Citizen Azmari. Ilana Webster-Kogen
The methodology of making a statement exclusively through sonic cues and visual signifiers—making musical style her public voice—continues across Rada’s album. “Life Happens” is a polished music video, and her most viewed song on YouTube by a factor of ten.20 The musical style and visual imagery illustrate a complex set of multidirectional influences, particularly through instrumentation and harmonic modulation. The song can be broken down again into a collage style: first, a two-measure Ethio-jazz exposition that repeats (with the four-measure section opening each new verse, a massenqo featured in the second verse). Next, she sings a four-line verse in minor key. Finally, the chorus modulates to major for four measures, eventually cycling back to the Ethio-jazz section, with a brief gospel-style vocal passage at the song’s end. The collage effect repeats itself in virtually all of her original songs, and indeed lends itself to the music-video genre.
The imagery mirrors Rada’s songwriting style, displaying multidirectional Afrodiasporic sensibility. As the video opens in a warehouse, the camera pans in to Rada playing a drum kit and dressed in the style of 1970s Swinging Addis (see Falceto 2002). Next, at 0.06, she is wearing a disco-style silver dress and playing a saxophone, and at 0.10 she is wearing glasses and playing the keyboard with one hand. At 0.13 she wears purple and plays the flute, which sounds like an Ethiopian washint. We appear to be moving through decades chronologically; at 0.16 she is wearing a jumpsuit, and at 0.18 she is holding a massenqo and wearing West African prints and headdress. At 0.20 she is wearing an ’80s-style fedora, playing the bass. The images of Rada from different eras, playing different instruments, in different styles of ethnic dress, offer a collage of multidirectional influence coming from Ethiopia and the United States. The video expresses her combination of eras, regions, tone colors, and melodic structures through an easy-to-grasp visual medium.
In contrast to the collage form of the other songs, “Bazi” sticks faithfully to funk. It begins with a fuzzy guitar and a bass muted by a wah-wah effect (see Le Gendre 2012: 137 for a clear explanation of the effect of the pedal on guitar timbre), moving quickly into a brass section playing in unison, to be followed by a bass line reminiscent of funk trailblazing group Parliament. Formally, “Bazi” establishes a funk groove through the bass, via a low-pitched, rhythmic melody that responds heterophonically to the other melodic instruments throughout (see Le Gendre 2012: 106 for the role of the bass in establishing groove in funk songs). The lyrics are about love and heartbreak, but the language does not convey the double meaning that in many funk songs substitutes sexual relations for unfulfilled political desire. Rada has, in a context removed from the black Atlantic, used iconic funk vernacular—fuzzy guitar, bassline as parallel melody, brass in unison, and contrapuntal melodies—to sound African American. Table 1.2 suggests that Rada and her band employ the lexicon of African American musical style to create substantially different effects from one song to another. Individual effects may not be especially meaningful, but the composite demonstrates fluency with a variety of Afrodiasporic approaches to composition and melody, instrumentation and ornamentation, and flow and timbre.
In each song, Rada uses the main signposts of African American popular style—call-and-response, flow, articulated attack, and embellished coda—to create divergent effects or to signify a variety of styles. Not included in table 1.2 but apparent to any listener is the subject matter of song texts, namely personal relationships. Among the Afrodiasporic musical styles that contributed to the civil rights movement in the United States (jazz, soul, funk) that Rada references, lyrics constitute an explicit part of musicians’ political message (and the part that scholars focus on disproportionately). Soul and funk, and later, reggae, emphasized themes of freedom and dignity for black activists, and song titles like “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” and “(To Be) Young Gifted and Black” complemented songs about personal relationships that stand in for political struggle like “I Will Survive” or “What’s Become of the Brokenhearted.” The absence of explicitly political themes in her lyrics not only distinguishes Rada from the politically conscious black music that she references directly but also protects her from having to engage directly in Israeli politics. By avoiding any topics of national interest, and indeed even the language of those debates (Hebrew), she frames Ethiopian-Israelis beyond those debates.
Rada’s international prominence and rapid ascent demonstrate that diverse audiences respond to her cut ’n’ mix approach to songwriting, made up of apolitical English song texts and a collage of Afrodiasporic melodic and rhythmic styles. These compositional techniques rely on mastery of a variety of techniques—syncopation, pentatonic modes, melodic lines emphasizing the offbeat, muting for amplified strings—that amount to a musical lexicon of Afrodiasporic popular music. These techniques are part of an oral tradition that has accrued cultural capital because, in Gilroy’s (1993) estimation, that music’s affective and symbolic power exists as an alternative to textual traditions that were strictly curbed by racial slavery. Rada’s compositional approach engages and masters those musical styles as de facto texts, transforming them into a canon to be rehearsed and referenced. In her original songs, Rada inserts Tel Aviv into a circuit of blackness that includes New York, Kingston, and Ethiopia by becoming an insider through mastery of this vocabulary.
TABLE 1.2 Comparison of African American musical elements
ETHIOPIAN SOURCE MATERIAL: “NANU NEY”
“Now THAT was a good version of the song.”
“Amazing! Ester’s version is great!”
“Much closer to the original.”
It was the evening of March 6, 2015, and text messages were coming in. I was in Tel Aviv for a few days, and my friend Moshe Morad had invited me to join him on his radio show Misaviv La’olam beShmonim uShmoneh (Around the World in Eighty-Eight) on 88 FM, a Kol Yisrael national radio station. I joined the live broadcast for an hour, discussing Ethiopian music in Tel Aviv and playing songs by musicians performing around town that spring. To represent Rada’s music, Moshe chose the Amharic track from her album, “Nanu Ney” (Audio file 6), and as my acquaintances listened to the broadcast they sent me a barrage of messages, soon followed by comments on the show’s Facebook page indicating their preference for Rada’s version over the one they had heard before (see chapter 3). Some of the commenters could have been referring to the Ethio-jazz standard by Muluken Melesse, but most of them were comparing Rada’s cover to the sample of the song that most young Israelis have heard, “Mima’amakim” by the Idan Raichel Project (2005). I had myself discussed all three songs with Rada only the day before, when I interviewed her, since her engagement with source material from Ethiopia constitutes an important dimension of her positioning as an Afriodiasporic musician.
The original, “Nanu Nanu Ney” (Audio file 7), is a staple from Swinging Addis (see Shelemay 1991 for a description of the repressed music scene in the Derg years of the later 1970s). Like most of the Ethio-jazz repertoire, it is brassy, modal, and fast-paced, and fans of the important Éthiopiques CD series know it. Yet unlike the Ethio-jazz stars who tour widely like Mahmoud Ahmed and Alemayehu Eshete, or who remain beloved at home like Tilahoun Gessesse, Melesse has retired from the music industry and does not have a presence on the touring circuit. His version has taken on a life of its own outside of Ethiopia, since it has been covered and sampled without interventions of its original performer.
In contrast to the arrangement of African American covers, and to original compositions, “Nanu Ney” is Rada’s only recorded rendition of Ethiopian source material, in this case Ethio-jazz. Ethio-jazz developed within a framework of exchange between African and African American musicians in the 1960s and 1970s (Le Gendre 2012: 242), spanning South Africa (Ballantine 1991, Muller 2006), Ghana (Collins 1987, Feld 2012), and Swahili East Africa (Sanga 2010, White 2002). As African musicians adopted rock ’n roll, blues, and jazz, African American musicians visiting Africa for the first time in the 1960s and 1970s looked to ancient Egypt and Ethiopia for iconographies