JOB: The Hip-Hop Musical

So you think you’ve got problems? Eli Batalion and Jerome Saibil’s JOB: The Hip-Hop Musical envisions the story of the eponymous Biblical figure "played out," as it were, through a series of raps against the background of a contemporary record company. The results are funny, entertaining and surprisingly challenging intellectually. The choice of setting promises social commentary that the story can’t ultimately deliver, but JOB remains an energizing mix of the classic and the contemporary with an appealingly ecumenical view of the relationship between what is considered "high" and "low" culture.

Job Lowe is General Manager and "Employee of the Year" at Hoover Records, the darling of President and CEO J. Hoover, and the proud husband of a newly-tenured professor of philosophy. It seems that his life is complete. But Lou Saphire (pronounced sa-FEER), Hoover’s vice-president, changes all that when he begins to doubt the extent of Job’s loyalty to the corporation. "Job ain’t got no loyalty/he acts like he’s got humility/but all he wants is royalties!" raps Saphire. Hoover accepts Saphire’s challenge, allowing Saphire to strip Job of his benefits, stock options, the overwhelming majority of his salary and company car as a test to Job’s faith in the company. Meanwhile, Saphire cackles: "These are the company cutbacks!/Step back as we grab you by the nutsack!"

Besides their onstage alter-egos, "MC Cain" and "MC Abel," Sabil and Batalion play all of the characters themselves, using a single key physical attribute or vocal inflection to identify the shifts. It is clear that one of them is playing Hoover, for example, from the old man-ish gravel in their throats or the stoop in their backs–same for Eleanor, Hoover’s spoiled, intern daughter, from the bored sing-song that enters their delivery. This strategy enables them to switch characters from scene to scene, and in some raps, both play the same character simultaneously for that studio-ish echo effect.

Batalion and Saibil deserve credit for their vivid performances, but their rhymes, consistently witty and pleasing to the ear, are the highlight of the show. Since its inception, wags have criticized hip hop for what they describe as its degradation of language, its substitution of a limited selection of curse words for the more expressive vocabulary of "proper English." What such flagrant, shameless "hating" fails to take into account, however, is the radical extent to which hip hop changes the pop song to accommodate greater lyrical depth and complexity. In hip hop, unlike other pop forms, the lyrics matter every bit as much as the instrumental, if not more so. JOB: The Hip-Hop Musical is noteworthy for the exposure it gives to this significant aspect of hip hop. JOB pushes rap lyrics to their fullest potential, channeling issues of theology, philosophy, finance, and sexual politics while, at the same time, no nutsack goes ungrabbed.

The way in which JOB encompasses the very highest and lowest with equal enthusiasm, from the Top 40 to 400-level university philosophy, is exciting. It seems that Saibil and Batalion want to reach out and hug our culture as a whole. Batalion and Saibil’s affection for culture, in all its manifestations, is infectious–the rare example of an attitude that is postmodern in the best sense of the word.

— Patrick Gallagher