The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity

8. Activism and Authenticity: Palestinian and Related Hip-Hop in an International Frame

209 chapter 8 Activism and Authenticity Palestinian and Related Hip-Hop in an International Frame : caroline rooney He dreams as I do, as the angel does That life is here . . . not over there. —Mahmoud Darwish, “Under Siege”1 First, a shimmering cymbal sound with two soft beats from the kick drum over a dark screen bearing the film’s title: Local Angel (2002).2 The film begins with this pause, and then all of a sudden there is a violent explosion of sound synced to flashing strobe lights. The sound and the images reveal a drummer’s body pounding out a fast and relentless 4/4 beat formation with little variation, a near wall of sound, while the drummer’s head is covered by an Abu Ghraib/Guantánamo Bay–style hood. What should we make of this strange figure, at once anonymized and silent, depersonalized, and yet energetically animated with a Dionysian drive: a drive that is both exhilarating in its abandon and menacing in its implied blind violence? As the drum solo reaches its climax, the body of the drummer lifts up and is thrown back as if being hit by staccato flying bullets of sound before crumpling and slumping. The overall effect of this opening scene from Udi Aloni’s Local Angel is a little like these stanzas from William Blake’s “The Tyger”: What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp? caroline rooney / 210 When the stars threw down their spears And watered heaven with their tears Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? (2008, 197) That is to say, there is the same inexplicably introduced hyperforceful (four-beat) rhythm—“What the hammer? What the chain?”—placed within a context that raises the question of the relation of this energy to the angelic and divine. Udi Aloni’s film, announcing itself as Local Angel, offers as first “illustration” or juxtaposition the hybrid figure of the terrorist-drummer accompanied by a voiceover that speaks of the creation of angels and the embattled relationship between human nature and the divine. Without further explanation, the film cuts to a New York cityscape (over a jazzy, klezmer-style sound track) of high-rise buildings pasted with huge billboards of aspirational lifestyles and fashions, featuring, in particular, advertisements for Gap clothing . Our attention is then directed to the gap-toothed grimace of the city’s skyline, the gaps here being the absence of the Twin Towers in the otherwise stock panning—“Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” (Shelley 2008, 1079)—of the city’s iconic skyscraper horizon. There are connections to be made, therefore, between these staggered or stuttering “G/gaps.” In particular, there is a connection to be made between the sheen of fashionable modernity at its most awesome and the scene of the masked drummer. As the autobiographical musico-political documentary of Local Angel unfolds, it may be said that Udi Aloni’s reaction to 9/11 broadly resembles the portrayal in a short story entitled “Twilight of the Superheroes,” by Deborah Eisenberg: “It was as if there had been a curtain painted with the map of the earth. . . . The planes struck, tearing through the curtain of that blue September morning, exposing the dark world that lay right behind it, of populations ruthlessly exploited, inflamed with hatred, and tired of waiting for change to happen by” (2006, 33). Or, with a less oppositional schema, it is as if 9/11 served to rend America ’s taken-for-granted universalism, in the form of American metropolitan civilization constituting the vanguard of modernity, to reveal its actuality as a mythology—in fact, as a blinkered insularity. Furthermore, Aloni understands , more readily than many, that there is a connection to be made between “here” and “there,” between the trauma of 9/11 and Israel-Palestine, or as he says in the film: “After the event of September 11, I told myself it all begins over there.” While Local Angel deliberately plays with the figure of quasi-monstrous terrorist menace at its start, once the trajectory of Aloni’s film takes him back to Israel, his homeland, this mythic figure is unhooded, ironically via the Palestinian and Related Hip-Hop / 211 figure of “the hoodie,” as we are introduced to Palestinian youth through the hip-hop...