Abstract
Norwegian musician
Norwegian musician Moddi’s upcoming album Unsongs features 12 songs from around the world that have been banned, censored or silenced
CREDIT: Jorgen Nordby
Out of all the concerts I have ever planned, one had apparently awoken the devil. “By performing in Tel Aviv you legitimise a state based upon occupation and apartheid.” “You used to be my favourite artist, I thought you had some moral fibre!” (Alongside the occasional “Welcome to Israel, I can’t wait to see you here!”) My phone rang from unknown numbers – people who wanted to teach me about the West Bank, Zionism, Hamas.
To begin with I simply brushed it off. Typical lefty nonsense, I thought. Group mentality, reflex protests. I stood my ground. I don’t do boycotts. Maybe, if I had had any political songs, lyrics that could sting, I would consider whether they were suitable for Israel. But I was singing love songs. Songs about the sea. About homesickness. Not for a second could these songs be taken as support for anything. They were harmless. I was harmless.
But the rain wouldn’t stop. Soon, I was presented stories by young people from Gaza. I read reports and testimonies from the West Bank about house demolitions, expanding settlements, minors in prisons, borders that ate into what once was Palestinian land. And, perhaps most disturbing of all, I received messages from young and old Israelis who, with desperation between the lines, wrote about a struggle for peace that seemed more unrealistic with every day.
I decided I would use the situation for something good – I would write a song that could sting. I sat down with the guitar, turned off all the lights and let my fingers guide me. But nothing came. There were chords, of course, and melodies that I would have been proud to perform. But there were no words. Whenever I opened my mouth, nothing came out. For almost a month, I didn’t pick up my guitar again. It felt as if the magic had disappeared, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make the stories I had heard into songs.
I cancelled the concert in Tel Aviv. I had suddenly gained insight into a harsh reality, and now singing love songs and songs about the sea wasn’t only helpless – it felt bizarre. Not long after the announcement, the emails and messages were raining in once again. “Moddi has decided to boycott the only democracy in the Middle East.” “Stop being such a sniffling, hypocritical ass. Your music most probably sucks.” And, encouragingly, “Moddi is a pawn of fascists. He would have boycotted America but played for Hitler.”
A few days later, I received an email from Birgitte Grimstad, a famous Norwegian songstress and activist, who during the 70s and 80s was the face of Norwegian political folk music. She wrote about her last tour to Israel, in 1982. Terrified by the increasing violence between Israel and Lebanon, she had been urged not to go. Not only would it be dangerous, people said, it would also be taken as implicit support of the Israel Defense Forces’ invasion into Lebanon. But Birgitte was unmoveable. “I didn’t want to back out. I knew that there was a lot of opposition within Israel too. I wanted to go, but I had to bring something which could show where my sympathies lay.”
Birgitte brought a song. Together with the songwriter Richard Burgess, she gathered details about Eli Geva, an Israeli officer who had refused to lead his forces into Beirut earlier that year. From being one of the youngest and most prominent commanders in the Israel Defense Forces, Geva overnight became an icon for the peace movement. The same summer, a crowd variously estimated at between 250,000 and 400,000 people gathered in Tel Aviv in protest against the war. Through newspaper cuttings and radio reports, Eli Geva’s story also found its way to Norway. Now Birgitte had decided to bring it back again.
When Birgitte arrived in Israel, rumour had spread about the Norwegian singer who saluted the deserter Geva. Soon afterwards, she received warnings and threats.
“People were in shock, they were afraid. Some said that if I played, I would get shot!” she said. As she was preparing for the tour finale in Jerusalem, the Norwegian ambassador said he would have to leave the room if she played the song. Birgitte did not perform it that day. For more than 30 years, the story about Eli Geva would remain unsung.
I decided I would keep my eyes open to stories like that of Birgitte’s. If one song can contain so much history, I wondered, how many others might there be out there? And why haven’t I heard them?
For almost two years I would keep asking those questions, and the answers made me scared. I learned with horror about how far it can go when powerful people feel threatened, about the broken fingers and torn-out tongues of Latin America. I read about the brutal colonisation of northern Norway and how the songs of the Sami people virtually disappeared. I found myself translating songs that are still unwelcome: by Russia’s Pussy Riot, Lebanese composer Marcel Khalife, Viet Khang from Vietnam and Israeli singer songwriter Izhar Ashdot, word by word. Political songs, love songs, children’s songs, drug ballads … Each song held the key to a forgotten or forbidden story. Voices that I did not necessarily agree with, but nonetheless deserved to be heard.
Later this year I am releasing 12 of those songs. Songs that sting.
Eli Geva
The dogs of war are loose again, cold
blows the wind to me
And widows weep for fallen men, for
fallen men they weep again
Cold blows the wind to me.
Again the ravens rule the skies, cold blows
the wind to me
With hacking beaks and hungry cries, with
hungry cries they wheel the skies
Cold blows the wind to me.
We heard the march of army boots, cold
blows the wind to me
Until they stopped outside Beirut, outside
Beirut we heard them shoot
Cold blows the wind to me.
But a colonel who served in that army, the
finest in all of the land
said: “If they send orders for taking the
town I cannot obey their command”,
so when at last the order came, the world
knew Eli Geva’s name,
stood up against that cold, cold wind.
Come blow his name to me.
