Tag: Irony

I’ve mentioned being a rapper in a few places but realistically I wasn’t much of one. The D.A.R.E. rap I wrote in fourth grade got vetoed by a fundy Christian girl’s parents and that was the end of it. It’s kind of like my dark origin story – it turned me bitter.

I did have two “party rap groups” with women in Chicago and San Diego that never went anywhere . For the San Diego one we had a cassingle ready to go on gold tapes with cheap gold chains but never made it. The band fizzled around 2005. The Chicago one happened a year or so later but also failed to record anything.

For a little while I was freestyle rapping under the name Gypsy Feelings but it was always an impromptu thing as opposed to something that was booked ahead of time on all but two occasions. Due to the hit-or-miss nature of the art form it didn’t always reach its full potential. It was a bit like trying to show off a fancy vehicle with a temperamental engine that needed lots of momentum to start and occasionally stalled out.

Ironically this was the only rap project of mine that got recorded and released. Unfortunately it wasn’t a live recording and the momentum I just referred to requires crowd energy and was impossible to generate in a studio. Erin Allen from Sister Fucker released it on a cassette split with a project called Fuck You. I wouldn’t recommend anybody go out of their way to purchase it but if somebody has it lying around I’d be curious to hear it again.

My favorite set happened in Chicago. When the band HEALTH was just starting out they had seen the party rap group at the time Hood Ri¢h and were fans of it. They hit me up about booking a San Diego show but the rap group was no longer playing and I did a project called Guest Toothbrush with Andy Brack who was then a student at the High School I was working at.

A year later I was living in Chicago and HEALTH had a show at the Bridgeport venue Co-Prosperity Sphere. It was also a homecoming show for the Chicago group Bird Names. They had played at the same San Diego house that hosted the show in the last paragraph and it just so happened that the flyer for that show was a photo taken of me at the previous one where the legend on my shirt was changed to “cash for touring bands”.

Bird Names had brought it back to show me and me and the HEALTH guys were blown away by the serendipity of it all. They also really wanted to see me rap again so I did a quick set with their drummer BJ. It was the only time I’d ever freestyle rapped with a live drummer but if I were to get back into it that’s the way I’d want to do it for both the improvised spontaneity potential and the vaudeville comic effect.

As luck would have it I’d find myself in an actual band with BJ about five years later with Kyle Mabson and Dalton – the hard rock group Sexting. There was no rap in that one, maybe things would have worked out better if we went in a rap metal direction. Instead I would lose my voice every time we played only to not even hear myself over Kyle’s guitar which he always made sure was at least twice as loud as the vocal PA.

There is a video on YouTube for the song Snow White Apple but we recorded an album’s worth of material that’s probably just sitting on Jeff Byron’s computer.

Anyway back in High School I had a mostly imaginary Jewish themed rap group with another kid at my school named Stanley Krimmerman. We called it HWA or Hebrewz With Attitude – I was Jewpac Kippur and Stanley was Synagogue Doggy Dog. I wrote all the lyrics for both of us. We wrote a fairly tame and inoffensive song about keeping kosher:

“I’m Jewpac Kippur / I’m Synagogue Doggy Dog / We’re a couple of Jews / Riding high on the hog

But we don’t eat its meat / Nah, we never touch that slop / We gotta keep it kosher / so that God’ll give us props”

Beyond that all of our stuff was edgelordish and insanely offensive. I was working on a song I only ever wrote the hook for called Zyklon B-otch:

“Zyklon B-otch why you down and out? Getting wiped by the Reich ain’t what I’m about”

That brings me to this song. I don’t remember being explicitly taught about the perpetual and recently accelerated Palestinian Genocide but between the information in History textbooks and whatever might have been on the news in 1997 it was impossible to see the Israel/Palestine situation as anything else. I recently read a post about the ongoing situation from Mykki Blanco where they talked about how responding to tragedy with intellectual nihilism is a fundamentally white response.

I won’t argue with that. Another thing that inspired me to write this was struggling with my Jewish identity and the fact that I had Zionist grandparents. What I was trying to do with this piece was express and criticize what I saw as the Zionist id by writing a piece of violent Gangsta Rap from what I saw as an untenable perspective. I’ve talked to a few Zionists in my life since this time and while I can sympathize with the fundamental sentiments in an idealized abstract sense I don’t see how anybody can look at the material results of it and the accompanying manifest destiny and not be on the side of the Palestinians.

I know that what’s done is done and Israel can not simply cease to exist but it seems like things were moving in a positive direction with Yitzhak Rabin before he was assassinated and the never ending far right regime of Netanyahu has been a nightmare – he both provided material support to Hamas to sabotage any possibility of a secular Palestinian movement and has demonstrated time and time again that he has no interest in peace.

The situation has never been as urgent as it is now. I’m under no illusions that writing this ironic and horribly offensive set of lyrics is an effective form of protest or can make a positive difference. It’s just another thing that’s been cavorting inside my head and needs to be exorcised by releasing it into the wild.

I hadn’t read The Stranger by Camus when I wrote this but I had heard the song by The Cure and that was the inspiration behind the hook and starting lyric. I don’t want to only interact with these underlying horrors from a place of irony and nihilism. I want to believe, even as measures are being taken to suppress and silence the truth in both Israel and abroad, that some day the people of Israel will take a long, stark look in the mirror and exercise their political power to end the genocide in all of its forms: displacement, othering and direct and indiscriminate state sanctioned murder.

Here it is:

“Yo! I’m standing on the beach with a gun in my hand

Camel jockey’s gonna get it if they step to the promised land

Ain’t so much for y’all to understand

‘Cept that stones don’t mark graves that we’ve left in the sand

Yo I don’t give a fuck about Camp David Accords

As long as towelhead motherfuckers die by my sword

You think you’re tough? You think you’re hardcore?

In the Middle East the Jews are the overlords

Like Bon Scott and Angus Young we do the dirty deeds

The desert is our garden and guess who’s the weeds?

We know you’re men like us cuz we know you can bleed

But progress is progress and you suckas impede

We’re gonna get away with all the blood being spilt

Cuz we’re riding on the waves of Holocaust Guilt

Gonna bury my blade down to its hilt

Cut you up to pieces like a patchwork quilt

I’m alive

You’re dead

I’m a Hebrew

Killing an Arab

I got a gat for Arafat a grave for Khomeini

Do ‘em like they us

And we Hitler ‘n Mussolini

I don’t care about Bloods, don’t give a fuck about Crips

Cuz I claims my turf on the Gaza Strip”