Sha’anan Streett enters from stage left, sporting baggy sports shirt and playfully bushy sideburns in the spirit of David Ben-Gurion. Ben Gurion dreamed of a Jewish State with Jewish policemen and Jewish criminals. But in the past decade, Israel has gone even farther, developing a flourishing music scene that runs the gamut from eighties misery-rock and to a full-fledged hip-hop movement.
Streett is the lead rapper of Hadag Nahash, a major force in the burgeoning Israeli hip-hop scene. A mere ten years ago, Israeli radio DJ’s argued that hip-hop only sounds good in English. With regular crowds of up to 15,000, this group, along with other fixtures such as Subliminal and MWR, has them eating their words. The hip-hop group’s name, which literally means “Snake Fish,” is a jumble of the phrase “Nahag Hadash” (new driver) – a phrase that adorns the sticker that virgin Israeli drivers must stick to their windows.
Hadag Nahash looks like a hip-hop group. Their clothes are baggy. Their manes are shaggy. Chains dangle as they strut, sway and bounce on a tightly packed stage with all the classic energy of hip-hop. But they are also an entirely an Israeli shade of the genre; Streett is sporting an Israeli soccer shirt advertising the notoriously terrible team “Brave.”
At the packed Knitting Factory in Manhattan’s East Village, Hadag Nahash brought the fever of modern Israel to the mostly Israeli audience. Reflecting Israeli society, Hadag Nahash’s music is a kaleidoscope of world styles, with hip-hop lyrics accompanied by funk baselines and a dash of middle-eastern flavor. We are even treated to snatches of Jewish folk, with the band threatening to break out in full-fledged rikud-diyan.
The seven-song encore is the highlight. The band breaks into the Sticker Song, a huge hit which borrows lyrics from a poem by David Grossman, an Israeli poet and social activist, who in turn lifted his words from the collected wisdom of Israel’s ubiquitous political bumper-stickers. For the last song, the group is joined on stage by Matisyahu, a Broklyn-based haredi reggae star, decked out in his yeshiva blacks and foot-long beard.
A man wearing a large knitted yamulke unfurls an Israeli flag halfway through the show, waving it gleefully through the air. Indeed, the show harnesses a particular urgency felt by rappers and audience alike, a need to express and confront the complexities of modern Israeli society. Hip-hop is a form uniquely suited to outbursts of excitement and frustration, complex themes and incisive observation. Indeed, early rappers used hip-hop’s word-heavy form for complex expressions of identity and sometime anger, and their lyrics are now studied as poetry.
Hadag Nahash are not angry, but they are poetic. They are cheerful and bouncy, charismatic and engaging. They are a tight outfit, at ease with their material. This is their first New York gig, and they are enjoying themselves.
