Steven Paul Lieberman (born June 21, 1958), also known as the Gangsta Rabbi and The King of Jewish Punk, (Hebrew name ליב פרץ בין אליאזר ה־בדלן ה־נזדי or Lev Ava'ran bar-Eli'ezar ha-Bad'lan ha-Naz'ari) is a Jewish-American punk rock /metal singer, songwriter, multi-instrumental musician, composer, arranger, producer and former village comptroller residing in Freeport, New York. He is a Hebrew Nazarite, the founder of The Bad'lanim, a minority sect of Judaism and a vegetarian since 1995. He held the Guinness World Record for Longest Officially Released Song for The Noise Militia (#38/76) at 35 hours, 41 minutes and 9 seconds, from December 3, 2020, until October 2, 2021. On June 1, 2022, Lieberman's sequel to "The Noise Militia" entitled The Post-Militia Pogo-Battalion(#39/77) was completed with a duration of 76 hours, 30 minutes and 27 seconds and was submitted to Guinness unsuccessfully to reclaim the record. During the sessions of The Noise Militia, Lieberman experimented with the fusion of genres where he developed "Militia Punk" a mixture of noise-punk, thrash- metal and military music.
Lieberman is often considered an outsider musician,described as "walking the line between insanity and ". This has been partially attributed to his lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder, which first struck him in 1970 at the age of 11, as well as his decade-long fight with progressive leukemia in his later years, which ultimately was deemed terminal and has become a recurring theme in his lyrics. By the end of 2017, Lieberman refused all further cancer treatment. From this time, he was in and out of home hospice care.
In 2009, Lieberman signed a multi-album deal with Jewish indie label JDub Records, taking the place of Matisyahu on their artist roster. As of the spring of 2011, Lieberman, a town comptroller by trade, was "the world's only Orthodox Jewish heavy metal musician with a record deal", according to Newsday.
Over his career, he has commercially released 40 CDs and 38 cassette albums in the underground, using the Bop Bop Bigger Bab-èL moniker and reissued in 2016 for the 25th anniversary of his first cassette album, "Bang the Bass Bopmania" as "Bop Bop Bigger Bab-èL featuring Steve Lieberman".
On all his releases, Lieberman sings and plays all instruments. On the early primitive-sounding cassette releases during the 1990s he played chords and leads on a distorted bass accompanied by a Yamaha DD-6 drum machine. By 2002 as he started releasing commercial CDs, he added and featured flutes as well as various brass instruments and a variety of Eastern instruments. In his later years, he has added 6-string guitars and arranged and played a full brass and woodwind choir in an effort to fuse punk rock with marching band music and jazz, and eventually opera and classical. He shared the stage with Weezer, Andrew WK, Glassjaw, Ryan Dunn and the Misfits before retiring from performing in December 2011 to battle accelerated phase myeloproliferative leukemia. He briefly returned to the stage in the spring of 2016 to perform Gangsta Rabbi's Quadrophenia performed in its entirety on a three-stop farewell tour as a solo act, accompanying himself on his trademark distorted bass, a 3-string Fender Stratocaster and alto trombone. His 2010 song "No Festival of Lights (On This Hanukkah)" has received honorable mention placement in the Song of the Year Award Although Lieberman's music seemingly had little commercial success, unaudited download and stream sales of his first 40 records approached 20,000,000 in 21 years as of July 2023. In September 2018, Lieberman's single, "The Diarrhea Song" had briefly appeared on the Apple iTunes Top 100 UK Rock chart, peaking at No. 22 and "3 Little Puppies" peaked at No. 19 on the Apple iTunes Top 100 Other Territories Chart two years later .He received airplay on Rich Russo's free-form Anything Anything with Rich Russo radio show on New York City WRXP 101.9 and WDHA-FM 105.5 commercial rock radio stations. Throughout the shows Lieberman's music was featured on, Russo described him as "Jethro Tull meets the Beastie Boys, a one-man Jethro Tull" as well as "an inspiration to all suffering from serious illness" Additionally, Lieberman enjoyed some success on college radio, where The Rabbi Is Dead peaked at No. 3 on KZSU Stanford University in 2012 and "Jewish Pirate" had a one-week appearance at No. 8 on WUSB (FM) Stony Brook University two years after release in 2008.
Life and career
1958–1991 the early years Steven Paul Lieberman was born on June 21, 1958, in Brooklyn, New York to a working-class Jewish family. He is the youngest son of Lester Lieberman (1928–2012), a quality control technician, and Ilene Lieberman (née Marcus) (1930–2014). At the time of his bar-mitzvah in 1971, Lieberman, already an observant Jew, acquired a bass guitar to fill a vacancy in his junior high school jazz band. He picked up the instrument and started playing it upside-down and backwards. After passing the jazz band audition, he had developed a crude system of chords for the bass; when properly distorted, they mimicked the major chords of the 6 string guitar. Forgoing this method for more conventional bass playing, Lieberman became the bassist for hard rock as well as jazz-rock fusion bands throughout high school, where he developed a lead bass style influenced by John Entwistle . During this time, he suffered from major depressive disorder and committed parasuicide at age 17. Amidst episodes of depression and mania, Lieberman graduated from college in 1980 with a BBA in accounting, where he worked his way up to become town comptroller by 1998, a position he held until his retirement in September 2014.
He was on hiatus from music through much of the 1980s except for recording a vinyl single "Nuclear Blitz (Edits 96 and 85)" in 1984, playing all the chords and leads on the bass guitar. Lieberman was married four times and divorced three times by his 33rd birthday and widowed at age 60.
1991–1994 the underground cassette trade He planned to return to music briefly in the spring of 1991, to commemorate his 20th year of playing the bass, this time accompanying himself with a used Yamaha DD-6 drum machine. By year's end he recorded a 13 track cassette called Bang The Bass Bopmania. Overdubbing tracks by using two portable cassette players, Lieberman started writing and recording bass-only crude punk/hardcore music. There was a free paper in the New York area at the time called The Musician's Exchange that would review Lieberman's cassettes and those of like-minded musicians in a column called "Independents' Day." This resulted in trading tapes amongst the musicians and circulating them throughout the underground.
Lieberman recorded under the "Bop Bop Bigger Bab'el" moniker from 1991 to 2001.
1994–2001 enter The Gangsta Rabbi-stage left
In 1994, Steve Lieberman began to study the Bible continually, as he did in the years following his bar-mitzvah. This time, he realized discrepancies between the Word in the Bible and the way modern Judaism is practiced. An example of this is that the modern Jewish calendar, besides having its months named after Babylonian gods violates a commandment given in Exodus 12:1, where the new year must be celebrated on the new moon directly preceding Passover, so why do 10 million Jews disobey God by celebrating "Rosh Hashannah" in the seventh month?
After confronting a rabbi with this question after he performed a grave unveiling ceremony, and the rabbi was unable to answer, Lieberman recorded his 20th tape entitled Gangsta Rabbi, the title track becoming his theme song and stage name – because "he likes to pick theological fights with actual rabbis".
His biblical studies caused Lieberman to break off from existing Jewish sects to found the Badlan'im (Heb:"isolationists") sect in 1995 where precepts include fasting, continual prayer, vegetarianism, and belief in only the Bible as the law, so that God's word is not superseded by that of the Talmud and other rabbinical writings. Additionally, he replaced the calendar from the current system, in the 58th century, to a more appropriate system, being in the 35th century, commemorating the Exodus from Egypt.
Packaging a live cassette from a First Night festival on New Year's Eve 1994 as Mission of Tolerance 5755-Live, the Musician's Exchange's head writer Paul Incinitti said of Lieberman's show, "based on the sound of the screaming crowd, Lieberman should tour and call (the tour) "No Sleep To Gaza". He is every skinhead's nightmare".
2001 ashes of Bad'lania After the release of his 36th cassette, Diaspora Blaster 36 in the spring of 2001, Steve Lieberman's house and studio were completely destroyed by an electrical fire. Acquiring a used flute and a book on how to play it, he wanted to start a genre that would fuse the flute with punk rock, as Jethro Tull did for blues-rock three decades prior.
2002–2003 By the spring of 2002, the studio and house were rebuilt and Lieberman purchased a Korg D1600 16 track digital recorder. Deciding that the user's manual was too thick and a bit boring, he just plugged in and winged it and three months later, out comes his first CD Bad'lania Rising, a "greatest hits" collection of the first 38 tapes. The title was the sequel of his last tape Ashes of Bad'lania where "Bad'lania" is the homeland of his Badlan'im sect.
Bad'lania Rising By its August 27, 2002, release songs from Bad'lania Rising were known through the use of on-line music distributors; the largest at the time was mp3.com. His song "Puppy" debuted at 719 in the Garage Chart and "Gangsta Rabbi" at 1229 on the Jewish/Israeli list on mp3.com on June 24, 2002, the first day after release. Looking for a genre that would best tolerate his new style, the progressive rock community showed least objection. In a review in their site progressiveworld.net which yielded Bad'lania 2 out of 5 stars said the record was "awful", but praised his newly learned flutework which was played over the racket of everything else and closed by saying "we are fascinated by the eccentric ... but... I just can't say I enjoy listening to it.".
Jewish Lightning Re-recording many of the post-1996 heavily Jewish-themed tunes with the exception of the new Astroland Spring-Green '415, Lieberman's second CD Jewish Lightning was released on September 16, 2003. This record, as Bad'lania, received some poor grades for listenability because of Lieberman's overuse of ethnic instruments and non-conforming methods in the studio, but for the content, "identifying with Biblical ancestry and anger towards the Holocaust" he was dubbed "a proud Israelite poet" by Binyamin Bresky at Cleveland Jewish Radio.
Additionally, in a tribute to Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal after his 2005 death, Jewish music journalist Baron Dave Romm said of Lieberman in a review of Lightning, "his energy and attitude are infectious. He has something to say and by damn he's going to say it ... he's as fearless as Simon Wiesenthal and just as smolderingly angry."
Desert Fever Brigade The Desert Fever Brigade sessions during the spring and summer of 2003 yielded 35 songs of which 21 of the most "commercial" were included on the CD. The album was released on December 29, 2003. Reviewers showed the work little respect, as Adam Mico of the Daily Vault said in his review of DFBMico, Adam -The Daily Vault "Flogged Mercilessly On 01/05/04" Desert Fever Brigade by Steve Lieberman—Mr Lieberman has no control center in the brain, hence this CD sounds the way it does. After Desert Fever Brigade's release, Steve Lieberman held the No. 1 artist spot on mp3.com.au, the largest on-line distributor in Australia, for 6 weeks spanning December 2003 – January 2004.mp3com.au Artists Charts MP3 Downloads from mp3.com.au week ending December 3, 2003
2004–2005 skinheads in my yard oy vey
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