REVIEW: Band Camp V
- Posted on July 24, 2007 12:42 PM
- 0 comments
Matisyahu, Yellowcard, Plain White Ts and Madina Lake
The Waikiki Shell, Honolulu
Sunday June 17th 2007
Review by Matt Killeen
Matthew Miller or Matisyahu. A Chassidic Jewish Rap Reggae Artist. To British ears it sounds like something from an Alexei Sayle sketch but in the US, on the East Coast at least, Judaism comes with a different vibe. It’s more widespread, more familiar and more cultural than religious. It’s about food and parties. Israel and all its paranoid anti-socialism, its walls, gunships and bulldozers, seem far away. It’s a subject you just don’t get into unless you’re eating chopped liver round someone’s house.
The fact there’s a Chassidic Jewish Rap Reggae artist in the US should not actually surprise. That he is hugely successful, however, still takes some getting used to. In Britain we would be, after mispronouncing his name, first amused, then suspicious. Perhaps worried that he’s hot in that hat. Almost certainly we would not be interested. In the States, the redneck-no-passport-Fox-watching US of A, there’s a stadium full of people gathered to check him out.
This is Hawaii of course, as stirred a racial and cultural melting pot as the US has to offer. It is also the local college radio’s big day out and the surfing suburban kids, and bizarrely enough their parents, have come out in force. Waikiki Beach has come to rock out.
Matisyahu may sit uneasily in the running order but Madina Lake, The Plain White Ts and Yellowcard are very much of a muchness. They’re punky rock as made by people who grew up listening to Green Day. They’re vaguely politically right-on but inoffensive and too polite in a ‘you’re the best audience’ kind of way. Bands like this do several types of songs: The ‘I love you’ acoustic ballad in which teenage couples snog execrably. There’s the bitter hate song, often called ‘Hate’ or ‘the Hate Song’. There’s the song bemoaning the no opportunity mall community suburbs of America and then one looking back at the self-same adolescence with a wispy nostalgia. It’s a formula that works, since it taps into a basic demographic truth about life in the US.
Madina Lake, sporting the very latest Towers of London hair, bounce about in the heat under a blazing sun, with the audience trailing in with their Budweiser. Even if they had more than one hook in their set, they don’t have a chance. One wonders whether the coming months as under-card to Linkin Park can save them from obscurity.
The Plain White Ts have more potential, their singer tapping into that cod-coy British frontman thing, one part Brett Anderson, one part Jagger. They also have at least one sure fire hit in ‘Delilah’, their teenage love song, which works because it’s so obviously a true story. It treads on the very cusp of contrivance before pulling you back, saying ‘tell your mum I saved your life’. When he breaks up with her I hope he stops singing it because then, and only then, would it get crass.
Then everyone gets a lesson in how this stuff should be done by Florida’s Yellowcard, or the surf punk band with the violin as you may know them. Never quite as interesting as you would want them to be, they are nevertheless compelling, maintaining a swagger that comes from true success. Lest we forget, in all the scoffing, that Yellowcard sold 2 million copies of Ocean Avenue in the US, the kind of numbers that we can’t honestly dream of in the UK.
Everything is set-up, therefore, for the headliner. There is a genuine buzz, which it appears has been generated by recent college airplay. The religious aspect is barely considered an issue. It isn’t because the Jewish in America, or anywhere else for that matter, benefit from a semantic quirk. A very religious Jew is devout, kosher or possibly Chassidic, depending on their sect. A ‘devout’ follower of Islam is a fundamentalist. It is doubtful whether many thousands of Hawaii’s youth, including many hundreds of Marines about to ship out to Iraq, would have turned out to celebrate the reggae tones of a Muslim.
Not that this is the fault of Matisyahu, who appears to have fused his belief system with an accessible MC style, espousing multiculturalism and ecumenical spirituality. The backing is standard dub reggae, very familiar to someone who grew up in Birmingham with early UB40 and The Beat in the background. As with most musical fusion across cultural and racial divides, it is the similarities rather than the differences that drives his work. His continued success should serve to remind us how alike we are. I suspect, however, that most of the UK will fail to get past the braids, beard and yarmulke. The flip-flopped, beach short wearing teens of the Island of Oahu rise above such parochialism. They howl for more long into the hot pacific night.
Matisyahu - official site
Matisyahu MySpace
Post a comment
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.seatwaveblogs.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1079
