Popularity and Musical Style
Argov was among the first singers to achieve commercial and nationwide success in the sphere of Middle Eastern-Mediterranean/oriental (Mizrahi)-style music, despite the fact that his music was not mainstream at the time, and radio stations gave predominance to pop music from overseas. Some believe that the great popularity of Argov and other Mizrahi singers of his time, among them Avihu Medina, Haim Moshe and Margalit Tzan'ani, was a response to the widespread sense among Mizrahi Jews in Israel that they were being discriminated against by the Ashkenazi hegemony.
The themes of Argov's songs were similar to those of American country music: love, heartache, disappointments, joy, addiction. He is considered a prodigy by many in the music business. Arranger and conductor Nancy Brandes, who musically directed many of his recordings, described him as a musical genius: He could make perfect recordings in one take, and when asked to do another take, was able to sing a totally different version just as perfectly. Argov had a remarkable talent for improvisation that respected the spirit of the song while allowing him to leave his personal mark.
Read more about this topic: Zohar Argov
Famous quotes containing the words popularity and, popularity, musical and/or style:
“A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of “spirit” over matter.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The popularity of disaster movies ... expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)
“Through man, and woman, and sea, and star,
Saw the dance of nature forward far;
Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times,
Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is not in our drawing-rooms that we should look to judge of the intrinsic worth of any style of dress. The street-car is a truer crucible of its inherent value.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)