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“Jay-Z disappoints me as a person” | The Product

Monday, October 31st, 2011
Y-Love on 10.18.11 | Photo by Max Elstein Keisler

Y-Love on 10.18.11 | Photo by Max Elstein Keisler

When I was at Shemspeed’s CMJ concert in Brooklyn, I got the chance to talk to Y-Love. He called out Jay-Z, talked about going more pop with his sound, and dropped some theology.

KEISLER: Long story short, how’d you come to Judaism?

Y-LOVE: I saw a commercial on TV when I was seven years old that said happy Passover, and I told my mom I wanted to be Jewish. And ever since I was a little kid (MEK: You went straight to Orthodoxy?) Yeah, I never really got into non-Orthodox Judaism, I had a metaphysical problem with that. For me personally, my issue with non-Orthodox Judaism, was, if g-d is infinite, He fills up everything, on all planes of existence at the same time. To apply a linear application of time to g-d, to say back in the day it was like this, and today it’s like that, to me that doesn’t work. So that’s why I went to Orthodoxy.

I think you kind of see that mentality on your first album.

That album came out roughly around the same time Soulja Boy came out , and I was so pissed, cause at the time I was up at two in the morning with English to Hebrew to Aramaic dictionaries, and he was (KEISLER: YOUUUUUUUUUUUUU!)…Exactly, cause I was coming out with four language wordplay and he’s coming out with YOUUUUUUUU and blows up.

Well he’s in jail now.

Yeah I found that out on Twitter, now I know what today’s least important news is.

So what’s with Hood Samaritan?

Everything blew up with me and DeScribe when we did that collaboration – this is another collaboration to redefine Y-Love, I’m really breaking out of the box I was in before. It’s totally different now, you can see I look totally different (MEK: You switched the flow up, right?)…Yeah, it’s a lot more accessible, a lot more English, it’s not 100% English, but it’s still 90% English as opposed to Aramaic half the time.

You kind of slowed it down too, from that rapid East Coast thing.

Oh definitely, to make it more accessible.

What’s the Baltimore sound? More east coast or dirty?
Well Baltimore has its own sound, there’s that chick Keys (MEK: YO, Keys is on point), I love what she does but I wish she would be more positive, I love her flow (MEK: All she does is diss Nicki Minaj), and then she has other songs, dissing, and very materialistic (MEK: She has that song where all she does is hate on her boyfriend). She’s always against something, if she had a track about empowering women instead of I HATE THEM BASIC BITCHES…then there’s Shy Lady Heroin who came out against Keys…but in general the Baltimore scene is a lot more positive than a lot of other scenes.

Is that connected to the club culture?
Oh, Baltimore club music is a whole other thing. That’s what I was raised on, if you hear me doing fast repetitive styles, that’s that influence coming out.

What rap do you listen to?
A lot more hardcore stuff than comes out in my lyrics, let’s put it that way. I listen to Immortal Technique, K’naan, everybody on Rhymesayers, Brother Ali I’m really into, and then pop stuff like Busta Rhymes and Ludacris. Everyone’s listening to Watch the Throne…

Really? I can’t stand that album.

Why?

I just don’t want to hear Jay-Z rap anymore.

I feel you, Jay-Z disappoints me as a person, but not as an MC.

He disappoints me as both.

He disappoints me as a person. Prime example, I’m real involved with Occupy Wall Street, I built the general assembly’s website in New York, and Kanye showed up to Occupy Wall Street, talking solidarity with the 99 percent, where was Jay? When Hurricane Katrina happened, Kanye was on national TV talking about George Bush doesn’t care about black people, Jay-Z, he sold a car? Like come on bro, you’re from Bed-Stuy, can we see a Jay-Z recreation center or something.

My complaint with Jay-Z is he destroyed Rocafella.

He’s really all about the money, he’s about making himself rich at the expense of others.

At the expense of Beanie Siegel.

(laughs) Beanie got clowned in every single way.

I miss that old Rocafella stuff and nothing Jay’s done since then has been at that level.

I think his new stuff, you can tell he’s not trying to be the MC he was then.

I don’t know, I feel like he simplified the flows too much, and lately I don’t like his vocals either.

How do you feel about Kanye though?

Kanye’s not the kind of rap I usually listen to but I definitely respect him as an MC, and how he’s grown as a rapper, he was a lot more traditional sounding on College Dropout and he’s more offbeat and out there now, and his production goes in weird places, he’s doing him. Jay, since Blueprint 3 is just watered down.

Drake gets hated on all the time.

I hate on Drake.

But I can never hate on him, cause he’s the only other black Jew in the rap industry blowing up on the pop tip. Shyne’s on that gangster tip.

How’s he going to be Chassidic and gangster at the same time?

Easily, he said in XXL magazine, “there’s nowhere in the Gemara that says I can’t drive a Maserati”.

But is he still rapping about killing you?

…Yes, cause that’s his persona, he says “I get paid to drop F-bombs”.

People were giving Mase shit back in the day for saying he was a pastor and then doing gangster rap…

That’s a difference between Christianity and Judaism, if everything’s nebulous people are allowed to make judgment calls. Unless you’re Catholic there’s no canon. With Orthodox Jews, it’s like look, am I doing anything wrong? Well then shut up. So that’s his point of view, I respect that, cause that’s my point of view with what we do at Shemspeed. Until you see something actually wrong that you can point out, don’t say nothing. We’ve dealt with a lot of haters in the Orthodox world.

It’s funny to me, cause coming from the not-Orthodox world, Shemspeed seems so innocent and so moral.

I mean, yeah, we’ve had crazy rapper experiences though. When Remedy came down with a whole bunch of people from Shaolin to one of our shows, Staten Island projects was represented fully in this club, and who was it who got the VIP room shut down for blazing in the club?

Shemspeed?

Yeah, and then you see a whole lot of Jews in yarmulkes getting led out of the club. So, we get down. Granted, nobody’s getting shot, and if somebody punches you, the next words out of their mouth are “excuse me”, we don’t need metal detectors or anything like that.

So what’s happening project wise?

I got the Hood Samaritan mixtape coming out, I got a documentary about me coming out in the spring, I got this new video with Andy Milonakis and TJ Di Hitmaker on MTV, The Takeover, so yeah, Shemspeed’s taking over. That’s what’s up.

Max Elstein Keisler is a third-year journalism major at Harvard Extension School. He’s involved in the local music scene in Boston and the coverage of Jewish music worldwide. His writing can be found at maxelsteinkeisler.com. His column, The Product, usually appears here on alternating Thursdays.

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Y-Love in The End of Days | The Product

Friday, October 14th, 2011


For me, hip hop is my secular music. After I’ve been working a shift at the Hillel for like 10 hours surrounded by Hillel-y Jews, I want to put on some grimy stretch and bobbito freestyles or some dirty south trap music. So I wasn’t sure how I felt about Shemspeed artist Y-Love, a Chassidic convert from Baltimore, especially since I heard he mostly rapped about religious life–in Aramaic.

The first/title track I heard off his 2008 LP “This Is Babylon” had me interested though. The production is classic low-budget hip hop—a kick kick snap drum pattern and droning, oppressive synths. The synths don’t let up for the whole song, their minor chords and too-bright timbres sounding like the droning of flies. “Babylon, land of the law that crime pays,” Y-Love chants for a few bars, as close to a hook as he gets. His rapid-fire, offbeat flow and commanding voice fits the budget production. This is street preaching music that makes you want Moshiach. A chunky bass noise rises up in the middle of the song, something like the sound in Wu-Tang’s classic “Can It Be All So Simple.” But the sound is dominated by those looming synths and Y-Love’s voice.

“Bring It On Down” combines an old school breakbeat and wailing synths for as close as dude gets to a party track. “Remind me what the angels said, I forgot/All my peoples stay rabbinical, we up in the spot/Thunder and lightning, smoke and the flames, all the people gon’ drop at the sound of his name,” he raps, his voice swelling with emotion. It’s a song equally informed by old school party joints and apocalyptic fervor, turning “Bring It On Down” into a call to tear down the roof and the golden calf.

“6000” (the title is a reference to the year some Jewish traditions predict the world will end; we are in 5772 now) mixes pro-Black messages with Jewish nationalism. In 2011, it reminds one how nightmarish Bush seemed at the time—Y-Love talks about how elections aren’t enough to remove Bush from office. I thought that at the time too.

If there’s a problem with this album, it’s a problem almost all political hip hop has. It’s hard to listen to this album all at once. Every track is filled with anger, righteous though it may be, and the prophetic tone is overwhelming at times. But the individual tracks are so high energy, and Y-Love is such a strong MC, that by themselves they’re great listens. And the rapping in Aramaic is surprisingly dope—even if you don’t understand the language (I don’t), dude knows how to manipulate sounds and his flow is always on point. When he’s switching between English and other languages nearly every line, like on “Mehadrin Rhyming,” there’s a glossolalia-like effect. He sounds like a man speaking prophecy. The experimental, UK-jungle-like production doesn’t hurt.

“This is Babylon” is technically incredibly adept and the production is frightening; song-by-song, it’s great. It could be more cohesive as an album, not to mention more melodic, but Y-Love’s later work hints in that direction. And I have to give props for making such a weird LP—the beats are too hardcore for Chasids, the lyrics too esoteric for the hip-hop market and the party tracks too apocalyptic for parties. It’s out there for anything, let alone Jewish music.This is going to stay on iPod status.

Max Elstein Keisler is a third-year journalism major at Harvard Extension School. He’s involved in the local music scene in Boston and the coverage of Jewish music worldwide. His writing can be found at maxelsteinkeisler.com. His column, The Product, usually appears here on alternating Thursdays.

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“The Jew” in Rap | The Product

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

During my interview with Kosha Dillz, he mentioned how rappers often portray Jews as “record label executives and lawyers who hoard rappers’ cash.” I decided to do a bit of research, and it turns out that he’s right – pretty much all the references to Jews in hippity-hop are as lawyers or rich kids—in fact, Jewishness is often set up as being diametrically opposed to the street mentality of the authentic rapper (Redman on Def Jammable: “I’m trying to be set for life like a Jew kid”). At the same time, the Jew in rap is clever, especially at manipulating the law.

Is there more to Jews in rap than Matisyahu and stereotypical lawyers?

Matisyahu and lawyers: the only Jews in rap? | Photo by Flickr user Chrontourage (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Jay-Z references the Jewish lawyer a few times in his pre-retirement work (post-retirement Jay-z shouts “L’CHAIM” in his songs to access the coveted Bar Mitzvah market). On Cam’ron’s 2002 single “Welcome To New York City”, Jay-Z raps “Coverage at Centre Street/Got Brafman defending me/’Cause New York will miss me if I’m locked in the penitentiary/The judge says ‘is this that thug/From the kit kat club/But I got enough chips stacked up to make that bitch back up.”  He’s talking about a 1999 stabbing incident at a nightclub, playfully referencing his own guilt.  The chips that Jay stacks (“came in the came 400 deep”), both from illegal hustling and rapping mean he can afford the best lawyer, which means 3 years probation, and no jail time.

On “Can I Live”, off his own 1996 debut album, the lawyer appears as “Channel 7 News, ’round seven Jews, head dead in the mic/Forgetting all I ever knew, convenient amnesia/I suggest you call my lawyer, I know the procedure.” It’s very visual, with Jay-Z talking to a reporter while surrounded by Jewish lawyers. Rappers from Jim Jones to Jadakiss have used the Jewish lawyer line, to the point that you could call it a trope of New York gangster rap.

Looking at rap outside New York, however, references to Jews are less common and more hostile. The most famous may be Ice Cube‘s “It’s a case of divide and conquer, cause you let a Jew break up my crew…You can’t be the n**** for life crew, with a white Jew telling you what to do.” It’s hard to see this as anything but hateful—Cube was known for his essentialist racial views at the time (around 1991), endorsing The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, a book which blames Jews for the slave trade. Cube marks the Jew as an Other—not only White but somehow more sinister. The Jew subverts brotherhood and destroys society. Isn’t that from Henry Ford?

I can’t find many references to Jews in more new school stuff – as rap migrated commercially from New York to the South, where there are fewer Jews, I think we became less of a reference point. Additionally, as rap moves away from the street-hustler narrative that dominated the music of the 90s, references to lawyers become as dated as slinging crack and gunplay.

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind a comeback. Shanah tova.

Max Elstein Keisler is a third-year journalism major at Harvard Extension School and a writer for New Voices Magazine. He’s involved in the local music scene in Boston and the coverage of Jewish music worldwide. His writing can be found at http://maxelsteinkeisler.com. His column, The Product, appears here on alternating Thursdays.

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