11 March 2007

The last few days have been wamer than usual, allowing us to shed those coats and long sleeves and expose our pale arms. Even though it's suppsoedly going to rain this week and get colder, it's definitely a nice respite and hopefully a sign of things to come for Passover.

Purim came and went, the drunken debacle it always is. I went to a friend's for the reading of Megillat (scroll) Esther, dressed as a blonder and preppier version of myself (no hair bleach was used in this costume -- we've evolved from high school. If pictures exist, I'll begrudgingly provide a link for you).

Last week the Israeli Grammy award ceremony took place, and despite not having a TV they were broadcast on the all-Israeli music radio station. As if the American version isn't disappointing enough, the Israeli one was down right embarrassing. Like many forms of art in contemporary Western society, music is by and large turned into a side dish for commercials, and so what gets played to a larger audience is appropriately called "Middle of the Road" or MOR, so as to appeal to the (lowest) common denominator. As a result, four of the six nominees for Song of the Year sounded so similar in their dulling balladry that I just about fell asleep at 9:30pm. Granted, this is a larger debate about whether music and all forms of art should be inherently accesible to all sectors of society, or if there are 'levels' of culture; but we're talking content and substence here, not how much it costs to experience art (a different yet connected subject).
What was most striking about the ceremony, and what ultimately brought some excitement to it, was a protest by a singer named Eyal Golan, one of the most popular singers of Mizrahi music. Mizrahi, literally meaning "Eastern," is a hodgepodge of Greek/Turkish/Arab/Western pop music defined by its sound, the accents of its singers and the topics sung (normally God, love and/or one's mother -- very similar to Country music). Golan wore a shirt that protested the fact that the nominees did not represent this sector of this industry.
The mid-1990's were seen as a breakthough for this genre, with the mainstream success of Mizrahi music and what was seen as the emergence of an Israeli melting pot. Perhaps the introduction of Mizrahi music into radio stations would mean better socioeconomic conditions for the "Mizrahi" community, composed of immigrants and children of immigrants from an area stretching from Morocco to Iran (read: non-European).
On the one hand, Golan had every right to protest. A substantial percentage of the population listens and supports this type of music, itself very diverse; press promotion of concerts are small and confined to one page, while MOR take up at least two pages of the weekend paper; and the most popular radio stations play a handful of Mizrahi songs (and usually the most watered-down sounding ones) in their daily rotations, lending itself to looking like the American phenomenon of the token minority on TV channels.
On the other hand, Mizrahi music suffers from the same blandness that exemplifies MOR: Over-production, more often than not sounding like it's performed on the same child's electronic keyboard I had in the 80's; covers of very recent songs that don't bring any innovations; and lyrics that are increasingly predictable. Mizrahi music is said to have reached a milestone with the popularity of Zohar Argov, known as "The King" here. The song "Eizo Medina" (What a Country!) by Eli Luzon, however, encapsulates the social frustrations that the community faces, in their own sound, in a way Americans take for granted with the protest songs of the 1960's. If there were more songs like Luzon's in any Israeli genre (there are, but in very small numbers), then perhaps we'd be cookin'.

Anyways, enough of my ranting for now -- I have to finish the reading material for a class.