Abstract
This article uncovers an untold story of how rock music came to the big stages and national broadcasting studios of a country transitioning from the European sphere and a socialist ethos to the American sphere and a market-oriented culture. In demonstrating how the rock musical preceded, anticipated, and likely enabled rock music in Israel, this article will focus on five rock musicals from the early 1970s. We argue that the rock musical introduced a friendly and commercially oriented version of rock and rock’n’roll music and its antics, and thus enabled wide crowds to adopt a foreign-born culture such as rock. By the end of that process in the mid-1970s, the broad acceptance of American rock music and particularly a socially involved rock aesthetic had emerged through the overlooked and unlikely genre of the rock musical.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 257-281 |
| Number of pages | 25 |
| Journal | Journal of Israeli History |
| Volume | 40 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2022 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Funding
The authors would like to thank the anonymous readers for their very helpful comments and suggestions. The Faculty of Humanities at the University of Haifa generously funded a work group on the origins of Israeli rock music. In that forum, we benefited from the helpful suggestions and insights of Tal Vaizman, from the assistance of Noa Toib who discovered exciting archival sources, and from Yair Raviv (and Noa) who transcribed video interviews with the founders of Israeli popular music. We are grateful to Dadi Shlesinger, guitarist with Lehakat Heil Ha-Yam at the time of the Raphsoda be-khahol production, for supplying first-hand knowledge on the production.
Keywords
- 1970s
- Americanization
- Rock
- rock musical
- rock opera