CAKE/Bob Berg/Getty Images
Qalam strives to explore the interpenetration of different cultures. To this end, we have decided to launch a series of playlists in which music mediates between different geographical and ideological spaces. Our first playlist is called ‘West to East: One Hundred Best Songs’. It will be updated several times a week, and its curation will focus on how Western pop culture has reflected the realities of the East, whether they are musical, geographical, religious, or political. (The terms ‘West’ and ‘East’ should be taken as broadly and arbitrarily as possible.)
John McCrea, lead singer of the Californian band Cake, is the owner of the most sarcastic voice in 1990s indie rock and a great master of the double entendre. The band still exists today, but it was the ’90s that gave it its true spirit. That’s when they produced their best song, ‘Frank Sinatra’, and recorded an incomparable cover of the disco feminist anthem ‘I Will Survive’. Around the same time, forty years after the Korean War, Cake released a provocative and ironic song with a chorus that went ‘I bombed Korea every night’. Such political satire is generally characteristic of the American rock and roll tradition—you need only think of the 1960s hit ‘CIA Man’ by the band The Fugs. At the same time, it is reminiscent of the Soviet folksy song ‘Phantom’, which was about the Vietnam War. In 2005, the raspy-voiced Israeli singer Zeev Tene translated ‘I Bombed Korea’ into Hebrew, substituting the cities of Sidon and Beirut for Korea. This version can be heard in the animated film Waltz with Bashir (2008), which is about the events of the 1982 Lebanon War.