• culture

• Music

• Israeli music

Hi Yudko, Happy Birthday: 70 years of Poliker, 7 memorable songs

The angry song hidden in "Afek and Dust", the rock anthem that always comes good, the words reminiscent of Grandma, the boy who is constantly in the sounds, the moment that made hundreds of people cry, the piece that revealed the secret of happiness and the wonderful combination of crying and kicking.

The musical hero is celebrating 70, so we went back to songs that touched us inside the soul

Tags

• Yehuda Poliker

• Israeli rock

• Ash and dust

• Jacob Gilad

Amit Slonim, Nadav Menuhin, Nir Yahav, Sagi Ben Nun, Erez Michaeli, Ziv Reinstein and David Rosenthal

Friday, December 25, 2020, 12:00 p.m.

• Share on Facebook

• Share on WhatsApp

• Share on general

• Share on general

• Share on Twitter

• Share on Email

0 comments

• Hope Davis in "His Honor"

• Trailer for the third season of the "Stisel" series of yes

• Raviv Fiddler sang back

• The flight attendant, Kylie Kwko

• Raymond al-Bidavia, Raymond Abacis

• Quiz for Debbie Glickman: Who among your friends in "This Is It" said ...

• Ma Rainey's Blues

• From the film "Children" by Ada Ushpiz

• Gila Almagor paid tribute to her husband in tears: "My beloved, wait for me ...

• The stars of "Big Brother" 2021 in the pool

• Great Country Season 18

• Matan Yair

Photography: Dave Shachar, Editing: Noa Levy

"From here to all": without a number on hand, but with a broken heart / Amit Slonim

Almost all the songs on the masterpiece album "Ash and Dust" deal in one way or another with the memory of the Holocaust through the prism of the second generation.

It's no secret.

The range of emotions in the songs is dizzying.

Poliker, along with his musical partner Yaakov Gilad, managed to convey the pain and helplessness of living under the shadow of the great trauma.

"When You Grow Up" and "Radio Ramallah" connect the difficult memories of Europe to local pain, the daily terror of running a country under existential threat, with that war always in the background.

No one has sung like that before him.

Poliker performing with Shlomi Shabbat in Caesarea, 2015 (Photo: Niv Aharonson)

And there is also the duo of songs "Love Kills" and "From Here to All".

In my opinion the two best songs on the album, and certainly the most underrated.

The name "from here to all" and its slow rhythm suppress great pain.

Captivating.

It is difficult to get excited about a song about disappointed love in a sequence of songs about the Holocaust of the Jewish people.

What is this already a painful breakup or even betrayal versus genocide?

But language is actually pure genius of the album, which manages to remind of the "life itself" of the second generation.

They had no numbers on their hands, but they had ambitions, dreams, lusts.

When you stab them, they bleed.

When their hearts are broken, they are in pain.

Of all his bereavement songs, of all the songs about loss, holocaust and beacon, Poliker's most angry song in the end is a song about love.

Gilad wrote painful and painful words here.

He wishes his ex-girlfriend that she would not find anyone, he tells her that there is a "thousand for free" like her, and even hints at a heavenly intervention that will lead to murder or suicide.

In the end, he admits, it's not his story but hers.

He is passive, stricken with grief and anxiety like the generation of parents who survived the Nazi machine.

This combination is as painful and scary as it is disposable.

No one has written such songs in Israel until then, and his influence on generations of Israeli composers is no less great than his influence on the playlist on Memorial Day.

"Free is completely alone": not mathematical, but so accurate / Erez Michaeli

Gasoline erupted in Israel in 1982, with the debut album "Twenty-Four Hours" which sounds great even today.

Rough, bombastic, kicking rock.

One that does not always seek to please the ear, but shakes the heart and moves the legs.

The album also spawned a rock star: Yehuda Poliker - whose later personal work, centered on the monumental "Afek and Dust," sometimes makes us forget the beginning of the explosive journey.

"Free It's All Alone" was the first single from the first album and it's a poliker rocker in all its glory: young, beautiful, energetic, a voice that burns the ears, and most importantly - a guitar hero.

This song reminds me how much Poliker is a wonderful guitarist.

After playing covers of the Beatles' Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin in his youth, it can be said that he learned from the best.

"Free is completely alone" throws his head with a yeasty muscular sound to Yehuda's electric guitar.

From the powerful sound in the opening, through the short and mighty solo below, to the virtuoso guitar and the "zeppelin" ending.

A song that always comes in handy.

The words are simple.

A short relationship that did not go well, with a non-mathematical but very accurate conclusion - that one and one is actually a lot.

So free it is all alone.

A song that connects us a little to ourselves, and how fun it is to shout those words.

Israeli music has honored us with quite a few rock anthems, but very few of them provide the stadium feel already on the studio record and only a few of them provide a surprising and delightful sense of release - which always causes, even close to 40 years later, to scream the chorus along with it.

Yes, free it is completely alone and completely there.

"Ash and Dust": Every time I go back to Grandma / Sagi Ben Nun's house

Every time I hear "Ash and Dust" I remember longingly my grandmother Genia, a Holocaust survivor, who raised me like a mother.

Every time I listen to the words "Eternity is only ashes and dust" - I go back to lunch at her house, reluctantly chewing your parfait she made, because Grandma promised that if I finished the food - she would pamper me with a story.

Geniehla fulfilled her promise: she told me how the Nazis buried her friends in Auschwitz, while still alive, before her eyes.

Every time I look at the album cover of the same name, with the memorable train picture, I am reminded of my youth visit to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, in the summer of 1989. When we left, we played the album tape, which came out a year earlier.

It was a chilling, powerful and very Israeli moment.

The theme song was written as a reminder of Yaakov Gilad's mother's first trip to Poland after the war.

After Poliker and Gilad's parents, like my grandmother, shared their descriptions of the horrors, works were born that take you from the train window at the little Treblinka station to the window to the Mediterranean.

In "Ash and Dust" they reached the pinnacle of their creation, as no one had ever done before in Brock.

With melancholy lyrics and melodies that are sometimes comforting, bouzouki and guitar, they entered the pantheon and deep into the heart.

So thank you, dear Poliker, for the song, the album and the huge contribution to the culture.

And most of all thank you for reminding me time and time again of my beloved grandmother, Genia, who lost half of her family in the Holocaust but defeated Hitler, and died at the age of 94. And nothing has been forgotten.

The pinnacle of creation.

Poliker in a show to mark the 30th anniversary of "Ash and Dust" (Photo: Shlomi Pinto)

"The boy in you": chasing the button that can not be closed forever / Nadav Menuhin

Yehuda Poliker is now celebrating 70, but in his work, even the late one, there is a child who is hiding.

Even his autobiographical book, "My Shadow and I," Poliker opens in a short chapter entitled "The Man Who Was Once a Child," and so he writes: "A man who was once a child sits and watches the changing landscape, and the sights run before his eyes ... [he] We are now traveling in the opposite direction, on the way back to who he once was. "

Always a child of his parents, always melting in the rain, always to be punched.

More on Walla!

NEWS

Yehuda Poliker: "Music saved me from a wedding and a career as a barber"

To the full article

In this respect, the theme song of his successful album from 1995 is to a large extent also one of his ultimate songs.

You can hear it already in the accompaniment, even before one word is said, when in the meeting of the guitar and the drums unfolds all the way along between shadows and light, fear and hope;

The whole journey from the wounds and scars that have not healed - to the climax that only you can break, and in the middle: a person who travels and travels at the speed of light, escapes and returns, escapes and returns, misses small details that others have already forgotten.

When I was a kid myself I did not like this song.

Today he is shaking me.

Maybe I did not yet understand then how a child can live within an adult.

But for Poliker, who also wrote the lyrics to the song with Yaakov Gilad, it was always clear: there, in the private dream museum, is the fuel to move forward, and chase forever, in Sisyphean endless, after the button that only you can close, or that no one else can Do it.

Indeed: on the way to the buttons, Poliker touched the souls of countless painful Israelis.

We owe the gratitude first and foremost to the child in it.

"When You Grow Up": I've been to hundreds of shows, but this is a moment I will never forget / Nir Yahav

About two years ago, Yehuda Poliker held a special tour to mark the 30th anniversary of the release of the masterpiece album "Ash and Dust".

The performances were packed with word of mouth and tickets for them were sold out long in advance.

At the end of each show - after taking the audience to a moving and exciting journey between the memory of the Holocaust, Greek music and fine rock and roll - the audience used to stand on their feet and applaud the legendary musician.

At this point the piano would come in and Poliker would sing "When You Grow Up."

I have been to hundreds of shows in my life, but it was a moment I will never forget: a large audience stands after a soothing catharsis experience, replete with mixed feelings of joy and pain, trembling with excitement and singing the masterful song along with Poliker.

There were a lot of tears around, and it's hard to believe that other songs would have managed to evoke as much emotion as this song.

More on Walla!

NEWS

30 years of "ashes and dust": there is nothing like Yehuda Poliker to mention the Holocaust and revival

To the full article

A redeeming catharsis experience.

Poliker marks 30 for ash and dust (Photo: Shlomi Pinto)

After all, it is difficult to find an Israeli song that so accurately and sharply detracts from the experience of so many Israelis.

Even people who have experienced the Holocaust through the eyes of a second or third generation (like me) identify with it, but it seems that every child and every parent understands in depth what it is, even without understanding every word and every line.

When the parents want you to be a "general" and you do not want to "even be a soldier", or the feeling of disappointment from the parents that "nothing will grow out of you anymore" or in general the feeling of alienation from the world where "you did not want to be at all".

Only when you become a parent do you understand much better the feelings of confusion and conflicting messages that each child experiences, so it is possible to identify with him at any age and in any situation.

The marvelous music also plays the confused and contradictory game as it moves from a minor scale to a major in the chorus, and returns again to the minor sadness at the end of the chorus, as if to say: one cannot escape the sense of non-belonging.

It will hit us all sooner or later.

Because when you have a child who comes and asks what will happen when he grows up, this feeling may cause you to tell him "leave, don't ask".

And maybe that's why hundreds of people around me cried at that show.

"Window to the Mediterranean": What does the man want?

Just a chance for happiness / Ziv Reinstein

Exactly 70 years ago, in December 1950, a rare phenomenon occurred in the Land of Israel: it was snowing in Jaffa.

The elders of Jaffa (and others) remember that winter of "the year 50 end of December", as Yaakov Gilad wrote in Poliker's most exciting song - "Window to the Mediterranean".

But this song is anything but a song about a cold and hard winter.

It is a song of hope, a song of simplicity and anticipation, in which lies the genius of the duo.

What does the man want altogether?

A house, a loving woman, the laughter of twilight children and a window overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

The secret of happiness is simply, probably after what the Holocaust survivors 'parents' parents went through.

And with all the despair and difficulty, there might be one in a million chances that some happiness would sneak into the window of the new family, just like that one in a million chance that did happen, that it was snowing in Jaffa.

"Night shift": cruel rock that knows how to cry - but also kick / David Rosenthal

My attitude towards Yehuda Poliker is a bit ambivalent.

I really liked the old Poliker of gasoline, less the deep tone of pain that developed later, which was sometimes too simple.

The process of Poliker's transition from rhythmic and light rock to melancholy drama is very clear, with distinct milestones.

"Night Shift," Benzin's second and final album, and especially his theme song, marked one of the significant stops in this transition.

"Night Shift", the song, is a wonderful combination of what Poliker was and what he will be - a cruel and polished rock that contains a lot of pain.

"Melting in the Rain," which came out more than a decade later and also deals with escape and detachment from home, is no less good, but it already blends in with the late Polycarp mix, which gives more expression to the pure pain without the softening shell.

"Night shift" still maintains the sacred balance, and in hindsight evokes a longing for the other Poliker, the one who knew how to cry but also kick.

• Share on Facebook

• Share on WhatsApp

• Share on general

• Share on general

• Share on Twitter

• Share on Email

0 comments