Category Archives: Music and Dance

Sahara, My, My but it’s Dry

Humor and Satire, Music and Dance, Orientalism

Vaudeville loved Orientalism. By the time Valentino played The Sheik, images of Middle Eastern scenes were well represented on stage and in music. Some of the lyrics from this time period are very clever. My personal favorite is a prohibition song from 1920 called “Sahara, We’ll Soon Be Dry Like You,” sung by the great comic singer Billy Murray. To hear this original Edison Diamond Disk recording in a digital format, click here.

Here are the words. Why not click above and sing along…


Sahara (We’ll Soon Be Dry Like You)
Words by Alfred Bryan, Music by Jean Schwartz

Verse 1: King Rameses went to pieces seven thousand years ago,
And pass’d a law that Egypt must go dry.
He took the liquors from the “shickers” all the way to Jericho,
But kept his little toddy on the sly.
The desert of Sahara flow’d with honey so they say,
Till prohibition came along and dried it up one day. Continue reading Sahara, My, My but it’s Dry →

Springtime for Osama

Islam in Europe, Music and Dance, Terrorism Issue

If you had taken a poll of Holocaust survivors after their liberation from death camps in World War II, chances are few would have imagined that a future comedian (and a Jewish one at that) would produce a box-office smash that included a chorus line of goose-stepping rockettes prancing to “Hitler in springtime.” For the record, Mel Brooks spares no one, including a Busby Berkeley romp with Torquemada through the Spanish Inquisition. Nor does Monty Python, who satirized Nazis and, spam-spam-spam, The Spanish Inquisition, on the other side of the Atlantic. Of course, neither Brooks nor Python would have kept their heads (or the body parts they make the most jokes about) in 15th century Spain. So if even the cruelest atrocities of history can be lampooned with hindsight humor, when is a good time to rip into Osama Bin Laden and the distorted political mantra of jihad?

Jihad: The Musical already hit New York, and now it is taking Britain at the fringes (if Edinburgh can be deemed a fringe venue) according to the latest news reports on the BBC and The Guardian. Continue reading Springtime for Osama →

GQ not for Osama’s HQ

Gender and Sexuality, Music and Dance, Osama Bin Laden

Osama Bin Laden as an arch-villain seems to have become so unimportant that even imposters are not sending tapes with his voice to al-Jazeera anymore. It has been over a year since his last tape was posted. His number-two, al-Zawahari, makes the news more often. But some of his extended family members have picked up the slack. Imagine a novel in which Osama has a sexy niece who is trying to make it into the hip-pop culture scene and, better yet, that she poses in seductive poses for a men’s magazine like GQ? Sound too far fetched? Well it happened this month. Continue reading GQ not for Osama’s HQ →