When you think of hip-hop or rap, you don\’t generally think of jowl-necked septuagenarians or skinny, psyched-out white guys rapping about the tsuris their mother gives them, but then again, you don\’t generally think of Jews either.
As a 50-year-old white high school teacher, I\’m well outside the hip-hop demographic. I can\’t dance, have increasingly little fashion sense, and can\’t pull off the permanent scowl required by the true hip-hoppers. But here I am, in the packed and noisy Stella Adler Theatre in Hollywood, wondering if these two Jewish guys got some innate rhythm sense that I don\’t. And wondering if I can stand the embarrassing spectacle if it turns out that they don\’t.
With angry lyrics that court controversy, two multiplatinum albums and a third on the way, his own clothing line, record label, legions of fans and glittering religious jewelry, Subliminal could easily be mistaken for a Jewish P.Diddy.
Jews have been part of hip-hop since its beginning,\” said Josh Noreck of the Hip Hop Hoodios, a Latino Jewish rap group based out of Los Angeles and New York.
Jews can dance a mean hora, but when it comes to hip-hop, they aren\’t known to hold their own — until now. The Milken Community High School Dance Team swept the open regional Dance Team Competition in Las Vegas and earned a bid to the 2004 National Dance Team Competition of the High School.
When the Milken team qualified to compete in just one category at last year\’s nationals, they were the first private Jewish school to earn such an honor. By sweeping last month\’s regionals in the hip-hop, lyrical, medium dance, jazz and officers categories, Milken enters this year\’s nationals as one of the teams to beat.
Two year ago, when Jeremy Kagan met Yudi Simon, a Chasid, and T.J. Moses, an African American, the young men lived just four blocks from each other in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.\n\n\”But it may as well have been 50 miles,\” he said.\n\nTheir tenuous relationship is the focus of Kagan\’s new Showtime movie, \”Crown Heights,\” set around the riots that rocked that mixed neighborhood in August 1991. The fictionalized film will be accompanied by a short documentary, \”Increase the Peace,\” Kagan made about the events and the real life Moses and Simon.
Hip-Hop music might be cool, funky and ghetto, but DJ Socalled thinks that an infusion of an Yiddish could make it even better.
\”Hip-hop is all based on breaks, and the Yiddish theater records have amazing breaks in them, and they are original breaks,\” said Montreal-based Socalled, who is known as Josh Dolgen when he isn\’t working the sound sampler. \”You never hear anyone do them — everyone has sampled James Brown breaks, but nobody has sampled these records.\”
Socalled is going to be bringing his Yiddish-hip-hop-funk-jazz-dance music collage to Los Angeles on Dec. 18, where he will sample the night away at an early Khanike (Yiddish for Chanukah) concert for a new group called Avada.
Oakland-based singer/songwriter Hyim has a Middle East peace proposal he\’d like to float: Send 10,000 kids to the region, have a heart-to-heart with their Arab and Israeli counterparts and then get \’em all singing.
The Borscht Belt has gone way downtown as a crop of young hip-hoppers redefines the shape of Jewish comedy.
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