still waiting for Afghanistan (the klezmer afghan hip hop edition)
I started writing this post in the back of a taxi in Delhi while motorbikes and Hyundais beeped and bickered and the battery of my laptop slowly dribbled to zero as I struggled to come up with some perfectly crystallizing last story to sum up this whole trip. The end. Finito. It snuck up on us, my friends. I’m back home.
Then I was in Heathrow with an hour layover enjoying my first unpeeled apple in a month and cursing the half-life of pentium, and decided to forget the summing up and just tell a little story about my last night in afghanistan, when I got together with the afghan rapper (there’s only one) and he and I attempted to make some klezmer afghan hip hop. Niche, anyone? But the story got longer & the battery ran out so I had to wait till I was back in Washington to post the following:
The party was in a ritzy section of Kabul in a pimped out pad with furniture so low slung my knees were level with my chest. There was beautiful tilework on the walls and ceiling panels painted in day glo colors evoking nostalgia for the hi-flying afghanistan 70s of hippies and hotpants and green parks and trees. This was the first Afghan home I’d been to that I didn’t have to take off my shoes. Johnny Walker Red and afghan hashish were in abundance. Otherwise it was a typical afghan party meaning lots of boys, no girls. I was there because Najib had introduced me to the rapper’s manager four hours earlier at a show at the university. “Bro!” said the boy. “I hear you like Afghan music, man. We should make a party, get together make music with your accordion, man? Western music and eastern music mixed up what you think, man?”
I said yeah.
So let me quickly explain why it was I dragged my accordion to Afghanistan in the first place. (A travel-size version of the instrument, but still.) The simplest reason is that since I don’t speak Dari, I hoped music could fill in where the phrasebook failed. And that part at least has been sort of true – I mean, I can’t bargain a driver or pass a checkpoint, but there have been several times that a little melodic doina or two has deepened some of my relationships here beyond the merely contractual. I’ve played accompanied by village musicians on casio keyboards, I played oy mrs feinstein in the norouz festival in Mazar’s last remaining cinema to a crowd of 400 cheering Afghans, I’ve serenaded countless sheep with hava nagilah. But it’s had a local impact too; I think the accordion helped Najib and I become friends.
That’s a kind of achievement in a place where the gulf is so wide between native and foreigner, and where so many relationships revolve around money. Because the fact is this: no country has this much foreign aid coming into a place with so little of anything of its own. It makes for massive imbalances. For example, Afghanistan is one of the four or five poorest countries in the world, but the housing market in Kabul is more expensive than Los Angeles. Billions of foreign dollars flowing like a river into a desert, and who can blame all the smart ambitious Afghans for fighting for a bit of mud? Whether that means joining the institution, like becoming police chief (going price for the position, $300,000, I’m told) or simply making yourself invaluable to a foreign reporter and thus sharing a piece of his limited budget, every relationship in Afghanistan shares some flavor of the donor-recipient paradigm. It’s a frontier capitalism with few rules and no protections.
“It’s like the wild west meets 2007,” explains Alex, the owner of the dayglo house, a 26-year-old with goatee and baseball cap whose family escaped Afghanistan back with the royal family and who has houses in Beverly Hills and elsewhere. Alex hangs with the rap crew. Also present were two secret service members and some Kabul real estate moguls.
Alex tells me he came back to Afghanistan three years ago and promptly lost a quarter million dollars; now he’s slowly making it back. “Back in LA, well I don’t want to brag, but I was, you know, an operator,” he says. And as the British and the Persians and so many others before him, he imagined Afghanistan would be an easy eastern extension of his empire. To his surprise, the traders were tougher than any he’d met in the US. “What’s left in Kabul is like a few big sharks,” he said. “And lots of little tiny guppies. And I’m like a guppy that lost his fin and an eye and just barely is swimming around, you know? But now I got my baby shark teeth.” He grinned maniacally. “And you know I’m gonna be pretty soon a full size shark. And you know what I’m gonna be then? A GREAT WHITE!” he said, spitting into my eye.
I once wrote here that journalists get a lot of respect on the Afghan street. And that’s true. They’re also seen as here to make money like everybody else. (That’s part of the respect.) But the funny thing about being a journalist in this frenzied mercantilistic stage set of a country, well, it exposes something shady about the exchange. After all, what is journalism but cultivating intimacy, gathering material, then using the material for one’s own purposes. So what’s the difference between that and a villager who serves you tea in his home, charmes you with his stories and then expects compensation in return?
Not that the exchange is so blatant – I only once paid for an interview but then in extenuating circumstances. More commonly I would be asked for favors. People would ask me to “tell the Americans” to get them a hydroelectric plant so they could have electricity. Only $50,000! Others would ask my help getting them a scholarship to America. I gave advice or help when I could. Other times I just felt helpless and angry and wondered what my translator had said about me to get the interview. But it probably wasn’t his fault. To village elders struggling with poverty it’s hard to explain the difference between an American journalist and an American surveyor and an American donor agency. All of them are foreigners, all come to ask questions, all get their answers and all of them leave. I brought my accordion in part to get beyond this cliché, to interact rather than just interview.
Making accordion-flavored afghan hip hop seemed like the perfect cap to the experiment. And the rapper was good -he rapped in English and Dari, with some German thrown in there as well. Then I played some tunes and that was odd & fun. Then we played together and it was, well, I think a train wreck would have sounded more coordinated. Imagine Oyfn Pripitchik meets G-Unit...
It wasn’t just the musical differences that killed it, though. It was that he was so interested in making me happy that we couldn’t get started. Afterwards he said he wanted me to get him a gig in the states. “Do you know any rappers, bro?” he asked. “Like 50 cent, or Jay Z, and don’t forget about Dre?”
Just then the food arrived from Afghan Fried Chicken and we ate and I said my goodbyes. I drove home past that day’s suicide bombing. The stone entryway of the damaged building teetered like some old sacred ruin.
Then I was in Heathrow with an hour layover enjoying my first unpeeled apple in a month and cursing the half-life of pentium, and decided to forget the summing up and just tell a little story about my last night in afghanistan, when I got together with the afghan rapper (there’s only one) and he and I attempted to make some klezmer afghan hip hop. Niche, anyone? But the story got longer & the battery ran out so I had to wait till I was back in Washington to post the following:
The party was in a ritzy section of Kabul in a pimped out pad with furniture so low slung my knees were level with my chest. There was beautiful tilework on the walls and ceiling panels painted in day glo colors evoking nostalgia for the hi-flying afghanistan 70s of hippies and hotpants and green parks and trees. This was the first Afghan home I’d been to that I didn’t have to take off my shoes. Johnny Walker Red and afghan hashish were in abundance. Otherwise it was a typical afghan party meaning lots of boys, no girls. I was there because Najib had introduced me to the rapper’s manager four hours earlier at a show at the university. “Bro!” said the boy. “I hear you like Afghan music, man. We should make a party, get together make music with your accordion, man? Western music and eastern music mixed up what you think, man?”
I said yeah.
So let me quickly explain why it was I dragged my accordion to Afghanistan in the first place. (A travel-size version of the instrument, but still.) The simplest reason is that since I don’t speak Dari, I hoped music could fill in where the phrasebook failed. And that part at least has been sort of true – I mean, I can’t bargain a driver or pass a checkpoint, but there have been several times that a little melodic doina or two has deepened some of my relationships here beyond the merely contractual. I’ve played accompanied by village musicians on casio keyboards, I played oy mrs feinstein in the norouz festival in Mazar’s last remaining cinema to a crowd of 400 cheering Afghans, I’ve serenaded countless sheep with hava nagilah. But it’s had a local impact too; I think the accordion helped Najib and I become friends.
That’s a kind of achievement in a place where the gulf is so wide between native and foreigner, and where so many relationships revolve around money. Because the fact is this: no country has this much foreign aid coming into a place with so little of anything of its own. It makes for massive imbalances. For example, Afghanistan is one of the four or five poorest countries in the world, but the housing market in Kabul is more expensive than Los Angeles. Billions of foreign dollars flowing like a river into a desert, and who can blame all the smart ambitious Afghans for fighting for a bit of mud? Whether that means joining the institution, like becoming police chief (going price for the position, $300,000, I’m told) or simply making yourself invaluable to a foreign reporter and thus sharing a piece of his limited budget, every relationship in Afghanistan shares some flavor of the donor-recipient paradigm. It’s a frontier capitalism with few rules and no protections.
“It’s like the wild west meets 2007,” explains Alex, the owner of the dayglo house, a 26-year-old with goatee and baseball cap whose family escaped Afghanistan back with the royal family and who has houses in Beverly Hills and elsewhere. Alex hangs with the rap crew. Also present were two secret service members and some Kabul real estate moguls.
Alex tells me he came back to Afghanistan three years ago and promptly lost a quarter million dollars; now he’s slowly making it back. “Back in LA, well I don’t want to brag, but I was, you know, an operator,” he says. And as the British and the Persians and so many others before him, he imagined Afghanistan would be an easy eastern extension of his empire. To his surprise, the traders were tougher than any he’d met in the US. “What’s left in Kabul is like a few big sharks,” he said. “And lots of little tiny guppies. And I’m like a guppy that lost his fin and an eye and just barely is swimming around, you know? But now I got my baby shark teeth.” He grinned maniacally. “And you know I’m gonna be pretty soon a full size shark. And you know what I’m gonna be then? A GREAT WHITE!” he said, spitting into my eye.
I once wrote here that journalists get a lot of respect on the Afghan street. And that’s true. They’re also seen as here to make money like everybody else. (That’s part of the respect.) But the funny thing about being a journalist in this frenzied mercantilistic stage set of a country, well, it exposes something shady about the exchange. After all, what is journalism but cultivating intimacy, gathering material, then using the material for one’s own purposes. So what’s the difference between that and a villager who serves you tea in his home, charmes you with his stories and then expects compensation in return?
Not that the exchange is so blatant – I only once paid for an interview but then in extenuating circumstances. More commonly I would be asked for favors. People would ask me to “tell the Americans” to get them a hydroelectric plant so they could have electricity. Only $50,000! Others would ask my help getting them a scholarship to America. I gave advice or help when I could. Other times I just felt helpless and angry and wondered what my translator had said about me to get the interview. But it probably wasn’t his fault. To village elders struggling with poverty it’s hard to explain the difference between an American journalist and an American surveyor and an American donor agency. All of them are foreigners, all come to ask questions, all get their answers and all of them leave. I brought my accordion in part to get beyond this cliché, to interact rather than just interview.
Making accordion-flavored afghan hip hop seemed like the perfect cap to the experiment. And the rapper was good -he rapped in English and Dari, with some German thrown in there as well. Then I played some tunes and that was odd & fun. Then we played together and it was, well, I think a train wreck would have sounded more coordinated. Imagine Oyfn Pripitchik meets G-Unit...
It wasn’t just the musical differences that killed it, though. It was that he was so interested in making me happy that we couldn’t get started. Afterwards he said he wanted me to get him a gig in the states. “Do you know any rappers, bro?” he asked. “Like 50 cent, or Jay Z, and don’t forget about Dre?”
Just then the food arrived from Afghan Fried Chicken and we ate and I said my goodbyes. I drove home past that day’s suicide bombing. The stone entryway of the damaged building teetered like some old sacred ruin.
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