When I left Zappa, I thought mainly about the huge number of wonderful songs that Hanoch hadn’t performed. The guy in the audience had tried to drag Hanoch into a patriotic celebration in which all of us, not only one athlete, “brought” a medal – and the singer responded to him, unwittingly, with a song that presents the opposite worldview and claims that long before there is “all of us,” there is “I” and “you.” A man lives within himself, and only afterward within his people. It was a totally random choice, but so fitting. It wasn’t a brilliant impromptu response to what had happened a moment earlier, for the simple reason that Hanoch didn’t understand what had actually happened. “Okay, let’s go on,” the singer said, and then quite amazingly began to sing “Don’t Call me a Nation”: “Need nothing from you, need nothing from them / A person is a person / Don’t call me a nation.” There were another two or three attempts to explain to Hanoch what the shouter meant, but apparently he wasn’t into the Olympics at all. “You want me to sing a song called ‘Galia’? There is no such song.” It wasn’t clear whether Shalom was addressing the person shouting or his long-time keyboard-playing partner, Moshe Levy. Even now Hanoch didn’t hear him correctly. “What? What did you say?” he asked the man, confused.
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Would he exploit the comic potential of the moment? Absolutely. A shout from the sports arena in the midst of an artistic event, addressing Hanoch like an old friend as “Shalom,” and the use of the rather belligerent “brought” instead of the more refined “won.” Only five words, but what comic potential they provided to the space in Zappa. Shalom Hanoch's new album stares death in the face
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The protest song is dead: Why aren't Israeli rockers more political?