Читать книгу Street Knowledge - King ADZ - Страница 24

www.myspace.com/cohenetmushon

First off, let’s get this straight: Cohen@Mushon are three guys — two MCs and one DJ. The trio, Michael Cohen, Michael Moshonov and Itai Drai, are some of the most humble and likable guys I’ve ever met and when we spend some time together I discover the boys have an infectious sense of joy about them, a rare thing indeed in the rap game. They are like the Beastie Boys used to be when they were young and restless. Cohen@Mushon are from Tel Aviv. They rap in Hebrew and use old-school Israeli music samples mixed with the fattest beats. This may sound like something that won’t cross-over, but I can assure you that their music has a global appeal. A serious global appeal.

‘First of all everything started as a joke. We met when we were sixteen-years-old and we started to do this routine every Friday and record a song — it was like our hangout — it grew and grew and when Itai (our DJ) came to the event we really became a band. We stated having like bigger and better shows and we started connecting to the scene. We used to have shows for our high-school friends but after we hooked up with Itai we got more serious and then at one of those shows we met Ori Shochat who is like the fourth member of the group. He’s a pioneering hip hop producer/DJ in Israel. He saw us and we started working on our album at his studio. That’s when we got serious, we kinda picked the material and we said, okay, we’re making a real album. Ori gave us a home to do everything and record for free and he really believed in the project and we were off on the journey.’

So Cohen makes the beats, then Cohen and Mushon write the lyrics together, and then Itai, AKA Walter, digs in his crates and finds some vintage Israeli sample to scratch in. The song that put them on the map contained a sample from an old-school Israeli track from the 70s, to which Walter added something from an Israeli cartoon to bring out the humour. What is also interesting is that even though they rap in Hebrew, the music works overseas as the message is universal.

‘We rap only in Hebrew because we feel that hip hop is all about your own language and talking on a personal level so that the only way to say something truthful is in your mother tongue. So it was only natural for us to sing in Hebrew even though most of the stuff we listen to is in English, but we wanted to make it our own. How it happened was very simple. Michael did the beats on Fruityloops (easy-to-use music software — and by the way we still work on it!) and he used to send me beats and I said to him, “You should be the MC also,” and he said, “No, you should be the MC and I will be the producer.” I said, “No, you have great things to say!” and so we started writing together. Our first concept for a song was “I have lost my physical fitness”. It was about us being unable to run or do anything sports related. It was very important for us to put some humour in our music, because when we started out, Israeli hip hop really took itself seriously, and was very political, very heavy headed. We needed to add some of that humour we had from our heroes — Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, The Beastie Boys — to bring back an element of fun to it. But that’s not to say that we don’t take it seriously. We don’t do it as a joke. We take our fun seriously.’