Nostalgia Sunday – Pop Star

June 29, 2009 - 6:48 AM by Rachel Neiman · 2 Comments
Filed under: General, History and Culture, Music, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture

Do Israelis know from the Jackson-5? Puh-leez! This is the country whose government banned the Beatles from performing in the early Sixties on the grounds that they were a degenerate influence on the nation’s youth. But they did know Michael Jackson. In the mid-Seventies, with the advent of third radio broadcaster Reshet Gimmel, which played pop music, and pirate radio station The Voice of Peace, Israelis did become exposed to the international pop music. “Maariv LaNoar”, a weekly magazine for young people, reinvented itself as the local version of “Tiger Beat” with covers like this one:

Israelis tended (and still tend) to be exposed to Euro-pop, rather than good old American rock and soul but Michael Jackson was a massive musical crossover artist, with huge cultural influence all over the Middle East. Once “Thriller” hit, every country had their own ringleted version of Michael Jackson. Israel too*.

His Pied Piper persona already in full-swing, Michael Jackson held particular appeal for the younger set (by this I mean people who are now in their late Thirties) and in the mid Eighties you couldn’t go to any wedding or bar mitzva without the kids breaking out into song: “Triller! Tee lai lai… la lee la la la la la la la la la la la la… Triller! Tee lai lai…” and so on, ad infinitum.

But by the late Eighties, Israel’s media had fallen into lock-step with its international counterparts and stories about Jackson — whom “Spy” magazine once described as “the American version of Prince Ludwig of Bavaria” — focused on the weirdness.

And then, in 1992, speculation began that he was coming to perform in Israel. And he did in 1993.

During the past decade, new albums like “History”, regularly made the mainstream Israeli press, like this cover of Yediot Aharonot’s weekend supplement from 2002 of Jackson pulling his famous crotch-grab move. Famous but not original; the move was copped from Prince-produced Minneapolis band The Time, who doubtless stole the move from some other uncredited act.

Now Michael Jackson is dead and, as a good friend posted the other day on Facebook, in-between all the big hits, “the airwaves are filled with a whole ouevre of repetitive music that we fortunately never had to listen to.” Because our memories are not of Euro-perception post-”Bad” crap. We over-forties remember the J-5 hits, the Jacksons and, of course “Off The Wall” — little of which are being played here. Sadly, Israeli radio — whose knowledge of soul music is limited to the Blues Brothers movies parts 1 & 2 — is as usual, regurgitating only what it knows, not doing any research and depriving listeners of that truly joyous, wonderful music. Personally, I blame it on the boogie.

*Izhar Cohen, he of the Eurovision Europop mega-hit A-ba-ni-bi.

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