You down with O.P.P.?

The Black Eyed Peas came to Tel Aviv last summer. I think if I had been in the US, I probably wouldn’t have paid money to go to their concert…but it’s different when bands come to Israel. I want to support that and show them that we WANT bands to tour in Israel!

I think the best part of the evening was realizing where I was. There they were on stage, singing familiar songs in my mother-tongue language. I didn’t have to struggle to listen to every single word in hopes of understanding…I was happily oblivious and catching everything. They made a lot of references to old school hip-hop and really good music from the late 80s and early 90s. At one point, Fergie was singing “Sweet Child ‘o Mine” with her own lyrics…at another point, they were throwing in crazy references like “You down with O.P.P.?” and I was going crazy.

“YEAH YOU KNOW ME!”

I realized I was the only one screaming the actual response instead of just screaming in general. They tried again…

“You down with O.P.P.?”

“YEAH YOU KNOW ME!!” I was so excited that I knew what to yell back! The crowd around me kept looking over at me like I was insane. What is this crazy person screaming to them!?

It went on like this for a few rounds until the band realized that there were maybe 5 of us in the crowd of 10s of thousands…there were a handful of us who knew what was going on. So they stopped and educated the crowd.

“When we say ‘You down with O.P.P.,’ you yell back ‘Yeah you know me!’ Try it with us!”

And so we did. And everyone joined in. How hilarious that I could be in a crowd that huge and only a handful of us knew what was going on!? Do they even know what O.P.P. stands for!?