Monday Music: Balkan Beat Goes On

Image by Courtesy of Balkan Beat Box

By Ben Shalev February 27, 2012

Crossposted from Haaretz

The penultimate song on “Give,” Balkan Beat Box’s new album, is poignantly titled “Enemy in Economy.” This light and humorous song mocks the varying suspicions that Americans harbor toward non-Americans, and in effect takes a stand against xenophobia.

Image by Courtesy of Balkan Beat Box

“Enemy in Economy” ends with a sort of musical pan of the length of a passenger plane. The band’s soloist, Tomer Yosef, repeats the lyrics, “First class, business class, enemy sitting in economy class.” At one point, the word “sitting” is replaced with “dancing.” A rollicking racket ensues and the listener can’t help but visualize America’s “enemies” — that is, anyone whose skin isn’t white, and whose accent isn’t perfect — dancing in the aisles, celebrating their terribly foreign and suspicious nature, and singing along with Yosef, who of course is himself one of the enemies, what with his dark skin and Israeli accent.

This song not only expresses Balkan Beat Box’s humanist spirit, but also reflects to some extent the Israeli trio’s impressive trajectory durig the past decade, as well as the status it has won in the international arena. Yosef, Tamir Muskat and Ori Kaplan formulated the sound and approach of Balkan Beat Box early in the last decade and have succeeded in gaining a surprising foothold in the American and European markets — and all that in the period of great suspicion after September 11.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO