From: EVAN-AT-KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU Date: Tue, 19 Mar 1996 13:39:05 -0600 (CST) Subject: Re: nomad music Interestingly, a recent lecturer on hiphop also cites the Fugees as the future, and as nomadic (though not with that term, "nomadic.") They are doubtlessly the shit. Their sycretism pervades their recordings thematically and formally. Most intriguing are their ways of combining rap-talking with singing. Though they use lots of reggae, they claim descent not from Jamaicans, but rather from Haitians--as in Haitian Refugees. Lauren Hill, on the Fugees' "Fugee-La," gives "Much respect [to New] Jersey," which fits quite well with their celebration of being between communities, inasmuch as New Jersey is still a place very much between Philly and NYC. The Fugees are far and away the group most worth a listen--and I plan to get close tomorrow night when they play here in the little shtetl on the prairie where I now live. Though I enjoy and appreciate their music immensely, aesthetically and intellectually . . . on the other hand, part of their message is reprehensible for its Jew-baiting. The prominent references and quotes from Farrakhan are not necessarily, in themselves, anti-Jewish; but they are all the more problematic in light of such phrases as (on their hit from the 1st album, "Vocab") "a Jew is a Jew." This is a totalization if ever a tautology was one. Their latest hit, "Fugee-La," reterritorializes in ways that must make successionists, from early Christians to Farrakhan, proud. Successionist-- the notion that Christianity succeeded, outmoded, and replaced the role and supposed truth of the faith of Judaism--is the flip side of saying "a Jew is a Jew." It says that the Jews are no longer the Jews, because a new We are the Jews. Now Farrakhan is again relevant here for vilifying Jews and Judaism ("a gutter religion"), then borrowing the English name of the holiest Jewish day--he called his march a "Day of Atonement." Reterritorialization. {Farrakhan's non-Christianity doesn't negate the relevance of historic precedent for his move, which precedent is largely Christian}. In the midst of hiphop and reggae reterritorializing each other come the Fugees. And the powerful refrain of "Fugee-La" says "Boy on the side of Babylon/trying to front like he's down with Mount Zion." Now, of course, the references to Babylon and Zion are replete in Reggae, and arise from Christian and Rastafarian themes. But the Fugees represent a new line of flight. Some people certainly do try to front like they are "down with Mount Zion." This fronting is especially unrighteous coming from those who side with the Babylon world in which faith gets lost. To maintain and reterritorialize my own repoached enjoyment of the Fugees, I must give them the benefit of a doubt. Perhaps I should not be so troubled by the words. Perhaps I can see somewhere in the danger a sense of poetic revenge, if nothing else, than for roles of Jewish Americans in mainstream cultural appropriations of African-American music. Anyway, the Fugees would still be powerful without tapping and feeding anti-Jewish sentiments. --Evan ------------------
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