If you want to see how Israel’s Gen Z lets it all out, a recent Saturday evening at Tel Aviv’s Reading 3 will give you a clue.
The performance by Israeli hip-hopper Vibe Ish hasn’t started yet, but the bottled-up energy is palpable, seemingly ready to explode and walk the line between the straight-up adrenalin of youth, to the angst-ridden emotions of young adulthood.
Vibe Ish, aka Or Shoshana, 32, released his third album (the second as an independent artist), "What Luck," in March, and a single, “Where To,” in memory of Ido Peretz, a fan murdered at the party in Re’im, in November. He has been making the rounds on the Israeli hip-hop scene for a few years, but it’s obvious that his brand of story-telling has brought a new, raw and unique grittiness to the stage. It’s an old-school approach to rapping that embraces the new-school media that is so prevalent in the life of the teenagers and young adults that follow him.
“We actually held a survey,” Shoshana says, a few days later when he meets up to talk, outside his apartment in south Tel Aviv. We’re sitting in a little park area, people and dogs interspersed. No one pays attention to the rapper, who just a few days earlier was performing to a full-house at Reading.
Doing a show after the October 7 massacre
He refers to his Instagram channel as he explains the survey, “We asked them whether (following October 7th) it was too soon for a show. Around 200 said it was too soon, and 900 said yes, have the show. So we decided to do the show.”
The night of the show it’s cold out, but inside the venue, hip-hop music plays, and teens and twenty-somethings mill around in baggy pants, tanks, and crop tops. The bar is open but it’s not clear what kind of a profit they’re going to make, since most of the audience looks like they only just started shaving. There are some older adults, grouped along the back walls, observers from another world, perhaps parents of younger attendees.
A group has gathered, sprawled out on some stairs in the back. A dark-haired kid is freestyling to his friends – girls and guys, backpacks strewn about, phones out taking pics, posting stories. These are some of Vibe Ish’s 73-thousand-and-growing followers on Spotify, who know the lyrics to every song and sing along with him as if their lives depended on it.
“I first heard him with Tzukush,” says 13-year-old Ofek Maor, referring to Vibe Ish’s 2021 mixtape "Perfect Timing," made with rapper Ilay Raviv, “and then I started following him.”
MAOR HAS brought along her friend, the “almost” 14-year-old Aviv Dorman. Both girls talk together, excitedly telling the story, one or the other interjecting for clarification here and there.
Explains Dorman, “Ofek said ‘Are you coming with me to the concert?’ This was a month ago and since then I’ve learned all of his songs.” But there’s one song that Dorman says she really relates to, and that’s “Where To.” “I connected to that song,” she says, as Maor nods in agreement, “Because of the war, it is really emotional.”
“And then there’s his life story,” Maor adds. “In the new album he really shares that and I connected to it.”
It’s a life story that gets told through songs like “Nine,” (which Shoshana says is one of his second favorite or “honorable mention” of his songs, after the song “Rain”).
“I have nine lives, a thousand problems
Scars, scars, I fell and I got up… ”
The stories he lays out are an honest look at life as he experienced it, and relatable to many. He was raised by a single mother, lived in poverty in the south Tel Aviv neighborhood of Kiryat Shalom, was bullied in school, squatted in abandoned buildings, and as an adult – is trying to make it in his chosen art while remembering where he came from.
He’s an MTV kid, who grew up on Britney [Spears], Justin [Bieber] and NSYNC. But one day, he went on errands with his mother, and they were in a store on Allenby when a song came on the radio. “I heard it and I remember, I was bugging my mom to ask the people in the store who it was, and then the DJ said it was Eminem, so I shot out of the store and I ran and bought 'Slim Shady.'”
BY THE time he was 17, he was going to open mics and making friends with the “arsim” (Hebrew derogatory slang for Mizrahi lowlifes) at school by freestyling. “They would laugh at me, then they would hear me [improvise] rap and say, ‘okay, that’s cool.’”
Fast forward 15-years and Vibe Ish is headlining at the Barby, Zappa, and Reading live music venues in Tel Aviv, “And I will keep rapping until I get to Bloomfield,” he says. He’s worked with artists like Ravid Plotnik, DJ Mesh, Cohen, Jasmin Moallem... And anyone who’s seen him perform knows something different is going on.
Eli Hazan, 63, is the father of Vibe Ish’s 21-year-old guitarist, Eilon, and he regularly comes to see his son play. “The first time I came to one of these shows I was in shock,” Hazan says. “What you’re going to see is a scene of all this energy – beautiful kids reciting the lyrics perfectly. It’s amazing.”
And he is right, once the show starts, it feels like the roof is going to blow off. It’s like Vibe Ish and the audience are one. There are soul-curdling beats, offset by rhythmic, melodic storytelling. He sings; they sing with him. He jumps; they jump with him. He crowd surfs; they catch him. He grabs a fan’s phone and takes a selfie with the audience. Depending on the song, the atmosphere goes from a feeling of connected camaraderie to letting out all the adrenalin of a frenetic stage-front mosh pit.
The show has ended. The full-to-capacity audience trickles out the front. Techies pack up. Fans gather at the stage door, waiting in line to take selfies with Vibe Ish. At the backstage outdoor exit, a group of high schoolers – male and female – shiver in the cold, hoping for a view of their favorite rapper.
Yet even when the trappings of success seemingly surround him, Shoshana says he realizes it can be misleading, and fleeting. He is “faking it till I make it” and says he works really hard for what he achieves. He writes daily, goes into the studio every other day, and holds the day job. He also has a sense of humor about everything. “My mother and I have this running joke,” Shoshana explains. “I ask her if she’s going to come to the show. She asks, ‘How many tickets did you sell, are you sold out? If you’re sold out, I’ll be there.’”
The show at Reading being any indication, Shoshana’s mother is going to have her concert nights booked for the foreseeable future.
Vibe Ish’s next shows are February 3rd at the Wunderbar in Haifa, and Zappa Jerusalem on February 10th. For tickets: https://linktr.ee/vibe_ish
