New Voices

• 2008
• Entertainment

Lou Reed and the Weepy Hipster
Written by Marissa Brostoff
For generations of Jewish girls, Modern Lovers frontman Jonathan Richman was the attainable rock star crush. Turns out he wasn’t so attainable after all.

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Lou Reed in high school. Image reprinted from Transformer, by Victor Bockris.
When I was a teenager, I had two favorite rock stars. One was Lou Reed, because he was a suburban Jewish kid who escaped the suburbs for a life of urban depravity. The other was Jonathan Richman, because he was a suburban Jewish kid whose favorite rock star was Lou Reed.

Richman was still in high school in 1969 when he made his way from Boston to New York to hang out with Reed’s band, the Velvet Underground. Reed, nine years Richman’s senior, accepted the short-haired, drug-eschewing aspiring musician into his famously wild cadre. Richman stuck around until he couldn’t take it any more. Then he went back to Boston and started the Modern Lovers, a band that synthesized the Velvet Underground’s grating, grinding sound with lyrics about the frustrations of being a serious young man who wanted an equally serious girlfriend…..check out NewVoices.com for the rest!

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Shemspeed

Shemspeed is an independent recording label and promotional agency highlighting cross-over music artists with positive and unifying messages. Founded by Erez Safar, an American-Israeli DJ/Producer, Shemspeed promotes over 15 dynamic artists representing a wide range of genres including hip-hop, reggae, and rock. These artists include Y-Love (revolutionary Jewish hip-hop), Diwon (Yemenite / Sephardic hip-hop, Israeli music and more), DeScribe (soul-awakening dancehall, hip-hop, & soul), and Electro Morocco (Israeli rock, dance music.) Shemspeed artists, collectively showcasing the diversity in world Jewish music, have performed with musicians as varied as Snoop Dogg, Lou Reed, Idan Raichel and Eminem; they’ve been profiled in Rolling Stone, SPIN, The New York Times and XXL; and they’ve been seen and heard around the world on various TV appearances (Conan O’Brien, CBS and BBC World) and global radio. Shemspeed’s mission is unifying people through culture and education, celebrating diversity and common ground. By way of this work, we add a public Jewish voice to multi-cultural, inter-faith, creative and collaborative bridge-building.

Verbal GraffitiY-Love on Judaism

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