Artist description One man abusing computer software to create ill musical compositions.

Music Style An ill blend of instrumental Hip-Hop music.

Musical Influences Willie Mitchell, Rudy Van Gelder, Lee "Scratch" Perry, The Beatles, Marley Marl, DJ Premier, The Bomb Squad, DJ Muggs, Large Proffessor, Beatminerz, Portishead, Tricky, The Beastie Boys, The RZA

Similar Artists Wu Tang Clan, RZA, Killah Priest, DJ Premier, Gangstarr, Large Proffessor, Portishead, Tricky, DJ Shadow, Company Flow

Artist History El Keter has years of experience from his start as a disc jockey at age 11 to his stint as a production intern at a hip-hop studio in Hartford CT to his production and vocal work in his own hip-hop group No Ordinary Repetitive Mentality. El Keter is also being tapped for production by Hartford music mistress Abiss and her Soul Accession Entertainment.

Group Members El Keter the Nazarite

Instruments Compaq Presario 7470, Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge 4.5 & Acid 2.0 and the Beat It Beat Mashing Utility

Albums N.O.R.M - Universal Joints, El-Keter - Protocals of the Wise Men of Zion ( forthcoming )

Press Reviews http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~tewing/culture1.htmlOctober 28, 1999Keter Tzadik, "Ebonics and Techno-Babble"Sometimes, a little learning is a stupid thing. In a series of columns for Slate, the linguists Jessie Sheidlower and Dennis Baron discussed the uncontroversial fact (uncontroversial among linguists, anyway) that African-American Vernacular English (known as AAVE or "ebonics") is in fact a viable dialect and not some mere "degraded" version of English. Unfortunately, it seems as if Mr. Tzadik only saw the title of the exchange, "Are Some Languages Dangerous?" and assumed these guys were just unfairly dissing ebonics, prompting his depressingly wrongheaded defense.Don't get me wrong. I'm not bothered by the fact that he's defending AAVE -- Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, a great layman's overview of current trends in linguistics, convinced me of AAVE's validity long ago. What irritates me is how he defends it. For all his demands for the respect of people who speak "non-standard English", he is completely blind to the racial condescension lodged in his argument. He winds up his e-mail saying elitists should think twice about making fun of the Indian guy's pidgin English at the 7-11, 'cause his ancestors created Sanskrit, a language that English is merely a bastardization of. Not only is this crap misremembered high-school social studies, it provides us with two orientalist fantasies in one sentence: his Indians either are noble (and dead) Sanskrit-givers, or clerks down at the local convenience store. "We find that terms like 'information "superhighway"' and 'surf the web' are just not compatible with an urban lifestyle. How many kids from Harlem have been surfing? Naw'meen?" All too well -- in his eyes, Harlemites are obviously incapable of using a metaphor based on something not part of their tight marketing niche. (As if the millions upon millions of people who use the term have ever surfed, either...)Tzadik boasts of creating his own post-everything linguistic multiculturalism. While his description of it recalls the prose of DJ Spooky on a really pretentious day, it initially sounds appealing, like a new-thing version of the language brew New York has long been famous and loved for. The English of even the most "mainstream" of New Yorkers has huge hunks of Spanish, Yiddish, Italian and AAVE slang thrown into the mix; Tzadik adds some Hebrew, some Spanish, some Arabic, and "media techno-babble" into what he calls his own "urban Renaissance language." Cultural commentators have long been afraid the heavily standardized English used in radio and television broadcasting would erase all the regional differences of the langauge in this country and reduce American English into thin gruel. But Tzadik's "urban Renaissance language" makes me wonder if something quite different might not occur. Perhaps English will become (or already is) a fungible language capable of absorbing and defusing all linguistic "difference" -- a master language so massive, no language can avoid its gravitational pull, no language can resist becoming its satellite. Needless to say, such a version of English would be an irresistible tool in the cultural domination of those who don't speak English by those who do. So on the other hand, maybe a little learning is a dangerous thing, after all.*Saying that English is bastardized Sanskrit is sort of like saying a human being is a bastardized dinosaur. English didn't evolve from Sanskrit; rather, English and Sanskrit share a common theoretical ancestor, called "Proto-Indo-European". Germanic languages (like English), Indo-Iranian languages (like Sanskrit), and the Italic languages (such as Latin and French) are all separate branches of this one common source. At best you could say that English is a bastardized version of an early version of German, itself ultimately a bastardized version of Proto-Indo-European. And don't get me started on the term "bastardization", either -- you'd figure a guy so enamoured of cultural miscegnation would think of a less offensive term for it. http://hiphopinfinity.com/Underground/NORM.htm

Additional Info El Keter is also a web/graphic/multi-media producer, his work can be seen at http://www.imageyenation.com

Location Springfield, MA - USA

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