Back Dikla. Love Music. Yoav Brill
Yoav Brill
26.05.2024
Dikla. Love Music.
When “Love Music,” Dikla’s debut album, was released into the world in 2000, it sounded like nothing else you could hear on Israeli radio. It was indeed pure pop—inviting, engaging, and instantly catchy—but it was completely disconnected from the contemporary sound of the charts in Israel at the beginning of the millennium. Those who insisted on definitions might have placed it on the shelf of “Mizrahi” or “Mediterranean” music—problematic terms used in Israel to define music whose sound originates from Arab countries and the Mediterranean basin—but its raw grit placed Dikla in a completely different realm, perhaps even polar opposite to the stars of the time. While popular Mizrahi music in Israel is primarily a product of Yemenite folk singing, spiced with melodies from Greece and Turkey, Dikla’s singing brought to the forefront the grandeur of classical Arab music, with its unrestrained and tumultuous drama. When you heard Dikla on the radio, it felt as if your hand had slipped off the scale and drifted to a neighboring station from Egypt or Lebanon. Accordingly, this album didn’t make Dikla a household name (she would only achieve that a few years later), but those who awoke to the sounds of “Boker Tov” and Dikla’s wake-up call “to all those who had no night” felt as if a new sun had risen in the skies of Israeli music.
And yes, although you could hear echoes of other musicians from immigrant countries who grew up in an era where hip-hop had already mixed everything—Natacha Atlas, the Belgian-Egyptian artist, comes to mind first—”Love Music” is firmly rooted in the Israeli street, under the water heaters, communication antennas, and peeling plaster. When David Bowie sings about the man from Mars, he isn’t looking out from his spaceship but rather from the window of a boy’s room in the suburbs of London. Dikla created a fantasy from the sun-stricken housing projects of the desert city of Be’er Sheva, where she grew up. The birds singing with her in “Tavlinim” paint the open space in which her songs unfolded, between the hot asphalt and the skies beyond. A friend who visited the apartment of the album’s producer, the multi-instrumentalist Ran Shem-Tov, reported to me in amazement that they recorded the songs with the home studio windows open, the noise of traffic from Tel Aviv infiltrating the microphone and the bus soot absorbed into the magnetic tapes. This might be an exaggeration, but the description hits the mark. Shem-Tov, an Israeli producer with an exceptional vision (who also represented Israel at Eurovision at one point), was the perfect partner for Dikla’s vision. Together they created an album that is a journey across a borderless continent within a country that is primarily defined by borders and barriers. In “Love Music,” a joyful Arab celebration is carried on the shoulders of heavy hip-hop rhythms. A kitschy San Remo festival vibe is accompanied by tablas and Bollywood singing. Lo-fi keyboards and drum machines echo psychedelia from the sixties. This album was punk in every sense of the word—an independent creation that no one was waiting for, and for this reason, among others, the result was so surprising and captivating.
And then there are the lyrics, in natural Hebrew and sometimes in Arabic. Some of them recur throughout the songs: night, sun, search, to fly. And the yearning for love, the object of which is not always clear. For a man, for a woman, for life itself. In her music, Dikla painted in bold colors the possibility of a contradiction-free existence in the Middle Eastern space to which Israel belongs, even if it sometimes denies it. It was a temporary fantasy that became even more fantastical when a few months later, the second Intifada broke out in Israel, bringing years of blood and tears.
After “Love Music,” Dikla released more albums, wrote songs for other singers, and remained highly regarded, but it took her another decade and a half to become one of the most beloved singers in Israel. In 2014, she won the title of Female Singer of the Year from Israeli radio station Reshet G. These were also the years when her later influence on the new Israeli pop could be identified. Today, deep-voiced singing and “Arabic” styles are much less rare on Israeli radio. Singers from the second and third generations of immigrants from Arab countries—Liraz Cherki, Shai Tsabari, Liron Amram—mix traditions from home with the most up-to-date electronic sound. Hipsters in Tel Aviv swear by the same passion for “indie” music and old Mizrahi music with a rough, low-budget sound. The musical culture in Israel has always outpaced its politics by light-years, and so did that album. “What did they promise us?” Dikla pleaded in the title track, and her question still resonates today. “Love, music, freedom.”