“Hip-hop goes beyond race, religion or socioeconomic class,” according to Lorenzo “Rennie” Harris, hip-hop dancer and founder of Rennie Harris Puremovement, Philadelphia’s famed hip-hop dance company. “Whether you are from Philly or Cairo, you can connect with African-American arts, because they are about freedom.” His words had just been acid-tested by a month-long tour of…
A lot of my favorite music could be described as religious hip-hop. It probably has to do with my obsession with the Dirty South, even though all of that music is Christian. Take “True Hero Under God” by Z-Ro, which includes lines like “But I am just a man, trying to Satan free / Through…
Hip-hop has always been Diaspora music, or at least since the Jamaican-born Kool Herc started looping James Brown records in the early 1970s. Later on, people like the late Japanese producer Nujabes made the culture truly global. Shi 360, an Israeli raised in Canada by Maghrebi Jewish parents, who plays Afro-American music with roots in…
Crossposted from Haaretz The mostly secular crowed at Mike’s Place in Tel Aviv had a religious experience last week when the five-piece Haredi Hip Hop band Shtar took to the stage, traditional wardrobe intact. It wasn’t long before the crowed began to sway to the rhythm of rapper Ori M’Ori’s tassels, as he hammered out…
“So you’re the only non-Jewish artist on Shemspeed?” “I would say so,” says TJ Di Hitmaker. TJ’s just finished his set at Littlefield and he’s losing his voice. Right now he sounds Tom Waits-level raspy. “I met up with DeScribe, he was telling me he raps. I told him I’m a dancehall artist, he put…
Image Courtesy of the Adler Archive This week “Def Jam Recordings: The First 25 Years of the Last Great Record Label” arrives in book stores. The 300 page hardcover tome is 12” X 12,” the same size as an old school LP and has a cover price of $60. It may be chock full of…
Courtesy of Yitz Jordan/Shemspeed Records. Photo by Jonathan Hunter. Y-Love, also known as Yitz Jordan, is a black Jewish convert from Baltimore who feels just as comfortable at underground freestyles as he does at the Sabbath table. The son of a Puerto Rican mother and an Ethiopian-American father, Y-Love converted in 2000 at Brooklyn’s Conversion…
Maybe it was only a matter of time before Socalled, the frizzy-haired, klezmer hip-hop hipster, tried to sidestep his ever-expanding identity as a “Jewish artist.” The arbiters of Jewish cultural identity go to great lengths to rope in the eclectic and the original, and a klezmer hip-hopper is a no-brainer. But no one wants to…
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