The Rapping Holocaust Survivor. Yes, The Rapping Holocaust Survivor.
Brace yourself. The endlessly, endlessly, endlessly, endlessly, endlessly fascinating phenomenon of people who you wouldn't expect to rap actually rapping is back for another go. This one's somehow even better and worse than previous iterations. Sigh. Here's Der Spiegel:
The sound is a familiar one: driving beats, austere rhymes, forceful vocals supported by female backup singers. Standard hip hop, it would seem. And yet, something doesn't seem quite right. The lyrics-some are Yiddish, others Hebrew, still others Italian. And then there's that voice. It's certainly too old to be coming from a hip hop artist, isn't it?
Uh huh. 85-year-old Esther Bejarano, one of the last surviving members of the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz, has teamed up with the German rap group Microphone Mafia and made a hip-hop album, Per La Vita.The aim is to raise youth awareness of the dangers of fascism. I don't know. It's hard to knock folks when their hearts are in the right place. Harder still when one of them lost her parents and sister in the Holocaust, and only escaped herself during a death march to Ravensbrück in 1945. And at the very least, you'd hope the project might find its way to one of the worst-named groups ever to release an album in any genre, Baton Rouge rappers the Concentration Camp. 
The group's ill-considered name (y'know, they're concentrating really hard on their lyrics) has always seemed especially sad because one of its members, Young Bleed (top-right on the cover), is really, really good. His 1998 solo album My Balls & My Word is one of the great underappreciated works of southern rap-the best thing, by a ways, ever to come out on Master P's No Limit Records. Listen to the single, "Keep It Real." (I know, I know. But we've already established name-choosing as a weakness, right?)
As for her rapping partners, Bejarano likes them, and plans to record another album with them soon. But there have been some creative differences. "They are very nice people," she says. "But they are a bit chaotic. They jump around on the stage a lot. I told them maybe they should tone it down a bit."
well, at one point i thought a comic book about the jews as mice and the nazis as cats would be lame.
Maus sits in between Leaves of Grass and Fires on the Plain on my bookshelf.
I can already see kids wincing in anticipation of this being forced upon them during Passover 2010 seders. Why is this night different than any other night? Some relative forced us to listen to this!
And now a deeper comment on Maus. Prefacing this by saying I'm a first generation child of Holocaust survivors: I used to really like Maus, and consider it a great piece of literature, but as I have grown older I've grown sour to it. While Art Spiegelman does do a decent job of presenting his parent's tale, the added flourishes that tend paint Art Spiegelman as the bigger victim than his parents ring as selfish to me. And I always never understood the lamentation of his father complaining about him selling more comics and making more money. I don't see that as something unique to the experience of Holocaust survivors and think it related his personal experience dealing with his dad, but is a tad much.
i read it when it first came out in graphing novel form- the mid eighties. i haven't re-read it since college.
a couple of years ago i re-read catcher in the rye.
it wasn't as good as i had remembered it. i wondered then if it isn't a perfect book for an individual of a certain age.
minorly related side note- after the watchmen came out i went back and looked through the whole set. some of the dialog is simply horrible.