Song Style as Strategy: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism and Citizenship in The Idan Raichel Project's Ethiopian-influenced Songs

Abstract

Over the past decade, the State of Israel has approached pariah status in political debate, and its cultural sector and economy have been subject to boycott. Nevertheless, one multi-ethnic band has cultivated critical acclaim and a transnational audience by preaching integration and co-existence. This band, The Idan Raichel Project (IRP), advocates an Israeli society that accepts minorities and incorporates this worldview into a syncretic musical style that draws from the diverse influences of Israel's citizens, particularly from its Ethiopian minority. Yet, the IRP has drawn critique for enacting a hierarchy within the band between labour and management. Meanwhile, the IRP's approach to nationalist discourses is conventional, with the main discourses and apparatuses of the State—the military, the status of Israel as Jewish homeland—remaining uncontested. This article engages the dialectics of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the IRP's Ethiopian-influenced songs. Through close analysis, I will argue that songwriter-producer Raichel projects a progressive nationalist ideology, framing Ethiopian-Israeli social problems within national/ist Israeli narratives of Home and Return. The band's musical texts might thus be considered a contact zone where struggles over power and exclusion are negotiated and contested in a public, global forum. Raichel's representation of Ethiopian music and musicians enacts a set of power relations that promotes nationalism and cosmopolitanism simultaneously. Through the analysis of three songs, I will argue that the IRP deploys a particular style of ‘discrepant cosmopolitanism’ as a deliberate political strategy, positioning the band's elite audience above polarising discussions of conflict and state legitimacy.

Keywords:

• Nationalism
• Ethiopian Music
• Discrepant Cosmopolitanism
• Migration
• Israeli Popular Music
• Citizenship

Notes

¹ The krar is sometimes played by Azmaris, the so-called wandering minstrel figures of Ethiopia (Kebede 1977).

² My introduction to the band emerged from a heavy identity politics current within research about Ethiopian-Israelis (see Ben-Eliezer 2008). I arrived in Tel Aviv in July 2008 to conduct fieldwork about Azmari music (Ethiopian folk music popular today in Addis Ababa), but almost immediately realised that marginality in Israel is a potent daily experience for so many Ethiopian-Israelis that people discuss racism and exclusion frequently and fairly openly among themselves. My research gradually shifted from covering Azmari music exclusively to examining the impact of the migration experience on Ethiopian-Israeli musical discourses of citizenship, and The Idan Raichel Project comes into that discussion constantly. When I went about my business around Tel Aviv and told non-Ethiopian Israelis about my research, the same two questions, asked almost without exception alongside one another, were whether I thought Ethiopian-Israelis were ‘really Jewish’ and whether I had heard of The Idan Raichel Project. So this group has had a profound impact on the Israeli population's awareness of Ethiopian-Israelis, perhaps even as great an impact as the controversial, ongoing debate over the group's Jewish lineage (see Anteby-Yemini 2004; Kaplan 1992; Seeman 2009). As a result, I spent a lot of time discussing and considering this band and its importance for the community but I have only interviewed Azmaris about the IRP and have never conducted a formal interview with a member of the band. Therefore, my impressions are based on the material I have gleaned from talking extensively to Azmaris, Ethiopian-Israelis and Israeli and world music fans of the IRP. This research was supported by the Jewish Music Institute and the University of London's Central Research fund.

³ Prior to the arrival of the IRP on the music scene, the best-known example of Ethiopian fusion projects was the work of Shlomo Gronich and the Sheba choir from the 1990s.

⁴ Raichel made this statement in a Hebrew-language television interview in Oslo when he was selected, along with India.Arie, to perform at the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony.

⁵ Amharic is the official language of Ethiopia, and the first language of most Ethiopian-Israelis born in Ethiopia. I used some basic Amharic during my fieldwork, but I conducted most of my research in Hebrew.

⁶ The Ethiopian-Israeli population can be subdivided into two smaller groups: Beta Israel (‘House of Israel’ in Amharic), the group colloquially referred to as ‘Ethiopian Jews’ or ‘Falasha’; and the ‘Falash Mura’ (Anteby-Yemini 2004), a group linked to Beta Israel who converted semi-forcibly to Christianity and who have converted back to Judaism recently (Seeman 2009). Beta Israel identify strongly with a ‘Journey narrative’ described by Gadi BenEzer (2002) as the formative Ethiopian-Israeli experience. In this dangerous journey, Beta Israel travelled to Israel secretly via Sudan, culminating in Operation Moses in January 1985. Some reports claim that as many as one-quarter of those who attempted the journey died en route, thus solidifying for Ethiopian-Israelis a narrative, like the biblical Exodus, of a long-lost Jewish group who risked death to reach Israel.

⁷ Casay discussed her positionality as an Ethiopian-Israeli in the documentary Black on White: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdAPk45UOYc (accessed 22 December 2013).

⁸ Casay linked to the event on her Facebook page: www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10150138151946214&set=vb.9113400938&type=2&theater (accessed 17 August 2012).

⁹ This debate was officially resolved in the 1970s but it rages today in various forms. Beta Israel were granted the right to migrate to Israel in 1973, but the Ashkenazi rabbinate eventually asked the community to undergo symbolic conversion (Anteby-Yemini 2004) since their lineage was not verifiable before the fifteenth century (Shelemay 1986). In 1996, Ethiopian-Israeli blood donations were discarded en masse without testing on the grounds of potential higher incidence of HIV infection (Seeman 2009). In 2008, the Interior Minister enacted a now-defunct policy wherein Falash Mura, or Ethiopian returning converts, could no longer migrate to Israel under family reunification on the grounds that their Jewish ancestry was inauthentic. Ethiopians who are Jewish by birth, by conversion or by ancestry are, for the most part, offended and self-conscious about the stigma imposed on them over whether they are legitimately Jewish as though they are a homogeneous and suspect group.

¹⁰ The Israeli anthropologist Malka Shabtay has researched the niche area ‘between reggae and rap’ (2001) extensively, which she also calls ‘RaGap’ (2003).

¹¹ The Israeli government has been known to confiscate subversive material from Palestinian singers (Al-Taee 2002: 50). A more comical local example would be the panic that ensued across Egypt when the Israeli transsexual pop star Danna (sic) International (‘Saida Sultan’ in Arabic) became a Cairo cassette culture phenomenon in the mid-1990s (Swedenburg 1997).

¹² According to a recent survey by the leftist Israeli newspaper Haaretz, a majority of American Jews support the State of Israel generally whilst being critical of illiberal internal policies. www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/listen-to-american-jews-stand-on-israel-1.322055 (accessed 22 December 2013).

¹³ www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11999281 (accessed 22 December 2013). Despite Raichel's veneration in the popular press, the Ethiopian musicians whose work he samples are highly critical that he has borrowed their work without seeking copyright approval from them directly. Alemu Aga, along with Francis Falceto (producer of Éthiopiques), are especially critical of these practices (personal communication, 27 January 2014).

¹⁴ See Regev and Seroussi (2004) for an excellent explanation of SLI style, history and ideology. In brief, the musical style dominated the recording industry, itself controlled by elites who were connected to the government and the military. As a result, for the State's early decades of existence, music, politics and the military were inextricably linked through the State Apparatus and institutions of cultural production.

¹⁵ Although this tripartite breakdown of Ethiopian music covers a broad range of musical styles including Azmari, Ethiojazz and so forth, I will leave them as one unified influence for the moment, since I argue that Raichel's sampling uses them as decontextualised signifiers of ‘schizophonic mimesis’ (Feld 1996).

¹⁶ For case studies of music and national identity, see Buchanan (2002) in Bulgaria, Cyrille (2002) in Martinique, Ho (2003) in Hong Kong, Ollivier (2006) in Quebec and Solis (2005) among Hawai'ian Puerto Ricans.

¹⁷ The song can be found on the IRP's second disc (Mima'amakim, 2005) or as the first video on the band's website: www.idanraichelproject.com/en/ (accessed 22 December 2013).

¹⁸ Lyrics by Idan Raichel, translation by Yali Sobol, transliteration by the author.

¹⁹ Since political and religious forms of Zionism developed in central and Eastern Europe (Aronson 2003), Ashkenazi Jews dominated early forms of Zionist ideology. Early Zionist thinkers were influenced by European ideas of self-determination and civic nationalism that were popular in nineteenth-century Europe, such as perennialism, modernism and ethno-symbolism (Smith 2004), and blended them with classic Jewish tropes of Home and Return such as Galut (Diaspora) and Ahavat Tzion (love of Zion) (Friesel 2006: 297).

²⁰ Virtually every Azmari that I interviewed during fieldwork lamented that Israelis think Ethiopians ‘came without culture’. Given their struggle for equality, this is a painful subject for many Ethiopian-Israelis, and recognition from Israelis matters to these musicians.

²¹ Transcriptions by the author.

²² The Azmaris I worked with during my fieldwork felt that music would prove influential in changing Israelis' views about Ethiopian-Israelis. Yet in several interviews they offered strongly worded critiques of Raichel, believing he has earned a fortune at the expense of studio musicians who have made him famous.