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The soundof shelter

By Jennifer Medina
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, SDEROT, ISRAEL
Monday, Apr 30, 2007, Page 13

As musicians warm up, friends chat in a stairwell in Sderock, a bomb shelter turned music club in Sderot, Israel. PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE

The underground Israeli pop-rock music scene seems to start here, in a bomb shelter set in the center of town.

It does not matter how loudly the teenagers hammer at their drums or pluck at the guitars; the green tin that is meant to protect residents from incoming rockets also works as a sound barrier for the funky music.

It is not unusual for Israeli towns to turn shelters into community centers of some sort. But Sderot, a kilometer from the Gaza Strip, is one of the few cities where such shelters are still used frequently.

And in Sderock, as the shelter-turned-music studio is called, the teenagers grapple with the dueling realities that have made the city famous: the music that comes out of it and the rockets that come into it.

"This is the safest fun place in the city," said Nir Oliel, 21, who has played guitar for several years. "It is also where everyone great came from."

In the Israeli public consciousness, Sderot is a place of poverty and danger. It has been barraged by more than 4,000 rockets in the last six years, including nearly 200 since the shaky cease-fire began in November. Six people have died from the attacks, and dozens of homes have been damaged.

A young musician arrives at Sderock. PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE

And yet Sderot is also the hometown of a pop culture hero of the moment: Kobi Oz, the lead singer of the Teapacks, the Israeli pick for the popular Eurovision song contest. Oz made headlines in March when organizers of the contest suggested that his song Push the Button might be disqualified for carrying an inappropriate political message. The Teapacks are scheduled to perform in the Eurovision semifinal in May.

The song riffs on the Israeli fear of being obliterated by an atomic bomb. Oz, who is also the host of a weekday morning television news program, makes no apologies for the lyrics, which he says are meant to reflect the "hot politics" of the region.

"There are not sweet love songs to play," he said in a telephone interview. "If you are here, you have to have all kinds of conflict inside the music. Our way to deal with it is to laugh in the face of terror and make rock 'n' roll for the craziness."

Oz, with two platinum albums in Israel, is by far the most successful musician to come out of Sderot, but he is hardly alone. He got his start with Sfatayim, whose name means lips, a band made up of young artists from Sderot who played Moroccan music. On Israeli radio it is possible to hear more than half a dozen bands from this city, quite a feat for a place with a population of about 25,000.

The musicians who grew up in the 1980s are the children of immigrants from North Africa and other parts of the Middle East. They blended their New World guitar and drum with their Old World counterparts — an oud and a goatskin-covered drum called a darbukah — to create what critics called ethnic-pop. Those who perform it say it is "pashut Yisraeli," simply Israeli.

But it is a particular kind of Israeli, reflecting the sort of chip-on-the-shoulder attitude that many children here grow up with, convinced that the wealthier European Jews in the bigger cities like Tel Aviv look down on them.

When the Qassam rockets — 70 pounds of steel each — began landing here, much of the Israeli mainstream seemed unperturbed, favoring a less aggressive military stance. After the rockets started landing in schools and houses, the residents grew increasingly frustrated with the government.

Encouraged by their hawkish mayor, Eli Moyal, they set up protest tents, crying out, "Conquer Gaza now," and demanded that the Israeli military take action. When Israel did take action, it did not help much: The rockets returned.

The teenagers at Sderock seem less convinced that more force will calm their lives down. Their music captures their angst.

Don't Break a song one group recorded for Independence Day celebrations, focuses on their sense of defiance and fear:

"We won't break; we won't be afraid," the chorus goes.

And then:

"How does the state abandon

This war, who is extending his hand?

They do nothing, when it comes to you."

The verse ends with "Shma Yisrael," which translated literally is a command: "Hear, O Israel." It is also a reference to the ubiquitous Jewish prayer that is said during daily worship and also on one's deathbed.

With the success of so many musicians in the last decade, the city has poured considerable resources into cultivating more talent. The city estimates that it spends US$30,000, a considerable portion of its budget, on music. International groups have invested hundreds of thousands of US dollars on projects like Sderock.

Chaim Uliel and Micha Biton, native sons who became successful performers and producers, teach classes here. Biton, 42, mused about how much more sophisticated the youngsters are.

"When my older brother was the first one to get a guitar, it was like a diamond," he said. "All the neighbors came over. It was something that everyone wanted to touch. That's not something so exciting or special anymore."

With so many opportunities, Biton said, one of the city's younger stars is almost certain to rise to the top soon. In particular, Biton has his eyes on Hagit Yaso, 17, a daughter of Ethiopian immigrants.

"Singing is just what we do," said Hagit, who has won several festival competitions in the country. "We do it to escape, to smile, to laugh." In a sign of the ever-shifting identity here, she raised her nose a bit at the suggestion that she would perform Oriental music. Asked which musicians she admired most, she did not hesitate: Mariah Carey and Beyonce.

For their teachers, it is only a matter of time before the younger students become more political in their songs and outlook. A byproduct of parents' insistence that their children stay inside to avoid the crash of Qassam rockets, the music shelters have become more popular than the basketball courts.

Biton's anthem for Sderot has become a sort of mantra for the residents: "I don't leave the town for any Qassam."

Oz, who has become a sort of ambassador of Israeli kitsch, says he is determined to sing about a place that lives in a constant tension between joy and sorrow, always navigating cultural divides.

"Our music is a bit schizophrenic, but that is how life is," said Oz, who now lives in Tel Aviv but visits Sderot frequently. "There is always a double kind of meaning. The point is to show everybody that's normal here."

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