In praise of future oldies

Ofra Haza turned out to be a force of nature given voice; I went back to that store repeatedly.

By PHILIP GOLD
The late Ofra Haza’s voice was a force of nature (photo credit: REUTERS)
The late Ofra Haza’s voice was a force of nature
(photo credit: REUTERS)
It’s not exactly a law of nature, but it’s certainly a fact of life. The older we get, the less we enjoy/appreciate/understand/tolerate/endure contemporary popular music. But it’s also a fact of life that as we age, our appreciation begins to reach backward. In pop music, this means that the more oldies there are, the more of them we might possibly discover or rediscover. So in that spirit, I would like to ask this paper’s readers (and everyone else) a question about contemporary Israeli music.
But first, a tale.
As an American bow-wave Baby Boomer, my musical tastes were formed by that blessed ’50s/’60s quadrivium of doo wop, folk rock, acid rock and soul, plus a dozen or so candidates for musical sainthood.
Anything pre-Elvis such as Big Band/Swing – hey, that’s what our parents danced to when your mother could still get her arms around your father.
The ’70s produced a more modest canon, but a canon nonetheless. Then it all went techno or punk or heavy metal or whatever else they called that slithery, bottom-line-driven, MTV-festered national inundation of raging decibels and dreary proto-porn. Thank you kindly, but I’ll stick to the classics and, y’know, that ’40s sound is sounding better all the time.
However, man does not live by oldies alone. So midway through the Reagan years, I started casting about for contemporary alternatives.
For a while, it was French and Irish, even Greek.
Then I discovered Israeli rock. It happened by accident.
I was in a Jewish religious goods store in, if memory serves, Rockville, Maryland, looking for whatever I was looking for. I wandered to the rear of the store, where the popular audio cassettes were discreetly displayed. Somebody named Ofra Haza beckoned from the shelf. What’s to lose? She didn’t seem to be crooning ballads to the kibbutz tractor park, and anyway, the money would receive a good home.
Ofra Haza turned out to be a force of nature given voice. I went back to that store repeatedly, before the kindly old gentleman who ran the shop decided that the cassette (and those new-fangled CD) covers were becoming a bit risqué for his clientele. So I transferred my passion to, if I recall correctly, Israeli Accents, a store in Chevy Chase, conveniently located across from Katz’s Kosher Supermarket – which offered “three-breasted” and “three-legged” packages of chicken – and an unmarked warehouse of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission whose possibly radioactive contents might have occasioned the unusual fowlish physiognomy.
Be that as it may, I now had me near a hundred tapes of mostly magnificent music. Yardena Arazi, whom I will love forever and whose “Shlosha Dorot” still gives me chills. Ariks Einstein and Sinai. The High Windows and their only album, still so promising of more that never happened. El Avram. Yossi Banai. The classics of Naomi Shemer and Chava Alberstein.
A couple dozen others. Their music had a wondrous quality. It spoke of a culture in genesis, of a common history and hope, and of creation flowing from more than individual talent and perturbation.
Some weeks ago, when considering this column, I got into YouTube’s videos of that era. Many seemed awkward, as though the performers didn’t really want to appear in that medium, as though they were imitating a model they didn’t quite care for. But there was nonetheless a genuine, civilized earnestness about them. They knew that their music was good, and that they were giving, by their art, something of value.
Anybody done anything decent since? Or has it all gone the way of American music – mass-produced, techno-corporate, quasi-porno trash performed by interchangeable... okay, call them people, whose lack of talent seems inversely proportional to their self-indulgence, their self-regard and their overweening, all-purpose contempt for the world that sustains them? Am I sounding... old? Perhaps. But am I wrong? Has there been anything really worthwhile since Ofra Haza so tragically left us? My wife, a Gen X type, is slowly persuading me to reconsider at least shards of ’80s/’90s American music.
I do, especially after she’s played the same cut a few dozen times. But we’re in Israel now. And so I ask: What’s been done over the last couple of decades, what’s being done now, that I might think about listening to in 20 years? All suggestions welcome. No need to rush.
The writer appreciates Israeli shopping malls that play the Everly Brothers and Dylan. He also enjoys the Karmiel Music Festival, which he never goes to, but three days every summer, he opens his window and it comes to him.