Hadag Nahash frontman Shaanan Streett is proud to call Jerusalem home.
By BARRY DAVIShadag nachash 224.88(photo credit: Courtesy)
They don't come much more die-hard Jerusalemite than Shaanan Streett. The 37-year-old lead singer of the longstanding and highly successful Hadag Nahash hip hop/funk outfit - and sometimes solo artist in his own right (he released Hevzek Or Holef last year) - called me up in something of a panic.
"We have to reschedule," he says with great earnest. "Wednesday evening's no good."
The reason for the change was quite simply that his beloved Betar Jerusalem was due to play the return leg of its Champions League second qualifying round match against Wisla Krakow from Poland, when we were originally due to meet.
Streett planned to be glued to his TV set, cheering our boys in yellow and black on to a potential showdown with Spanish giants Barcelona.
Although I have long since lost much of my boyhood passion for the game, I naturally consented to a more convenient, Betar-free slot.
Soccer apart, Streett is a true-blue Jerusalemite. While the rest of the Hadag Nahash gang have relocated to Tel Aviv, Streett is, at least for now, staying put in the capital.
"Who knows what will happen," he says. "For now, I can tell you my two sons are registered for kindergarten here for the coming year. So I'll definitely be here until next summer."
One gets the feeling, though, that it would take something close to monumental to pry Streett from his hometown. During the school year he runs Reznik, a pub that offers live entertainment, on the Hebrew University Mount Scopus campus.
Lesser known local musicians as well as several top acts have played there, including Noam Rotem, Amir Lev, Eran Tsur and - yes - Hadag Nahash ("the band only played there once"). Streett is also involved in a music series for Beit Avi Chai.
Still, if you ask musicians from Tel Aviv and elsewhere outside the environs of Jerusalem what they think about performing here, they would invariably talk about the difficulty of attracting audiences - certainly compared with Tel Aviv.
So, what keeps Streett here? "First off, Hadag Nahash has always had a faithful following in Jerusalem so, for us, it's not hard at all here. We played at the Yellow Submarine a couple of weeks ago and it was sold out.
"It doesn't make any difference whether we play at the Yellow Submarine or Hama'abada, all our shows have been sold out now for four or five years."
Surprisingly, that's not always the case at the other end of Route 1. "We don't always fill venues in Tel Aviv. Don't forget the places there are often larger. Barbi takes about 800 people and Zappa has a capacity of 600. Here [in Jerusalem] the capacity is 350-400."
While Hadag Nahash has built up a strong fan base in Jerusalem, Streett doesn't always have an easy time with his pub. "I opened Reznik last summer, but I soon realized the timing was off. There aren't many students around in the summer."
Not only that, it's no laughing matter getting non-students to Mount Scopus. "I tell you something, many Jerusalemites would rather drive to Tel Aviv to see a show than come up to the campus," he says. "Other than, maybe, Ein Kerem, Jerusalem still doesn't have neighborhood leisure spots that people come to from other places in the city. That happens a lot in Tel Aviv.
"Look at Zappa - that's all the way over in Ramat Hahayal [in north Tel Aviv]. It's not just people who live nearby that go there. Tel Avivites hop in a taxi and go to shows there. It's the same with Barbi [in south Tel Aviv]. It's not just locals from Florentin that go there. But it's so hard to get people to make the trek to Mount Scopus from other parts of Jerusalem."
So, what's to do about the entertainment situation in Jerusalem? "I don't know. I still haven't fathomed the psyche of the Jerusalem entertainment consumer. Maybe it will develop over the years," he says.
That must be wearying. "Yes, I sometimes get fed up but, at least for now, I'm staying put," says Streett. "I'm not promising anything - I've passed that age - but I'm definitely here for now. This is my town."
And professionally, nowhere is more home for Streett than the Yellow Submarine. "When we play there, it's not only that the audience knows all the words to the songs, even when I make up something on the spot they know the words to that too," Streett laughs. "Sometimes I feel they are more intimate with the material than me."
The band's following has also proven intergenerational. "We're not just talking about the people that used to come to the gigs when we started out 12 years ago. We're talking about their younger siblings and their families," he says. "We always come off the stage at the Yellow Submarine trembling with excitement and enjoyment. That's the place we feel most at home."
Streett, whose father is from Baltimore and his mother from Queens, also feels comfortable - although possibly not entirely at home - outside Israel. He has toured the States and Europe with Hadag Nahash and says he feels a rapport with non-Hebrew speakers, too.
STREETT AND the band have also gained a reputation for speaking, and singing, their mind regardless of where they happen to be. "I once went to meet someone from the Foreign Ministry, from the Department of Culture that finances artists' trips," he recalls. "I couldn't believe the ministry was going to help us perform in the United States. I mean, we're often critical of the government and things that go on here. So I asked him if he was serious about sending us abroad. He said the ministry was serious about it, and they wanted to show people outside Israel that they are not afraid of criticism. I had no problems with that."
Streett and, for that matter, Hadag Nahash have never been afraid of airing their views. "That's very much a part of who I am," the singer declares. "The idea has always been to remind people where they are living, what times we live in and what load we are carrying on our shoulders. But we also want to hint to them that we can do something about the situation."
Does Streett really believe a hip-hop band can change the world with a bunch of songs? "Hey, I'm not a kid anymore. I have no illusions about making everything right with music. But I was a member of a panel the other day, with two university professors, that talked about that very subject. I said, and my learned colleagues agreed with me, that a song can reflect a general feeling in the public, and maybe help it along a bit.
"Having said that, our audiences will remember what we said in our songs more than what the foreign minister said in some speech," explains Streett. "I don't thing it is a matter of no consequence when a band takes an idea and turns it into something aesthetic. The Internationale didn't invent socialism, but it helped to bring people together with a song. It was the same with Bob Dylan songs.
"All we can do is to give people a sense of not being alone in the way they feel. I think that's a lot."
The band's in-your-face approach has sometimes caused them grief. "Our second single, 'Af Ehad' (No One) was a protest against violence against women. But some people misinterpreted what we were trying to say and thought we were actually promoting violence," recalls Streett. "Then, in the Second Lebanon War, we'd performed in three bomb shelters in Nahariya and we were on our way to an army base near Rosh Hanikra when we got a call saying that the base commander had decided we shouldn't perform there. He probably thought our message was unsuitable for soldiers in the middle of a war. That was very frustrating for me... [and] got me wondering about lots of things."
When we met, Streett was in the throes of rehearsals with Hadag Nahash for what he hopes will become their next album. "We're doing a lot of stuff in English," he says. "I don't know how it will all work out, and when it will become a CD."
Presumably, singing material in English might help the band gain a stronger foothold outside Israel. "You don't think about things like that when you write songs. But it would be nice if that happens."
Streett is, apparently, an eternal optimist even following Betar's humiliation at the hand of the Poles - they lost 5-0.
"What's good about soccer is that there's always next season," he said when I called him up later in the week to offer my condolences over the crushing defeat. An optimist indeed.
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