1999 (6 page)
They'd find a supermarket or convenience store along the way and load up on groceries. Later that day when they reached this place, down some dirt track to a clearing in the trees, inside the three of them would cuddle under woolly blankets while their dinner heated on the fire. They'd spoon steaming Chef Boyardee Ravioli and Chunky Soup straight from the can, pass everything around so everyone got a taste. The food would be good and real in the way that bad and fake things are often so good and so real, in the way that when people come together sometimes that sort of thing is just what you need.
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Josh Dolgin, a.k.a. Socalled, is Montreal's leading mixer of klezmer and hip hop.
“'Rap is always about: Where am I from? What's my crew? Who are my peeps?,' Josh Dolgin says. The statement seems odd considering Dolgin, twenty-eight, is a curly haired Jew with a face full of freckles who grew up on the Protestant outskirts of Ottawa, not in the burning ghettos of the Bronx. But his rap credentials are authentic, even though he speaks hip hop's vernacular with intentional irony. As a teenager, Dolgin played keyboards in a gospel band but he was never entirely comfortable making music about Jesus. When one of the group's black musicians taught him how to make hip-hop beats in his basement, Dolgin found a genre that allowed him, surprisingly for the first time, to deal musically with his own Jewishness. The first rap he wrote, âThe Jew Funk,' was a playful hip-hop take on a Jewish prayer that included the line, âBaruch ata Adonai, Motherfucka!' While intentionally absurd and offensive, the lyrics express the paradox Dolgin still feels in trying to connect with his old-world roots. âI love the Hasidim, I love their music, I love the culture,' he says. â[But] how can I like culture, when culture comes out of boundaries and ghettos and people sticking together and being with their own kind?'”
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COPYRIGHT © 2010 PASHA MALLA
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in 2010 by
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Malla, Pasha
1999/ Pasha Malla.
Stories published in the May 2010 edition of
The Walrus
magazine, as part of a collection of three short stories.
ISBN 978-0-9879989-3-4
I. Walrus Foundation II. Title.
PS8501.T86I2 2012 C813'.54 C2012-901829-5
Designed by Brian Morgan at
The Walrus.
Set in Arno Pro
Ebook Conversion by
Coach House Books
Cover image for
1999
illustrated by and COPYRIGHT © CC-BY Rachelle Maynard
Story appears in
Darwin's Bastards
, 2010, Douglas and McIntyre.