The hoarse voice, the noise, the incisive texts – those are the elements immediately identified with him, even if not the only ones.
Since that moment he has been categorized as the most important and influential rock musician in Israel. The first identifying label that's been automatically associated with Hanoch since he sat down with the wrinkled white suit, the electric guitar and the unshaven face in the hotel room where the cover of the album “White Wedding” was photographed – is “rock.” That happened 35 years ago, when he was half his present age.
#MAYA SHALOM HANOCH LYRICS UPDATE#
The other thing that occurred to me after the performance was related to a certain element that has always existed in Hanoch's songs, but that I never really noticed before: Hanoch’s image as a political and opinionated artist, who expresses in his songs incisive views about Israeli reality, is so much a part of our collective awareness that I never realized that in many of his songs he actually expresses an opposite message, an absence of any statement – a message of silence, to the effect that words themselves are useless.Īlong these same lines, involving that underlying silent channel in Hanoch’s work, and in advance of his 70th birthday – I would like to refine and update the image that's been identified with him in the past decades. Shalom Hanoch performing at the Israel Peace Festival in Neve Shalom, in 1985. Indeed, just the opposite is true: This inventory of songs is a unique cultural resource, a tremendous lifetime achievement. But there are moments – for example, when celebrating the 70th birthday of this popular singer, which takes place on Thursday – when you want to stop and say: No, it really shouldn’t be taken for granted. There’s nothing surprising in easily recalling Hanoch’s huge inventory of songs. And one could think of another 20 wonderful songs that weren’t suited to an event of this type, and were not performed.
One could think of approximately 30 great hits that would have suited the playlist that night, at what had been intimate acoustic show featuring only Hanoch and Levy, who has been performing with Hanoch and producing his albums for over 30 years. When I left Zappa, I thought mainly about the huge number of wonderful songs that Hanoch hadn’t performed. The guy in the audience had tried to drag Hanoch into a patriotic celebration in which all of us, not only one athlete, “brought” a medal – and the singer responded to him, unwittingly, with a song that presents the opposite worldview and claims that long before there is “all of us,” there is “I” and “you.” A man lives within himself, and only afterward within his people. It was a totally random choice, but so fitting. It wasn’t a brilliant impromptu response to what had happened a moment earlier, for the simple reason that Hanoch didn’t understand what had actually happened. “Okay, let’s go on,” the singer said, and then quite amazingly began to sing “Don’t Call me a Nation”: “Need nothing from you, need nothing from them / A person is a person / Don’t call me a nation.” There were another two or three attempts to explain to Hanoch what the shouter meant, but apparently he wasn’t into the Olympics at all. “You want me to sing a song called ‘Galia’? There is no such song.” It wasn’t clear whether Shalom was addressing the person shouting or his long-time keyboard-playing partner, Moshe Levy. Even now Hanoch didn’t hear him correctly. “What? What did you say?” he asked the man, confused. Would he exploit the comic potential of the moment? Absolutely. A shout from the sports arena in the midst of an artistic event, addressing Hanoch like an old friend as “Shalom,” and the use of the rather belligerent “brought” instead of the more refined “won.” Only five words, but what comic potential they provided to the space in Zappa. Shalom Hanoch's new album stares death in the face The protest song is dead: Why aren't Israeli rockers more political?
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