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Arts

Aural assault

By SCOTT R. BENARDE
Published April 24, 2005

When remembering and teaching the Holocaust, we often forget the power of the pop song. For decades, rock, pop, folk and rap songs have served as gripping reminders of the Shoah, but have been overshadowed by literature and film.

On the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Hitler's death camps, and in observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day, which falls this year on May 6, perhaps it is time to look at how contemporary music continues to declare, "Never again."

Folk icon Woody Guthrie wrote about the Holocaust as early as 1948 when he penned Ilsa Koch, about the sadistic wife of the commandant of Buchenwald. The opening couplet immediately sets the hopeless scene: "I'm here in Buchenwald. My number's on my skin."

The Klezmatics pulled the recently unearthed song into the 21st century by adding music, turning the as yet unrecorded Ilsa Koch into a fearful dirge in concert. (The song is to be included on a Klezmatics CD called Holy Ground set for release in 2006.)

A whole album worthy of mention, though it's difficult to find and more a blend of jazz and opera, is David Axelrod's Requiem: The Holocaust, released by Liberty Records in 1993. Axelrod, a noted jazz producer and composer who also worked with the '60s rock act Electric Prunes, was compelled to write and produce the record in response to watching white supremacist Tom Metzger deny the Holocaust during a TV broadcast. Axelrod's haunting opera includes but four "songs": Kristallnacht, Trains, Auschwitz and Gas Chambers.

One of the earliest Holocaust references on record occurs in Bob Dylan's classic With God on Our Side from 1964's The Times They Are A-Changin'. It goes like this: "When the Second World War/ Came to an end/ We forgave the Germans/ and we were friends/ Though they murdered 6-million/ In the ovens they fried/ The Germans now too/ Have God on their side."

And one of the more recent references comes from David Draiman, lead singer of hard rock band Disturbed and the grandchild of Holocaust survivors. In 2002, the band opened its concerts showing Holocaust footage on a giant screen after which Draiman was led onstage in shackles and thrown into a "gas chamber." Green smoke swirled. He collapsed and the band began its sonic assault. Although he hasn't written directly on the Holocaust, Draiman said he was using the imagery as a metaphor for all of man's inhumanity to man.

These Holocaust-themed songs also are available on CD:

RED SECTOR A by Rush: Perhaps the most well-known of Holocaust-influenced rock songs as it first appeared on the band's hit 1984 album Grace Under Pressure, it has been a staple of the band's live shows ever since. The seeds for this harrowing rocker were planted in April 1945 when British soldiers liberated the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. Rush lead singer Geddy Lee's mother Manya (now Mary) Rubenstein was among the survivors. "I once asked my mother her first thoughts upon being liberated," Lee said in a recent interview. "She didn't believe (liberation) was possible. She didn't believe that if there was a society outside the camp how they could allow this to exist."

Lee related the story to band drummer and lyricist Neil Pert and also wrote the music. Pert came up with lines such as: "Are we the last ones left alive? Are we the only human beings to survive?"

THIS TRAIN REVISED by the Indigo Girls (from 1994's Swamp Ophelia): Set to blazing fiddles and volcanic drums, the song steams along like an out-of-control engine spitting smoke-and-fire images: "It's a fish-white-belly, lump-in-the-throat, razor-on-the-wire, skin-and-bone, piss-and-blood in a railroad car, 100 people - gypsies, queers and David's star, this train is bound for glory." Indigo Girl Amy Ray, who is not Jewish, says the song began to take root after learning about the Holocaust during a religion course, which included a visit by a survivor, at Emory University in 1986.

"I hadn't been taught about the Holocaust in (public) school, and I was shocked by a lot of what I learned about the human capacity for evil," she recalled in an interview. "I was always really struck by the train imagery of (the Holocaust). In the South, where I grew up, the train image is one of going to a better place. That irony and cruelty resonated with me: I wanted the song to be feel harsh and show cruelty. I felt angry when I wrote it. I was so angry about what happened." (A live version of the song is on the 1995 double CD 1,200 Curfews.)

THE DOOR by Martin Page (from 1995's In the House of Stone and Light): Page, who also is not Jewish, did not set out to write a Holocaust-inspired song for the album. He had a piece of music he describes as "uplifting, dark and mysterious," and he kept singing the phrase "the door," to a certain part of the melody. After he finished making a demo recording of the tune in his home studio, he glanced up at a bookshelf, saw Treblinka by Jean-Francois Steiner, grabbed it and read it.

"I was so moved," Page said in an interview. "I grew up in England, so I was very aware of the Holocaust, but I was not aware of the bravery at Treblinka. I instantly went back into the studio and the song, in a way, wrote itself.

"The door is the door to the gas chambers or the door to hope," he said. "The story is basically told through the eyes of a character I imagined had survived. I wanted to end the album with it because it is a testament to heroics and hope."

NEVER AGAIN by Remedy (from the 1998 compilation The Swarm: Wu Tang Presents the Killa Bees): Frustrated that public schools weren't teaching the Holocaust, the Jewish Staten Island rapper Remedy (born Ross Filler) composed his own history lesson. Combining ancient Jewish prayers, hip-hop rhythms, an ominous melody and quaking lyrics resulted in the most complete and defiant portrait of the Holocaust painted in song: "Never again shall we march like sheep to the slaughter. Never again shall we sit and take orders. Stripped of our culture, robbed of our name, raped of our freedom and thrown into the flames. Forced from our families, taken from our homes. Pulled from our God and burned of our bones. Never again!" (Also available on Remedy's 2001 and 2002 solo releases The Genuine Article and Code: Red.)

TATTOO by Janis Ian (from the 1993 album Breaking Silence): Ian was 10 when she first learned about the Holocaust from books in her parents' home library. As an adult, she tried for years to write a song addressing it. The poignant, almost-whispered Tattoo, with its reminder that survivors never completely heal, is the result: "Her new name was tattooed to her wrist. It was longer than the old one. Sealed in the silence with a fist. This night will be a cold one."

RIDE 'EM JEWBOY by Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys (from 1973's Sold American): Perhaps the most misunderstood Jewish musician around, Friedman's choice of band name and song titles offended many Jews and gave a chuckle to many bigots. If everyone had listened to the songs, they would have realized that Kinky was a proud Jew and that Ride 'em Jewboy was a sentimental tribute to those who perished in the Holocaust: "Dead limbs play with ringless fingers. A melody which burns you deep inside. Oh, how the song becomes the singers. May peace be ever with you as you ride."

LITHUANIA by Dan Bern and the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy (from 2002's The Swastika EP): Bern lost grandparents, aunts and uncles when the Nazis invaded Lithuania in 1941 and wiped out the Jewish population. Hitler and the Holocaust are a recurring theme in Bern's music, but nothing is as cathartic as Lithuania. Long and angry, it includes this passage: "I sometimes want to dance on Hitler's grave and shout out "Groucho Marx, Lenny Bruce, Leonard Cohen, Philip Roth, Bob Dylan, Albert Einstein, Woody Allen, Abbie Hoffman, Leonard Bernstein, Harry Houdini, Sandy Koufax!' And then I want to scream and sing as loud as I can, to the chandeliers that sway dangerously overhead, and proclaim Kristallnacht is over!" (My Little Swastika, about trying to reclaim and defuse a symbol of ultimate evil, is also on the CD.)

ATTIC by Jill Sobule (from the 1997 album Happy Town): The Denver-born singer-songwriter conjures up the ghost of Anne Frank when she asks in a wistful, almost naive tone, "Would you have hidden me in your attic, that's the question I'd like to know." The acoustic tune poses a most powerful question between its pretty melody and Sobule's delicate, almost fragile singing. Sobule, who is Jewish, says she feels compelled to put songs about World War II on her albums.

DACHAU BLUES by Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band (from 1969's Trout Mask Replica): Disjointed and atonal, musically annoying to pop-loving ears, the song quickly makes its point. Beefheart, who is not Jewish, croaks in his gruff voice, "Dachau blues those poor Jews. Dachau blues those poor Jews. One madman 6-million lose." Former band guitarist Gary Lucas shed some light on why the reclusive Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) wrote this song. Beefheart once told Lucas that he wanted Jewish musicians in his band because "Jews understand suffering."

UNTITLED by Peter Himmelman (from 1992's Flown this Acid World): Also known as The Taxi Song, Himmelman based this quiet yet potent tale on his own experience of riding in a taxi with an anti-Semitic cabbie who said, "Hitler's only fault was that he had to go and lose." The song ends with Himmelman visiting a survivor: "I spent the next morning with a man who had death camp numbers on his arm/ And I swore to myself I would do anything to protect him from further harm/ and he told me, "Wherever you may go/ You must refute them if they say it wasn't so.' "

- Boynton Beach-based journalist Scott R. Benarde is the author of "Stars of David: Rock 'n' Roll's Jewish Stories" (Brandeis University Press).

[Last modified April 21, 2005, 09:15:04]