Marc Ribot puts music right where it should go. In your face. In your gut. In your bones. His music bruises your shins and picks at your scabs. It is thick and heavy and sharp and it makes your ears ring. On his album "Requiem For What's His Name" he flushes the 2000 year old tradition of Jewish wimpiness down the toilet as he screams out his modern-day punk psalm:
"Yo! I Killed you're God/ And I don't feel much remorse/ I don't have to go back, 2000 years/ To find an innocent victim to cry about/ Yo! I killed your God/ It's the one thing, I'm never supposed to say/ I guess neither one of us has much faith/ In your good intentions anyway/ Yo! I killed your God/ That's what you say after a couple of drinks/ Why do you always leave it to your retarded brothers in the KKK to say the dirty word/ I know what you're thinking/ Yo! I killed your God/ That's what this machine's good for/ Throw away your books, throw away your images/ Keep away from me with your metaphor"
Recently I spoke to Marc Ribot about his life, his music and his Jewish identity. Marc Ribot's personality is much like his guitar playing. Up-front, straightforward, no bullshit. Marc Ribot is further down than down to earth. He is on his knees pounding the pavement, looking for roots in New York City.
Aram Rubenstein Gillis: I'm interested in hearing about your personal history. What was you're Jewish identity like when you were a kid?
Marc Ribot: I was born in Newark, New Jersey at Beth Israel Hospital, May 21st 1954. I lived a bunch of places with my parents and wound up in South Orange, New Jersey. Middle class to upper middle class house in the suburbs. I think I became aware of being Jewish when I was six or seven years old . . . I was lonely on Sundays when all the other kids would disappear, and I requested that my parents do something about that. I wanted to go where they were going. . . When I was 9 or 10, they made me go to Hebrew school. . . After four years of Hebrew school I remember exactly two words, Abba and Ima. No wait, I'm remembering a third one: Yeled. Not bad, it's all coming back to me. It was a total nightmare. The cantor was a sadist, a fat pig who would shake kids' hands too hard and pretend it was a joke. He would sit on recalcitrant Bar Mitzvah learners. . . I suppose you could say I heard some "Jewish music," in synagogue, but I don't know. I was so busy waiting to get out of there that I don't know what I heard. It didn't occur to me that I was supposed to like it, any more than it would have occurred to me to like the suit that they made me wear. I was there as a prisoner of war.
ARG: During your adult life what started getting you back into it? What made you question what had gone on in your childhood?
MR: . . .In the intervening 17 years, I was to some extent politically engaged. I was active in the Tenants Unions and somewhat active in my Labor Union. To make a long story short I'm somewhat of Lefty, and it was hard not to apply some of the lessons I would read about black experience in my little lefty reading bin, to start applying them to my own experience. . . [There] was a lot of the so-called Identity Politics movements and this stuff was in the Village Voice and in the stuff that we would all tend to read and it was reflected very strongly in music. It was reflected in rap which is heavy identity orientation music. . . .The sort of default setting of rap music is cultural nationalism and identity politics. And similar things were going on in gay movements and the women's movement. So it seemed. . . it was in the air to subject whatever your life was to this analysis. And not only for me. I read Frank London's press kit, that he started thinking about Klezmer music after seeing "Roots." The reason why musicians would be really sensitive to these issues is because in New York, musicians absorbed it through black music, quite frankly. I think that the deep structure of the current Klezmer movement is in rap. It's a way of imitating rap.
ARG: So when did you really start playing in the New Music scene?
MR: I played with this sort of R & B band called The Real Tones playing all the sort of New Wave clubs. It was this sort of punky R & B band, meaning it was white guys and we all wore black and there were several notorious junkies involved, that was enough. . . In '84 I got into The Lounge Lizards, and I think also that year or the next year I recorded with Tom Waits. And during this time I was staring to work with different people downtown. I didn't really meet [John] Zorn 'till a few years later. Tom Waits was living in New York and he used to come down to Lounge Lizards gigs. The Lounge Lizards was really where I first got a chance to sort of stretch out and stylistically experiment.
ARG: What was the connection between the music and your politics? Do you think there is a political content to the music of the avant garde New Music scene?
MR: In a word, No. . . .I'm interested in New Music for its own sake, and I prefer a kind of politics where everybody like me isn't thrown out in the street and crushed to death beneath the wheels of a giant impersonal capitalist machine. I mean if I have my choice. But in the self-conception of a lot of people involved in so-called avant garde, they think they're doing something wonderful for the world. They think they're so different than whatever they refer to as the mainstream, but in fact the avant garde mirror the mainstream a lot more than they oppose them. The great big record companies sign people and record them and sell them and make money and the teeny little ones do the same thing. The big companies have their stars, the teeny little ones have their stars. It's the same process. There's no particular critique of the form. And let's face it, the prevailing East Village politics has long since stopped being anything remotely like Left . . . But look, people talk all kinds of shit. But if you try asking people who can talk a really good game about the signifiers in their music that are non gender specific and are creating a culturally hybridized environment blah blah blah, ask 'em about a Labor union and they say "Oh man it's Mafia!! Forget it!!" . . .If I really had to typify the politics of most of the people I would say it's a sort of hazy libertarianism, and it's nothing.
ARG: When did you start getting involved in the Radical Jewish culture?
MR: OK, that happened for a specific reason. Here is one of the connections between rock and roll music and politics. I like rock that rocks. A lot of my favorite music has been transgressive in some way so a lot of my favorite bands have also been transgressive in some way. . . One type of performance that I admire is one that transgresses against a commonly accepted falsehood. I mean not blind transgression, like if I went up and stabbed somebody in the audience, that would be transgressing norms of behavior. On the other hand I think if you can successfully transgress some piece of bullshit that people don't even know is their assumption then it can come to create powerful music. I'm always on the lookout for that.
And I started to realize that there was a taboo in public rock and roll life. The taboo was not against Jews appearing, but against Jews appearing as sexualized pop icons. In other words you can be Jewish but there are certain proscribed roles you're supposed to follow if you're Jewish, like you're supposed to be funny. Actually there's a great article on this. . . in which the guy realized that the roles of the Marx brothers are definitive for the proscribed Jewish roles in American pop culture. Like for example you can either be completely not Jewish, like Zeppo, or you can be funny like Groucho or you can be silent like Harpo or you can pretend you're another ethnicity like Chico. Zeppo is sexy, and not funny. What you can't be is Zeppo and Jewish.
Now I know a lot of people will think that's not true but I think its a fairly powerful taboo. Instead of the old idea of 'there's one dominant culture' and 'there's one completely dominated culture' I think its a more complicated picture in which there's areas of exclusion and areas of definition because a lot of these areas are maintained in products culturally made by Jews. . . The problem with the funny thing is that, in Freudian terms, sex and funniness are antithetical. My shrink told me that. . . The hottest sex figures are not gonna be the same as the funniest comedy figures. And the problem with that, to reproduce a biological organism you need sex, to reproduce a culture you need SEXY, so it's deep. The problem isn't that they do this in Hollywood, the problem is that We Are Hollywood. The problem is that these powerful scenarios recreate their boundaries in our brains. Sweet dreams are made of these.
So I sensed, rightly or wrongly, my whole theory could be full of shit, but I sensed an area of pop cultural exclusion. I sensed a boundary and I thought 'What happens if you transgress it?' It's more interesting to transgress something once you've found it. So I tried to and you know I wrote a couple of tunes on this record. I wrote this tune called "Yo! I Killed You're God." . . . As it turns out a lot of my friends also are Jewish. So there was sort of a conversation started. Zorn is also very interested in transgression. And Zorn had sort of an opportunity to curate this two days of a [Radical Jewish Culture] festival in Munich, two days of an art project‹I think in 1992. And what better place to be transgressive than in Munich. I mean it's almost guaranteed.
This is the end of Part One of the Interview. But have no fear! Next issue we will be back with part two of the interview which includes Marc Ribot's thoughts on the development of the Radical Jewish Culture movement and reviews of his CDs "Schrekk" and "Requiem For What's His Name."
Aram Rubenstein Gillis graduated from Vassar College in 1997. If you would like to reach him about this article, if you would like a full transcript of the Ribot interview ($5 plus shipping and fondling) or anything else, please email aram@vassar.edu or write 62 Walnut Street, Oberlin OH 44074 or call 216/775-2009.