The Lipa Ban - Charedi music controversy continues
Over at Blog in Dm, the author has been detailing curious stories of bizarre over-reaching by some charedi rabbis in Brooklyn. The most intriguing one was a ban on listening to an Orthodox entertainer, Lipa Schmeltzer, right before a major gig. It doesn't seem to have worked, and the new Lipa LP, "A simple guy" (a poshuter yid) is now out. More details from the source: This Review Is Banned! -- Lipa Schmeltzer's "A Poshiter Yid".
I took a quick gander at the promotional video for the new LP:
By me, this is good, current dance music set to frum words. Neither is something that I have a great interest in, although I'm getting ready to pick up my own copy of the CD to weigh in on the controversy. What keeps coming up for me, and I'm sure I've mentioned this before, is what the rebbes in Babylon must have said when those modern piyyutim folks started bringing in these pietistic poems set to the current dance music of the day some 1500 years ago (stay tuned--I attended a piyyut class in Jerusalem while I was in Israel this spring and it was damn fun--blog post to follow, I hope, before time erases it from my memory). So, today, at a time when I run around talking about how Judaism is changing and Rabbinic Judaism is sooo last century, people still living in the middle of that allegedly outdated community are listening to what's happening around them and setting pieties to today's modern dance music. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Irony on me if the big changes that stick have to do with music (especially when you consider that I quite like most traditional musics and have no interest in the current stuff), not מנהג or הלכה. heh!
And the anti-Lipa rabbonim? The dustbin of history will be theirs soon enough. Too damn bad they have to engage in such nasty lashon ha-ra on the way.