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Well Water Black, by Alias featuring Why?

Alias is from Maine. I know this because Donald and I once saw him at a show in the venue off of Park Rd. in Charlotte, and his final line could be heard when the beat dropped, which was “I’m a white kid from Maine but at least I can rap about it.” I have got nothing else on Alias.

The ablum title is Resurgam, which in the Latin means “I will rise again.”

The featured singer and rapper’s name is Yoni Wolf. He is a close childhood friend of someone I need to call. His dad is a Messianic Jewish congregation leader. Messianic Jews are Jews who believe that Jesus is the Messiah, that everything that the Bible says about him is true, and yet they understand this in Jewish terms. I was recently at a conference of such folk in Grantham, PA. Whenever I met someone who attended the congregation that Yoni’s dad leads (Beth Messiah in Cincinatti, Ohio), I’d usually be unable to keep myself from asking whether she had listened to any of the Rabbi’s sons’ music. Responses were either “no” or “yeah…I’ve heard it…but his music is … weird.” His relationship to this movement as he experienced it seems to show up in a lot of his themes. In this song, he’d like to think he takes dictation from something big and evasive that he’s yet to see the face of bracing but when he’s awake he’s like a little limb torn off from every wind’s weight tore a moth hole in a sweater he knows he could do it better …. this probably isn’t about the tension of not manifesting the words of knowledge or prophecy or tongues that the more spiritual of one’s charismatic Messianic peers exhibit. But I can’t help but pretend as if I’ve been granted special insight by the sheer sociological fact of being found in the same one percent of one percent with him. —nadler