Hasidic Hip-Hop

  How does a Hasidic “rapper” break out of the niche-novelty genre and into the Billboard charts?  If you have a finger on the pulse of what’s shakin’, you have, no doubt, heard of Matisyahu—the Hasidic Jew whose picture and praises are finding their way into just about every American music magazine.

  Always donning a black suit, white shirt, Hasidic prayer shawl and a black, brimmed fedora, Matisyahu is quite a spectacle, to be sure.  But after hearing his music, it seems to me that labeling his unique brand of music as hip-hop is a misnomer. 

  Matisyahu makes mutt-music.  It is a complex hybrid of several genres.  Listening with a passive ear, it sounds at first like reggae or dancehall.  But listen more closely and you begin to hear undercurrents of hip-hop lyricism, punk/ska guitar riffs, and elements of Linkin Park-esque synth-metal.  Someone struggling to describe the music of Matisyahu may draw comparisons to Sublime or System of a Down, but the bottom line is this: it sounds exactly like nothing you’ve ever heard before.

  It’s not hip-hop, but the temptation to draw the correlation is irresistible.  Hip-hop and Hasidic Judaism seem so strikingly antithetical—so ideologically at odds with one another—and the music Matisyahu makes so defies classification, many critics and journalists have chosen the good story over the good description.

  It’s easier to understand Matisyahu’s music after you have learned a little about the man.  He was born Matthew Miller in West Chester, PA, and raised in Berkeley, CA and White Plains, NY.  As a Reconstructionist Jew, he attended Hebrew school as a child, but constant disciplinary problems garnered him frequent threats of expulsion.  In his teenage years, he fell in with the “Deadhead” crowd, grew dreadlocks and wore Birkenstocks.  He learned to beat-box and play the bongos, but was constantly searching for a greater purpose.  When he was a junior in high school, he left White Plains for a vacation in Colorado.  It was on this trip that he had an eye-opening, life-altering epiphany.  There, in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, Matthew Miller found God.

  Making a long story short, he visited Israel and rediscovered his Jewish identity, returned to White Plains, and dropped out of high school.  He began following the jam-band Phish on their tour, traveling the United States in search of himself and his life’s purpose.  After a few months, he returned home to his frustrated parents who then sent him to a wilderness school in Bend, OR, to “straighten his life out.”

  In Oregon, he began studying reggae and hip-hop.  He would attend weekly open-mic nights and rap, sing and beat-box.  It was in Oregon that he truly delved into his music.  As it has for many teenagers, music served as a means to discover himself, and as an outlet for his teen angst.  He returned to New York when he was 19, and soon became a member of the Lubavitch Hasidic Community. 

  Today, Matisyahu is making spiritual music that transcends religion, defies classification, and accentuates our similarities while encouraging individuality.  And that is how a Hasidic “rapper” amasses an enormous following.  That is why a spectacle like Matisyahu is taken seriously. 

 -From Pulse
   March 16, 2006