Noga Erez: The Intersection of Pop and Politics
Israeli-born, Tel-Aviv-based musician Noga Erez, is one of the country’s most talked-about artists, and one who carries a unique weight on her shoulders.
Speaking to fluoro, she describes her music as an outlet to channel the ideas of guilt and inner turmoil she carries as an Israeli citizen, feelings that are certainly amplified by the uncertain state of global affairs in 2017.
The 27-year-old, who has joined a small roster of indie stars who have found acclaim outside of Israel, employs a sound that is a mishmash of contemporary dance, trap, dancehall and whatever Erez is feeling, stitched together to often paint a picture of a world racked by fear and violence.
“I feel that things are happening in the world, in the real world, in the physical world that we live in, and, there’s also things that happen inside,” she says. “So there’s conflict outside, there’s conflict inside, there’s all sorts of things that I feel need a sort of bridge, something that will connect the two different worlds, of the inside and the outside.
“It [music] helps me express my thoughts and emotions, it also helps me to take information and things that I’m exposed to from the world and process them into something that I can grasp, something that I can understand emotionally.”
Dance While You Shoot, a hit single from Erez’s new album Off the Radar, is a melodious cacophony of discordant and scattered drum sounds punctuated by Erez’s subtle, matter-of-fact vocal delivery. The song and its video criticise the Israeli government, one that she has said is becoming more nationalistic and fearful, as well as the dissonance between wealthy Israeli citizens and those that are suffering not so far away.
The themes of her music are certainly thought-provoking and reflect the acrimony of modern life. But, as much pop music does, it still offers listeners a sense of escape, even if it is possibly the furthest thing from bubblegum radio music. As Erez explains, “I have this idea of giving people moments of thought and inspiration, and at the same time offering escapism and fun.”
Born just days before 1990, the year the Gulf War started, Erez weaves the theme of war throughout her lyrics and sound. Her parents, like so many Israeli couples, met in the armed forces while undergoing the country’s mandatory military service. Her life has been backlit by conflict, which she says has led her in the past to withdraw from the outside world. “As I became more aware of everything going on – the complexity of the situation, and how it affects lives on both sides – my reaction was to separate myself from it. I got rid of my TV and stopped consuming news completely.”
She found refuge in music. But rather than using it simply as a mechanism to retreat further into herself, she turned it into an outlet for her anger and confusion. “Most of the time it’s easy just to ignore what’s happening, but every now and then reality makes that impossible.”
Erez acknowledges that, as a member of Israeli’s upper crust, “we are very lucky not to live near the borders, not to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and to have shelters and technology protecting us. But with this sense of luck comes a sense of guilt for being able to do something like make music while lives are being taken.”
Erez is an accomplished musician in her own right. At 18, she was conscripted into the Israeli military as a musician, and since then has developed her talents in Tel Aviv, immersing herself in the creative community in Israel’s capital.
“My art is basically an experiment that I’m doing with all the knowledge that I have of music,” she says. “I’ve spent a lot of time just trying to create new sounds out of things that I’ve recorded, or out of things that I’ve put together, and combine them. So in a way, it’s very much like blending colours together, but in a very abstract kind of way.
“I like songs, this form of art that has a very clear structure, especially when you talk about pop music. I take all these layers of sound that I make and all this experiments that I do, and I put them into this structure, this frame. And in a way this freedom that, at the beginning, which I kind of limit in the end, I think really creates something which is in between very, very chaotic but yet formulated and structured.”
Her music, she explains, is very much a melding together of the different forces that have shaped her musical tastes in recent years. She doesn’t set out with the explicit aim to create thought-provoking music, but instead lets the process come organically, willing the music to speak for itself.
“When I experiment, I don’t want to achieve anything,” she says. “I really don’t do it to achieve anything, and that is what allows me so much freedom. That is what is so much fun about making music, and it’s just always been my favourite thing to do, because you really connect to a side that you lose as you grow older, which is just doing something to do it, as opposed to doing something in order to achieve something or for a certain goal. When I just do the craft, just listen to sounds and try to create new things out of it, it’s completely intuitive and wild and very, very childish in a way.”
Erez is set to release her debut album, Off the Radar, on Friday 2 June 2017. The LP is a collection of the singer’s most prescient songs, many of which delve into the vague sense of aimlessness that seems to ail so much of her generation.
“Off the Radar addresses contemporary fears of being anonymous or forgotten,” Erez says, “it talks about all of us, as a generation of people who kind of lost their identities to the ‘social media’ identity.
“I’m so excited about this,” she adds. “I never actually thought that holding the physical copy of the vinyl would make me as emotional as it did.”
Toy, one of the LP’s leading singles, is a creaky, desperate anthem about the poisonous nature of privilege. The video features a hooded Erez performing on a Tel Aviv rooftop: “I am the son of your leader/Give me your love, and I’ll spare you”, she sings.
“Toy is sung from the point of view of someone who has inherited leadership, regardless of their talent or experience” she explains. “The lyrics, while short, are meant to show the contrast between someone who disowns his ‘crown’ versus someone who embraces the privilege, entitlement and influence and uses it for their own personal needs. They become self-absorbed and destructive, showing how quickly and easily power can corrupt a person.”
Moving ahead, Erez has a string of festival dates, including the Primavera Sound Festival 2017 in Barcelona and Germany’s Melt! Festival. Aside from the craziness of a new album and touring, as well as the responsibility of being christened one of Israel’s rising artists, Erez plans to keep making politically conscious music. Given the fact that she has expressed the desire to collaborate with Palestinian musicians and help bridge religious divides in her country, she has a monumental task ahead of her.
Still, she is quick to note that these grand dreams of changing the world come from a very simple desire: her urge to make music.
“It comes from a very selfish place, really. Because I need to make music,” she says. “It’s something that I always needed to do and I don’t really know myself without that aspect. But if you realize that you’re going to release that work and people are going to hear it and maybe be influenced by it, it changes things in a way. It makes you want to send out something that you think is important.
“So, I believe that us, the more privileged people who live in the western world, that live in wealth, when you compare it to other people in the world, we bear this kind of responsibility, in a way, to raise awareness to things that happen outside of our eyesight, and we need to educate ourselves to be people who get exposed to what’s happening in the world all the time, in order for us not to detach from people who have less fortune. So if I could just, just in a little way make that happen with other people, that is an extra benefit from doing my art.”
In the end, music is – for Erez and for so many others – a way of finding a humanity that is easily lost in the face of uncertainty.
“Our way of trying to keep in contact with our feelings and fears, and of avoiding emotional detachment about everything, is music. Human beings can come from completely different places but share a fundamental basis of emotions. In my opinion, music is the form of art or communication that expresses that most accurately.”
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