‘The King of Jewish Punk’

Steven Paul Lieberman

Is The

The King Of Jewish Punk

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 an 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 3 December 2020 until 2 October 2021. On 1 June 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.

Lieberman is often considered an outsider musician,described as “walking the line between insanity and genius [sic]”. 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.

The Career Of The Artist

Over his career, he has commercially released 39 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”.[11]

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 cd’s, 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.

The King of Jewish Punk 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

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“The Diarrhea Song”

Although The King of Jewish Punk has music that seemingly had little commercial success, unaudited download and stream sales of his first 39 records topped 9,000,000 in 21 years as of September 2022. In September 2018, Lieberman’s single, “The Diarrhea Song” had briefly appeared on the Apple iTunes Top 100 UK Rock chart, peaking at #22 and “3 Little Puppies” peaked at #19 on the Apple iTunes Top 100 Other Territories Chart two years later. l.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 #3 on KZSU Stanford University in 2012 and “Jewish Pirate” had a one-week appearance at #8 on WUSB (FM) Stony Brook University two years after release in 2008.

Skinheads In My Yard!

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