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Kobi Oz might be the most influential musician in Israel. His songs brought Mizrahi stylings into the mainstream, painting a vivid portrait of a place coming to terms with its Middle Eastern identity.<\/strong><\/p>\n By Matti Friedman<\/strong><\/p>\n (Read the piece in Tablet here<\/a>.)<\/strong><\/p>\n Who is the most important Israeli musician of the last generation? Not the most gifted or popular, but the most influential, one without whom the country\u2019s sound wouldn\u2019t be the same?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n My vote goes to Kobi Oz\u2014the mix-track trickster, the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down, the Tunisian from a town of Moroccans who brought the South to Tel Aviv and changed what we mean by Israeli pop. Of course, more than one person is responsible for the rise of the once-disdained sound known by the generalization \u201cMizrahi,\u201d or \u201cEastern,\u201d which has become Israel\u2019s spiritual equivalent of American country and western music, though the two genres sound absolutely nothing alike. If we must choose one musician responsible for the mainstreaming of the Israeli Eastern sound, it might be Oz.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The record, the band\u2019s second, was going nowhere at the time and the record company\u2019s enthusiasm was flagging. As a lead singer, Oz was strange\u2014small and antic with a braid, chunky glasses, and a smile that was engaging without quite being friendly, like he had a good joke but thought you might not get it. His band\u2019s sound, the company was saying, was \u201ctoo Arab.\u201d He and his bandmates pooled most of the money they had, $600, and filmed\u00a0a video<\/a>\u00a0in front of a live audience at a place in Jaffa that usually featured Greek singers. The crowd immediately hated both the band and the song\u2014you can see it in the faces in the video. Were these guys Moroccan or Ashkenazi? What\u00a0was<\/em>\u00a0this shit? Only when a popular Greek performer came onstage afterward did the crowd start dancing, relieved that Oz and his friends were gone. Oz told the cameraman to film that, then edited the clip so it looked like people were dancing to his own song. It worked: The video got airtime, \u201cIn Newsprint\u201d became a classic, and the band never looked back.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That observation has its roots in Sderot, the southern town where Oz was born in 1969. Sderot is now famous for being the favorite target of Palestinian rocket squads in nearby Gaza\u2014many thousands of rockets have hit the town, and a child was killed there in the last round of fighting this spring. But when Oz was growing up in the \u201970s and \u201980s, Sderot was just a poor backwater whose residents were mostly a North African proletariat working in factories run by the socialists on nearby kibbutzim.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A working-class town with a rich culture spurned by the majority, containing talented musicians with no connections at any radio station or record company and no hope of getting anywhere near the mainstream\u2014all of this seems to have created the electricity that put Sderot\u2019s underground scene on the map. Hard rock was big in Sderot years before it made its mark in Tel Aviv. The town produced some important bands, a few of which made it and most of which broke up before any outsiders heard of them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The town was also home to a second underground scene, inhabited by entertainers who\u2019d play parties and weddings with Arabic songs and stage names like Sheikh Muijo and Filfel el-Masri. These were artists who\u2019d come with the great migration to Israel from the Arab world and were doing their best to keep people\u2019s spirits up in a country that was less welcoming than expected. They sang traditional music as well as protest songs coated in a kind of acid humor, which occasionally broke through as novelty hits. A good example from the 1950s was Filfel el-Masri\u2019s\u00a0\u201cInstallments,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0about people being convinced to buy now and pay later, or Jo Amar\u2019s\u00a0\u201cUnemployment Office,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0about trying to catch a break as a Moroccan guy in a bureaucracy that favored people from Poland. Sderot was a small place, but it had a lot going on.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For Oz, the town\u2019s key musical figure was (and remains) the guitarist Haim Uliel, son of Matatya, who was a cultural impresario and member of the Black Panthers, the anti-establishment Mizrahi protest group of the \u201960s and \u201970s. The younger Uliel started out in tight jeans and long hair playing Black Sabbath, then did a sharp U-turn back to the music he grew up with in his father\u2019s caf\u00e9 on the town\u2019s main drag, Herzl Street. The caf\u00e9 would host Jewish performers from North Africa and also Arab musicians who came over from nearby Gaza, which at the time wasn\u2019t a ministate run by terrorists and surrounded by fences, but just a place down the road.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The scene at the Herzl Street caf\u00e9 was sketchy, with uncouth men and women of disrepute, Uliel recalled when I met him at the little house next door where he grew up and still lives\u2014an intense 65-year-old in shorts and flip-flops whose living room couch is occupied by a guitar case. But it was those people in low places who ended up keeping the old sounds alive. There was a door between the house and the caf\u00e9, and the denizens of the demimonde would sometimes wander into Haim\u2019s kitchen. He\u2019d wake up and find drummers asleep on the floor.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\u00a0Listening to Oz\u2019s work over the past 30 years, you get a portrait of a changing country\u2014one constantly in crisis but also one with an irrepressible life, a place that has given up on being someplace else and has come to terms with itself. Because Oz and his band broke through in the \u201990s, the age of the music video, it\u2019s actually possible to witness the crucial moments in their rise on YouTube, like the release of \u201cIn Newsprint\u201d in 1993. The odds were stacked against the song, which has prickly lyrics about Israelis\u2014describing them as people diverted by jokes, journalism, and self-delusion\u2014and a complicated melody that changes rhythm abruptly in the middle and moves into explicitly Moroccan territory. The song was unlike anything people had heard before. It wasn\u2019t immediately clear if the band was earnestly channeling the North African sound or laughing at it, as was common in those days, when Mizrahi culture was still mocked by the wardens of popular taste.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\u00a0\u201cHumor is an incredible Israeli tool to win acceptance in society,\u201d Oz said when we met in a Tel Aviv caf\u00e9; he ambled in with a leopard-print sunhat casting shade on his trademark glasses and goatee. He\u2019s 51 now, nearly one of the elder statesmen of the pop scene, and everyone recognizes him on the street. \u201cIf you don\u2019t want to be the kid who\u2019s ignored,\u201d he said, \u201cit\u2019s better to be the kid who people laugh at. If they laugh at you long enough, you\u2019re one of the guys. You start laughing at yourself, and then you can laugh back at them.\u201d<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n