[HANASHIR:14790] Adon Olam/Shake That Thing

[SELINGER <SELINGER...>]

Quoting from my entry to this listerv from Friday...

>On another subject...Flipping through radio stations today I came across a
>reggae song with raunchy lyrics but a hypnotic beat and melody. It's
>called "Shake that thing," recorded by Sean Paul who sounds
>Jamaican. If you ignore the lyrics-- which I can barely make out anyway--
>it sounds extremely Jewish and would make a powerful and prayerful
>syncopated chant melody. 

>If you can stop laughing long enough to consider it, the beat would work
>great with the lyrics of Adon Olam...

That was my plan... I gave it a try, and it was definitely a fun
experiment.  Did it work? Apparently not, at least not for Carol or for
her son, who I guess *couldn't* stop laughing long enough to consider it.

What did I learn? Adaptation of Jewish lyrics to familiar melodies can be
good fun, e.g.  singing Hiney Mah Tov to the tune of "The Lion Sleeps
Tonight" in a song session. Adaptations to familiar melodies isn't
appropriate in a worship setting because the secular associations with the
melody get in the way of the prayer. That goes double if the secular
association involves getting jiggy. 

On the positive side, the experiment enriched my musical vocabulary and
made me think in a new way about weaving diverse styles into our
community's evolving musical idiom. That's all good.

As for the raunchy lyrics-- the good news is that Sean Paul published two
different versions of the same album, one with and one without explicit
lyrics. The bad news is that I think the lyrics Carol quoted may be from
the "clean" version.

-Robin Selinger
 robin (at) totshabbat(dot)com
 

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