Yankovich in Yisrael

It may seem obvious, but it only struck me recently that irony often requires a sense of retrospect: most notably, the hilarity of anachronism. In the good ol' US of A, we laugh at hair metal and watch interminable numbers of movies about hippies because, after 60 years of Hollywood, primetime TV and billboard charts, there's a 60-year culture to play off of.

But in the more recently developed--or, at least, recently liberalized--world, the issue seems to be that when western TV, music, and culture suddenly become available, it all comes in a single flood. That sense of retrospect is entirely absent. The typical Israeli becomes free to dress like Madonna or blast New Romantic crooners without seeming odd because an entire history of what we call cheese and nostalgia is to another completely of the cultural moment. Hippies, mods, rockers, and gangster rappers all digested simultaneously.

It hits me two days ago. Taking a taxi through the desert, my conversation with the cabbie quickly falls flat as what little Hebrew I know is exhausted (all four of my favorite falafel toppings have been introduced and made out to be tasty via the rubbing of my stomach). Presumably to cover the impending half hour of awkward silence, he switches on a CD. The singer's Jewish, but he's by no means an Israeli staple... try something more along the lines of Weird Al Yankovich.

And while this guy doesn't know a stitch of conversational English, he knows every line of White and Nerdy, Amish Paradise, and Fat phonetically by heart. It's nearly impossible to keep from laughing. He's bopping his head and belting the lyrics out of the car window to the chagrin of the odd bird or vineyard worker.

When the CD is done, I sing a couple bars of the originals before he quickly corrects me--turns out this guy has never heard the originals. To him these are anything but parodies, and so he assumedly believes that Weird Al Yankovich is solely responsible for some of the best pop music out of America in the last twenty years. Concepts of kitsch, pastiche, and cheese in this country are sometimes null, having often converged with the very things that they might have set out to poke fun at in the first place.