienced by several dozen other young Jewish musicians, who have also recently risen to prominence in the exclusive, competitive and politicized world of hip-hop. While not all Jewish rappers are as combative as to provocatively speak of the Holocaust in Munich, and while some even refrain from addressing Jewish themes in their rhymes, all still face the raised eyebrows of public and peers alike. Hip-hop, the musical form in which artists, known as rappers, rhyme rapidly to a repetitive beat, has recently replaced country music as the most popular and best-selling genre in the United States. Like every other musical brand, hip-hop, too, comes complete with a set of images, conceptions and notions. The genre, it is generally agreed, is dominated by black men who sing about inner-city life, drugs and violence; that, at least, is the common conception. The common conception of a New York Jew, at least in many books, movies and prevailing stereotypes, is of a nebbishy, bespectacled Woody Allen type, more likely to become a writer or a doctor than a rapper.
That conception is changing: Remedy�s acceptance into the Wu-Tang Clan�s "extended family" was his unofficial coronation as the wunderkind of the hip-hop scene; affiliation with the group is akin to admittance into the Royal Family. "Never Again" appeared on a Wu-Tang collection, released in 1998, which has since sold over 700,000 copies, making Remedy a well-known figure. Two years ago, he was invited to Universal Studios� Hanukkah celebration, together with such other luminaries as Ilan Ramon, Israel�s first astronaut-designate, and life-size puppets of the Rugrats, the ever-popular cartoon characters; Remedy�s performance at such a mainstream event marked his transformation from fringe hip-hop artist to nationally recognized musical figure. Another group, Non Phixion, led by Ill Bill, the son of Israeli parents, recently teamed up with The Beatnuts, one of the most popular hip-hop groups in the United States, on a concert tour that was aimed to promote increased voter turnout rates in the November 5 congressional elections. And then there are Necro, a young Brooklyn Jew named by MTV as one of the best white rappers in the country; Max Glazer, an extremely popular DJ and reggae producer; M.O.T (Members of the Tribe), who recorded an album for Warner Brothers, and others.
To understand what so many nice Jewish boys are doing rapping and rhyming, one must look back to New York of the mid-1980s. Around that time, white kids listened mainly to heavy metal, idolizing groups like Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath. Black kids, on the other hand, were discovering the nascent musical form called hip-hop, listening to the Sugarhill Gang and Afrika Bambaataa. New York being New York, it didn�t take long for the two to mix.
Among the first groups to wed the two genres was a punk group from New York City, the Beastie Boys. The Boys, all three of them Jews from middle-class New York families (one, Adam Horovitz, is the son of renowned playwright Israel Horovitz), soon realized the potential of hip-hop, and began experimenting. One of their earliest songs, for example, sampled sound bites from a heavy-metal classic, AC/DC�s "Back in Black," adding a hip-hop beat to the original song�s guitar section. In 1984, the Beastie Boys were signed by two friends, Rick Rubin and Russel Simmons, to a label called Def Jam. Rubin, a fellow New York Jew, was a former heavy-metal fan turned hip-hop aficionado. Simmons, a young black man enamored with the emerging poetry of the streets, dressed his younger brother and his two friends in leather clothes and open-laced Adidas shoes, dubbing them Run-DMC. With this concoction of blacks and Jews, Def Jam began producing records. Both Run-DMC -- which recently was struck with tragedy, with the shooting murder of its DJ, Jason Mizell, aka Jam Master Jay -- and the Beastie Boys rose to the pinnacle of the industry, selling exorbitant amounts of records. The Beastie Boys� major accomplishment, however, was to bring together the two seemingly unconnected musical brand, the black and the white, hip-hop and heavy metal.
Many took notice. In Staten Island, Ross Filler, then the prepubescent son of an affluent family, started listening to music. The first thing that grabbed his ear was metal, and he spent hours listening to Ozzy Osbourne�s shrieks and Iron Maiden�s epileptic guitar riffs. But Staten Island, with its upscale neighborhoods and spacious homes, also has housing projects, and the young Filler couldn�t help but meet kids very different from him listening to music very different from his own. He became curious, listened to some early hip-hop and was soon converted. "Hip-hop is real music," he said. "It represents reality. It�s not pop, it�s what�s going on in the world. It�s the struggles of the past and of today that our souls embrace."
Armed with this realization, he began writing rhymes. Desperate for a stage name, a must for every self-respecting hip-hop persona, he chose Remedy, a name based on an abbreviated version of his Hebrew name, Reuven Ben Menachem. As all the other members of his nuclear family attended Ivy League universities, Remedy had a hard time convincing his mother of the merits of a career in hip-hop; to her and to his father it seemed, at best, a terrible waste of time.
But Remedy persisted. He started hanging out in the streets, occasionally dealing drugs. With the scant money he managed to save, he would rent time at private recording studios to make demo tapes of his rhymes. Persistent as he was, two very real problems emerged: He was white and he was Jewish. "My representative went to a meeting with a record company, trying to sign me up," he recalled to The Jerusalem Report. "He played them my tapes, and they loved it, they went wild. Then, he mentioned I was white. I didn�t get the deal." Necro recalled having had similar experiences throughout his career. "Being white and Jewish is a serious roadblock in hip-hop," he said.
Unable to get signed by any major label, the two, separately and unaware of one another, started their own labels. Finally possessive of creative freedom, the two borrowed money and recorded their albums. Both sold relatively well for debut albums, Necro�s surpassing the 20,000 and Remedy�s hovering at approximately 100,000. Considering that both rappers had only the Internet as their sole tool of marketing and distribution, the achievement is all the more impressive.
While the two have never been targets for outright discrimination or hate, both say they feel as if some kind of "reverse racism," as Necro called it, is in effect. "White guys are still the exception to the rule," he said, lamenting a common belief among hip-hop fans and impresarios alike that "there can only be a limited number of whites in the business. Everybody thinks that hip-hop is about blacks singing about black themes, and a white who comes along and tries to do the same is suspect."
Oddly enough, if the color of their skin seemed an almost insurmountable hurdle, their Jewish identity may very well have been, in some cases, a point of redemption. The reason for that has to do with themes: While most black rappers have a standard set of themes to address (girls, guns and glory), white rappers often fumble in search of proper subject matter. With the exception of Eminem, a white rapper whose last album sold more than 10 million copies and who raps about "classic" themes of inner-city life, other white hip-hop artists are often hard-pressed for words, a curse in this uberverbal field. The result is often a resort to macho bravado or humoristic couplets, making most white rappers appear insincere.
Most Jewish rappers, however, seem to come equipped with a built-in solution. The Smut Peddlers, for example, a well-established hip-hop group, ironically ask, "anti-Semitic dipsh-ts / wearing Polo, ever hear of Ralph Lipshitz?" the latter being the birth name of fashion designer Ralph Lauren. Non Phixion, more aggressive in their lyrics, sing of Ronald Reagan and Menachem Begin eating felafel. Necro confesses to "doing Kiddush / dropping verses in Yiddish," and another group boasts that their beats "explode on the mike like Hamas in Jerusalem." Most committed, however, to serious Jewish themes is Remedy; shortly after high school, he became obsessed with the Holocaust, a development that would directly influence his musical career. "I read and read," he said, "I watched every movie I could find. I couldn�t believe this actually went on, and only a little more than 50 years ago. I couldn�t understand why it happened. So I sat down and wrote �Never Again,� crying with every line I wrote."
The song proved to be Remedy�s ticket into the Wu-Tang Clan. He sent The RZA, who is the producer and unofficial leader of the group, a tape with the song. Struck by the bold lyrics and unusual sound of traditional Jewish music in the background, the RZA added the song to a Wu-Tang compilation and added Remedy to the rappers� roster. Cappadonna, one of the clan�s leading men and Remedy�s good friend, considered the connection to be just natural. "Hip-hop is the voice of the oppressed, the Jews went through it like the blacks," he said, speaking of the Jewish supporters of the civil rights movement and stressing the similarities in the tragic backgrounds of the two peoples.
"Yo, check this out," Cappadonna said in a recent interview, revealing a cocktail napkin he had been secretly doodling on for the last half an hour. "Look at this," he said, passing the napkin over to Remedy, seated just across the table from him. On the napkin, Cappadonna had written "HIP HOP," not as a noun but as an acronym. It stands for, he wrote, "His Israel People, His Oppressed People." Smiling, he looked at Remedy. "All we got to do is connect the dots, man, all we got to do is connect the dots."
December 2, 2002
Arts
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