Is this for real or scripted? I don’t know, and I don’t care—either way, it’s amazing.

In this video, which you should watch right now—right now—three grandmothers read the lyrics to Beyonce’s suuuuppper sexy “Drunk in Love.” (It’s the Kanye West remix, which features a nice little “Bound 2” shout-out. Even better!)

From their effusive snacking to their horrified facial expressions to their gleeful disdain, these women are a joy to watch. They ask some very pertinent questions, like “Why did you even put this out for me to see?” and “We never talked when we had sex, what’s with all this talking?” Collectively, they are a three-headed Ur-Bubbe.

If Baz Luhrmann ever decides to wreak havoc on Macbeth and set it in Boca Raton (PLEASE GOD), I want these grandmothers cast as the witches.

Not sure if I agree with their final verdict on the song (that’s a whole other essay someone’s probably already written for Jezebel), but it would be great if this became a regular series. Working title: Grumpy old Rap Geniuses.

The post Watch Three Grandmothers Read the Lyrics to “Drunk in Love” appeared first on Jewcy.

For all the Jewish hip-hop heads out there (there’s A LOT), The Mindy Project’s Adam Pally shares your plight. It’s just that you know all the lyrics, but you can’t sing along because of that word you would never, ever say. Thankfully, Pally has come up with a solution, and, spoiler alert, it involves David Schwimmer. Doesn’t it always?

Watch Pally’s simple trick. You can even try it at home:

(Photo by Michael Kovac/Getty)

The post Adam Pally Fixes the Jewish/Hip-Hop Dilemma appeared first on Jewcy.

Last week, in a radio interview, Kanye West made some stereotypical comments about Jewish power.

“Man, let me tell you something about George Bush and oil money and Obama and no money. People want to say Obama can’t make these moves or he’s not executing. That’s because he ain’t got those connections. Black people don’t have the same level of connections as Jewish people. Black people don’t have the same connection as oil people.”

This week, the Anti-Defamation League is calling on Kanye to apologize, XXL reports.

Abraham H. Foxman, the ADL National Director then responded to Kanye’s opinion with some thoughts of his own. “If the comments are true as reported, this is classic anti-Semitism,” said Foxman.” There it goes again, the age-old canard that Jews are all-powerful and control the levers of power in government. As a celebrity with a wide following, Kanye West should know better. We hope that he will take responsibility for his words, understand why they are so offensive, and apologize to those he has offended.”

Ah, right— totally forgot that Kanye is renowned for saying all the right things. Because he never said, “I’m sorry, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time,” or “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” or “I walk through the hotel and I walk down the street, and people look at me like I’m … insane, like I’m Hitler.”

The ADL might want to stay off any lyric website, lest they find many more hip-hop references to Jewish connections and money, that aren’t automatically anti-Semitic, but rather, need context. (Royce Da 5’9: “While these rappers kill each other, them Jews they stick together like glue / and generate more money than FUBU”; Jay-Z: “See I was born in sewage, born to make bomb music / Flow tight like I was born Jewish”; Nas: “The Jewish stick together, friends in high places / We on some low level shit.”)

We’ll see if and how Kanye responds to Foxman. It should be interesting.

(Photo by Gabriel Olsen/Getty)

The post Anti-Defamation League Asks Kanye West to Apologize appeared first on Jewcy.

He’s done it again— for the 11th time to be exact. Drake has topped the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs Chart for “Hold On, We’re Going Home,” featuring Majid Jordan off his new album Nothing Was The Same.

It’s like nothing can stop our boy Drizzy from success—not his Degrassi roots, not his Chris Brown feud, not even Kendrick Lamar’s newest maybe-diss against Drake’s pajama wearin’ and sensitive soul (check out the the clip below). And, even though Inspectah Deck is not pleased with Drake’s homage track, “Wu-Tang is Forever,” the other eight members of Wu-Tang Clan are all about it. So, not too bad.

Enjoy the top spot, Drizzy. Haters gonna hate.

(Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

The post Drake Tops R&B, Hip-Hop Charts For The 11th Time appeared first on Jewcy.

“Today was one of my more awkward days,” admitted Aaron Schechter when he sat down at a bar on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He had arrived late, he explained, for a planning meeting at the financial accounting firm where he worked. It’s a job that the 23-year-old, one half of the hip-hop duo Divine Rhyme, didn’t like to publicize. “Kinda ruins the image I’m going for,” he said.

It was a funny story. The “big shot partners,” as he described them, had been waiting in the conference room, but no one mentioned his tardiness. Instead, one said, “Hey man, do you have a twin brother?” When Schechter told him no, the guy replied, “Well, this looks and sounds just like you,” and played a YouTube clip of Divine Rhyme performing, as a few of the guys burst out laughing. It was nothing new; at his previous job, Schechter said, “Every time I fucked up or did something wrong, my boss would say, ‘It must have been those blunts you were rapping about smoking the other day.'”

When he wasn’t enduring razzing from coworkers, Schechter, who is from the Philadelphia suburbs, spent his time writing rap lyrics or recording them with his partner-in-crime, Jason Majlessi. They started Divine Rhyme in 2006 at Lehigh University, where Majlessi, one year younger, graduated in May of 2010. By June, he had moved to New York to join Schechter. The pair calls each other “Sheck” and “Jahizzi,” but it’s hard to be gangsta when you graduated from a fancy liberal arts school in the northeast.

1 Persian + 1 Jew = Jewish group

A year later, Majlessi is working for a real estate firm in midtown, Schechter is with the same accounting group, and they still have their eyes on the prize. But they also have to hold down steady jobs. Divine Rhyme isn’t big yet. Far from it: they don’t have music for sale on iTunes. But they’ve opened shows for The Roots, Ben Folds Five, The Cool Kids, and the Boston rapper Sam Adams. And this year they’ve played gigs in New York (most recently at 310 Lounge on Bowery) and returned to Lehigh for a few more. For now, they’re trying to get fans the hard way: blasting their shit on social media platforms. They post songs to Myspace and the mixtape destination DatPiff. They put videos on YouTube, amass fans on Facebook and Twitter, and hold out hope that their time will come. They remain optimistic—“We’re working hard to keep Divine Rhyme alive even while pursuing full-time jobs,” Schechter says—but you can sense that they know all too well it’s a tough road ahead.

Majlessi, originally from San Francisco, is Persian. “I don’t know much about it,” fumbles Schechter, who is (surprise!) Jewish. He needn’t worry, though—his buddy exhibits the same blasé attitude about personal background right back at him. “He’s not that Jewish, but I mean, he goes home for Yom Kippur or whatever,” says Majlessi. Meanwhile, the duo’s good friend Julian Holguin, who was previously their manager, is half Italian, half Dominican. “He’s at a disadvantage in the music industry because he’s not Jewish,” jokes Schechter.

Growing up, Schechter’s last name gave him away; kids knew it was Jewish, but didn’t know enough to pronounce it right. “It used to make me really upset,” he says. “They would butcher it.” He speaks about Hebrew school like it was serving time. “I did my eight years, had the bar mitzvah. Stuck around for confirmation. But I got annoyed with it.”

Before Schechter got to Lehigh, Hillel sent him a letter about joining. It left him confused. “I really didn’t know why they would have sent me that. My dad probably checked some box and never told me.”  His Judaism is sporadic, like most every young, Jewish hip-hop enthusiast in New York, but inevitably, he does want to go on Birthright at some point. And when his parents came to see him perform at Hiro Ballroom in New York City in March 2010, his mom brought him a big package of matzah.

Still, Schechter said that Judaism doesn’t much enter his lyrics: “There’s a way that you could make it your whole thing, but that’s not the route I’ve gone.” And yet, in the eyes of listeners, Majlessi admitted, “Sheck being Jewish affects both of us.” For those quick to judge, the equation seems to be: 1 Persian + 1 Jew = Jewish group. When a popular Boston culture blog, Barstool Sports, announced that Divine Rhyme would be opening for the 2010 Stoolapalooza music tour, one tough critic commented, “the jew crew (divine rhyme) will make sam adams sound real good.” Schechter shrugs off the comment: “That guy probably saw me and said ‘Oh, look at this Jew. Another Asher Roth.’”

He’s right that the instant comparison is annoying, but at the same time, he’s certainly more Roth than Matisyahu. Roth, like Schechter—and maybe it’s universal—can’t seem to escape the label of Jewish rapper, even though he’s only half-Jewish, and even though there’s nothing Jewy about his music. Just like Schechter’s. And that omission isn’t some conscious play for more street cred, but happens because, as Schechter wonders, how the hell do you rap about it? “I think I bring elements of being raised as a Jew, but in subtle ways,” he says. “A lot of my lyrics are self-doubting; same vein as Woody Allen or Larry David.” But most college kids don’t want to watch Larry David rap.

Sheck and Jahizzi would much rather take after the characters in a different HBO series: How to Make it in America, which is currently shooting its second season on the Lower East Side. It’s no surprise they’re big fans of the show, with its buddy pairing of Cam and Ben, a short, loud Dominican kid and a tall, Jewish ginger. “We joke about how we embody the two main characters,” says Schechter. “Jason can be just like Cam, with his hustling attitude, and I can be like Ben in the sense that I’m more low key and try to do more of the behind-the-scenes stuff. We identify with the show in terms of what we’re trying to do.” Of course, the show is hardly realistic (the friends breezily come up with a line of t-shirts called Crisp), and these two know that in real life, they can turn down any street in Williamsburg and find two other young rappers hoping to “make it.”

For now, the religious dichotomy of Divine Rhyme only appears occasionally, like on their new track “WorldWide” when Majlessi says he’s “the flyest member on the no-fly list… We smilin’ as they screenin’ us because I’m Persian,” or on one of their best songs, “For the Ages,” when they rap: “Blue, 42, it’s the Persian with the Jew / And the crowd goes crazy every time we come through.” But both boys have vague plans to better incorporate it in the future. After all, if they’re going to try and pursue an eventual career in music, they need to get serious. “We can’t just rap about poppin’ bottles in the club, that’s not original,” says Majlessi, though three minutes later he admits, “Man, I love the bottles.”

For now, the guys have to stay in the rat race until they’re lucky enough to pursue music exclusively. In the long term, they want to make albums and rock packed stadiums. But who doesn’t? “The beauty of it right now is that money’s not the goal,” says Majlessi. “We just care about making music and getting our name out. We can only measure success in people coming up to us saying ‘Yo, I love your stuff, you guys are the shit.’ But we also check the link every day to see how many times the EP was downloaded, and we look at plays of our tracks on Myspace. Plus, rocking a stage in front of 3,000 people at UMass, that counts for something.”

Not everyone approves of the viral marketing. A classmate of theirs from Lehigh tells me: “I actually had to delete Jason as a friend on Facebook due to his barrage of event invites. One day I just said that’s it, this guy is gone. Their music is decent, though.”

Sheck and Jahizzi will hope to keep earning new fans, and to show people that “the Persian and the Jew” are far more than decent. That, or they’ll move on.

—

– Listen to some new Divine Rhyme tracks

– Check out their YouTube videos

– Find them on Facebook

The post Pimpin Ain’t Easy For A Jewish Rapper appeared first on Jewcy.

We’ve been waiting a long time to hear about the world’s most famous (and possibly overrated) Jewish rapper playing a bar mitzvah, and now we have it.

It’s reported that ex-NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker taught his son the value of saving a few bucks when he got Drake to play his son’s bar mitzvah for $250,000 instead of the million bucks Kanye was asking for.

Mazel tov, ya’ll.

The post Discount Drake Plays A Bar Mitzvah appeared first on Jewcy.

Check out “Exotic on the Speaker” by Soulico

The post Soulico Free Show appeared first on Jewcy.

Shyne was a pretty good rapper before the whole Diddy/shooting/jail/conversion thing.  But this video of him decked out in a fedora and sunglasses; freestyling outside the Kotel, might get us to admit that Shyne, er, Moshe Leviy, is the greatest Jewish alive.

(Tip: Sunny Day Entertainment)

The post I Guess Shyne Is Now The Greatest Jewish Rapper Alive? appeared first on Jewcy.

NOLA-Phonic Vol. 1 Mixtape (free!)

Galactic is a nasty funk band from New Orleans who boast members that founded the New Orleans Klezmer All Stars among their ranks. (They also do a sick job covering Balkan Beat Box songs.)

This weekend, saxophonist Ben Ellman dropped this mixtape with his DJ crew, Gypsyphonic Disco. It’s a mix of New Orleans bounce, Klezmer, Hip hop, and Balkan music.  Hosted by Chali2na, the mixtape features exclusive verses by Juvenile, Gift of Gab, Lateef the Truthspeaker, and Big Freedia; head to head with tracks by Fanfare Ciocarlia, Amsterdam Klezmer Band, and yes, Balkan Beat Box.

I’ve listen to a lot of Balkan/Gypsy “mash up” type tracks, but this definitely has something special. The New Orleans sounds leave their mark, giving NYC’s Bulgarian Bar a run for its money.

The post JDub Is The Selector: New Orleans Beat Box appeared first on Jewcy.

Have we ever mentioned how happy we are that Drake’s a Jew?  It gives us clearance to post things like his newest video off Thank Me Later,“Miss Me” (featuring Lil’ Wayne).

Drake “Miss Me” from John W on Vimeo.

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