Summary: Like all modern Jewish art forms, Jewish pop music is often an attempt to recast material, to translate certain stories for new audiences so they aren’t lost. This can be a burden, or it can be a catalyst to explore identity, to experience spirituality, to exorcise nostalgia from the songs that have run through our minds since childhood. And like all pop music, contemporary Jewish pop must struggle to negotiate a delicate balance between originality and a perceptible thread of its influences. It has to maintain youthfulness while grappling with songs we associate with our parents—for many, traditional Jewish music feels so inherently tied to family that it can be a challenge for those in between childhood and parenthood to relate to it. Two new bands are innovating in these directions—albeit from different ends of young adulthood: 32-year-old David Griffin’s indie-rock outfit Hebrew School, and Zeda’s Beat Box, a band consisting of an adult and four teenagers. Hebrew School Hebrew School, which is funded by a Six Points Fellowship, was founded in New York City in 2007. Its first album is set to be released this March or April. According to its Web site, the band is going for “an innovative use of the genres of Indie rock and experimental music to mitigate, through recording and performance, the disaffection of Jewish life in a large urban center.” In case the language didn’t tip you off, Griffin identifies with the eye-rollers in the back of the Sunday school classroom, the kids who were bored by what they saw as a burdensome and irrelevant tacking-on of superficial Jewishness to otherwise secular lives, or considered themselves “too cool” for religious and cultural engagement, but, in adulthood, find themselves craving some sort of reconciliation. “I joke that this is a therapy process for me, working the songs through my head,” says Griffin. While some of Griffin’s lo-fi, multi-instrumental songs are covers of traditional favorites, others are originals. In the former category, his “Adon Olam” is completely deconstructed, full of hoots and warbles, drum rolls and noise. It’s still somehow pretty, and performing live, the band seems to enjoy it with the particular abandon that accompanies the destruction of childhood sacred cows; in this case, the target is particularly apt, as “Adon Olam” is known to be musically mutable. “At my bar mitzvah I sang it to the tune of ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,’” says Griffin. Hebrew School’s rendition is an attempt to subvert the general wisdom that the song can be sung to a variety of tunes, he says, “a way to prove the point that it couldn’t work with any melody.” In fact, though, by going so far out in its rendition, the band almost comes back around to something that might be described as a “classic” experimental piece, and as such, just another way to perform “Adon Olam” in any genre. David Griffin Among Griffin’s original compositions, there are gestures, overt and hidden, toward a kind of inescapable Jewishness. One song, “The Gravlax,” puts lyrics like, “I’m not in it for the JCC…I’m not in it for being a Jew, just in it for the gravlax” to an indie pop beat. “People commented that it sounds just like a rock song you might hear in some jukebox in Brooklyn,” Griffin says, “but then if you step in, there’s this strange other element.” But it’s hard to tell where intriguing uncanniness ends and novelty for its own sake begins. Honestly, any mention of smoked fish by a band called Hebrew School seems pretty conspicuous. “Ancillary Devices” drops a hint obscure enough that it feels like a secret treat to pick out—the first notes are from “Adir Hu,” a tune from the Passover seder. The song’s lyrics are a bit literal, but their subject—deliberate methods Griffin uses to spark his creativity (“like the current tack of only writing on two-thirds/ to 75% of a [...]
