Eli Lishinsky: Behind the Scenes in the Orthodox Pop Music World
After a chance meeting at a friend’s birthday celebration, I had the opportunity to chat this week with audio engineer and record producer Eli Lishinsky. Lishinsky has worked for the past thirty years in the Orthodox pop music world, first in Israel and since the late 1990s in New York City, where he has engineered and produced music for some of the most recognizable names in Orthodox pop, including Modechai Ben David and Lipa Shmelzer. In our extended conversation, Lishinsky opened up some of the behind-the-scenes workings of Orthodox pop and discussed the aesthetics of production and composition in the work of its notable artists. Lishinsky, who does not identify as Orthodox, has a unique and fascinating insider-outsider perspective on Orthodox pop. Reflecting on creativity and aesthetics in contemporary Orthodox music, Lishinsky connected the norms of the musical scene, which are highly dependent on borrowing from stylistically dated mainstream pop music material, to a culture of conservatism that has only gradually loosened to a full engagement with contemporary music genres.
Counter intuitively, perhaps, for listeners outside of the Orthodox Jewish community, a style of pop music is the dominant sound of the Orthodox community—musical genres derived from “old world” Jewish musical life are a component in the soundscape of Orthodoxy but are not omnipresent and are typically syncretized with commercial pop music sounds and production styles. Since the 1970s, Orthodox pop has become a normative feature of communal life. Disco and ‘70s radio pop, which were the first genre references that Orthodox music stars gravitated towards, have come to be heard as safely within the norms of Orthodox life. According to Lishinsky, “whatever is dated in the secular market is OK to use.” From the perspective of rabbinic authority and normative popular opinion, dated pop music styles have been considered to be less threatening to Orthodox separatism. But at this point in the half century-long development of Orthodox pop, according to Lishinsky, “today all the rules [governing genre norms] are broken.” Musical styles that were once considered threats to the purity of the community, namely hip hop and EDM, are also rather old and are typically no longer considered threatening to conservative values. These more “edgy” styles are domesticated into use by Orthodox artists through pietistic lyrics, as was previously achieved in the Orthodox engagement with disco and pop. Lishinsky has been mixing and producing the musical soundscape of the Orthodox community throughout this period of transition.
Born in Moscow, Eli (Ilya) Lishinsky and his family moved to Israel in 1973 when he was six years old, and eventually settled in Jerusalem where he grew up. As a teenager he played guitar in rock bands. After completing his military service in 1987, Lishinsky moved back to Jerusalem and got involved in the sound industry, first running the sound board for an independent theater company, and later completing a certificate degree in audio engineering and working in a Jerusalem-based recording studio. Jerusalem has the reputation of playing a somewhat secondary role in the musical culture life of Israel, with most of the serious recording studios and bands focused in Tel Aviv. Lishinsky found the work of recording session engineer tedious. He described himself as impatient with the process of listening passively as musicians perform take after take of the same piece. Gradually he began to make connections between his love of music and the production end of the recording industry.
In 1992 he recorded and helped produce an album by Yehuda Glantz, an Orthodox Jewish musician from Argentina. As a bal teshuva (one who adopts Orthodoxy as an adult), Glantz had an unusual take on Orthodox music. Glantz was receptive to a set of non-Jewish influences that were somewhat of an outlier at that time in Israel. His original settings of religious texts drew on Latin American vernacular styles.
Seeking to expand his professional horizons, Lishinsky moved to New York City in 1996, originally seeking to work as a musician. After a year, seeking more substantial employment, he got a job at the midtown Manhattan recording studio Mixed Impressions, where he gained experience working with Hip Hop and R&B artists. At the same time, his association with Yehuda Glantz opened up contacts in the New York Orthodox scene, leading to opportunities to work with leading figures and build a reputation as a reliable mixing engineer. During the late 1990s, the home studio grew in its professional capacities and application. Lishinsky bought a digital tape machine and started mixing albums in his bedroom. One of his first projects was a mix for the icon of Orthodox pop music, Mordechai Ben David, of the song “Maaminim.” At the time of their meeting, Ben David was already two decades into his storied career. Their collaboration went on to become an enduring hit in the Orthodox market.
Lishinsky also worked with Ben David’s son, who goes by the artist name Yeedle. He co-produced the album “Yeedle IV,” which cemented Lishinsky’s status as a skillful and impactful collaborator for Orthodox artists.
Lishinsky described “Yeedle IV” as having marked an improvement in the production standards of Orthodox pop music that had a strong influence on the scene. According to Lishinsky, previous Orthodox pop records had been marred by a muddy excess of layering of instrumentation, resulting in sonic confusion and rhythmic sluggishness. In his mix of the Yeedle record, Lishinsky “went through an aggressive elimination process. Part of how I get results is by disagreeing with the content. I find that a mix sounds good when there’s air. When there are elements that don’t contribute to the groove, it’s dead weight. Space is valuable.” Bringing his experience working in secular contemporary music into the Orthodox scene, Lishinsky was able to have an impact on the music that was valued by the artists he collaborated with. “There was an amateurism. That’s why I had a strong impact. I didn’t care about Jewish music. I just wanted it to sound good. I was just brutally throwing things out. Before that, engineers weren’t getting involved.”
Another area where Lishinsky has strong opinions is in the area of lyrics and song writing. In the early 2000s he began to work with Lipa Shmelzer, who went on to become one of the definitive Orthodox star of the period. Lishinsky saw Shmelzer’s lyrics as being a key element in his musical success. Despite not speaking Yiddish, Lishinsky felt that the originality of Shmelzer’s lyric writing was a strength in the musicality of his songs. “You don’t have to understand lyrics to like them. They have a ring. Lipa Shmelzer was very musical. It was clicking. I always liked Yiddish song because it sounds good. You feel it. It works.”
In contrast, Lishinsky had strong words of criticism for the use of Biblical texts and prayer book Hebrew verses as song lyrics. Songs that use repeated lines of sacred texts are a traditional musical form in Hasidic music and Jewish paraliturgical song with a long history. In the context of contemporary pop music, Lishinsky finds this compositional strategy to be a sign of creative poverty that he has a powerful aversion towards. “I never like psukim [verses of sacred Hebrew, in this context, used as song lyrics]. I find it despicable. If it repeats, I always hated that. I found songs like that are less successful…I encourage artists to write lyrics. I see lyrics as music. I don’t care about the meaning. Whatever your message is, do it. It’s not my message. I need material for the chorus that will uplift [the energy of the song]. Artists say, ‘In our community, it’s OK.’ The lower grade writing is acceptable in the community. But I do discourage it.”
More recent Orthodox pop singer songwriters such as Marty Shapiro and Benny Friedman are more “normal,” according to Lishinsky. The “normal” here seems to map onto pop song writing standards: original English-language lyrics, the absence of liturgical Hebrew repeated phrases, and verse-chorus song structure. Lishinsky noted that these singer songwriters are highly imitative of contemporary Christian pop. Lishinsky upheld Ishay Ribo, the popular Israeli musician who writes original songs (music and lyrics) on religious themes, as the most artistically successful contemporary religious musician.
The Orthodox pop music has undergone a sea change in the past two decades, with a great expansion of the number of artists working in the field. During this period, Lishinsky opened a sound reinforcement business, Artsonic Pro Audio, that provides equipment rental and live mixing services for concerts. His work life has shifted to working on large scale live concerts in the Orthodox pop scene. Lishinsky continues to mix and produce records, but at a lower volume of projects than in his early years, allowing him to be more selective in choosing which artists he works with.
One project Lishinsky highlighted, was an album he produced of music by Rivkah Krinsky. Krinsky is an Orthodox woman singer songwriter who is part of an emerging cohort of religious women performers that have gained in mainstream popularity in the last decade. (Orthodox women artists are the subject of Jessica Roda’s recent monograph For Women and Girls Only). Speaking of the challenges to aesthetics for the Orthodox music world, Lishinsky cited restrictions on women’s voices as being a significant problem. “Women can’t sing, or they can only sing for women. All this potential is closed. The boundaries are really strict. There’s a lot of talent that is lost…in the mainstream [pop music] market there are much more female artists than male.” Lishinsky noted that the Krinsky album was one of the records he most enjoyed working on.
Asking Lishinsky questions concerning aesthetics and stylistic choices led him to make observations about the conception of originality in the Orthodox music scene. “We don’t talk about it [originality]. I get a demo [from an artist] and the demo tells me a lot. It’s less about being creative and more about trying to recreate something that was done in the past and do it successfully. In the process there may be something creative. There’s creativity, but the direction is already there. That makes it easier. If this is a rock song, we try to make it work for what it is. We don’t care how fresh it is.”
Lishinsky talked about the lack of concern for traditionalism, and the lingering elements of older Jewish genres in the music. “Artists are not interested in Jewish music history. Mostly there’s not a lot of overlap with traditional music. There’s some stuff that’s more cantorial. That’s familiar to them. They play around with it because it’s easy for them to relate to it. Almost every Jewish artist can mimic the cantorial sound.”
Concerning stylistic borrowing, which is endemic to the Orthodox pop sound, Lishinsky noted that “I don’t help them [the Orthodox artists he has worked with] learn about new styles. I was flowing with whatever they wanted to do. I don’t have a preference. I just want to do something that works.” Ethical judgements of musicians by rabbis used to be more of a consideration that affected stylistic choices, but the danger of being censured for playing the “wrong” style has mostly receded. “Today restrictions have broken…there is no genre that is off limits…Hasidic hip hop is fine.”
The shifting alliances between Orthodox Jews and Evangelical Christians in the political arena are reflected in the salience of Christian rock as a major source of inspiration for Orthodox Jewish song writers. “If you do something that sounds too churchy, maybe it would sound problematic. Anyway, Jews and Christians are good friends now.”
Genre borrowing can make Orthodox Jewish pop music sound out of step with aesthetic values of creativity and musical innovation. At the same time this feature of the scene brings the music into close dialogue with the mainstream. In the current moment, the stylistic borrowing characteristic of Orthodox pop has somewhat shifted its meaning and associations; derivativeness is aligned with trends in current popular music consumption that favor genre recycling. As Lishinsky notes, “Secular music is going retro. All modern artists, everything is based on old funk and disco.” The imperative of current music listening platforms towards aggregating common denominator popular music tastes has also had a palpable influence on music making. The tendency towards stylistic conservatism has moved the mainstream market closer to the stylistic norms of Orthodox pop.
Algorithmic curation, such as the machine-made aesthetic choices that guide popular Spotify playlists, chooses songs based on an agenda of seeking the most palatable and inoffensive music. The algorithmic music platforms have a tendency to create a musical landscape that is in some ways similar to the conservative sounds of Orthodox pop. Orthodox artists seem to have deemed the intentionally derivative approach to music making as necessary to placate the potential condemnation of rabbinic opinion. Lishinsky’s observations about the narrowing stylistic gap between Orthodox pop and the mainstream opens new questions about the dynamics of aesthetics in contemporary illiberal religious communities.
I will end this brief essay with a few questions that occur to me by way of a thought exercise that I hope to develop in future discussions with practitioners and scholars of Jewish Orthodoxy and Orthodox music:
In what ways does the current regime of machine learning-based music consumerism mirror dynamics of communal conservatism and social control relating to music in the Orthodox community?
In what ways are the sounds of Orthodoxy resistant to the “mainstream” and in what ways do they replicate American normativity?
And what does the shift towards embracing all popular music styles as “fair game” for the expressive culture of an illiberal religious community tell us about the Orthodox community and about the “mainstream” popular culture?