Remember when in the band Culture Club’s 1982 hit video “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,” Boy George became a legend in the Jewish world for wearing a t-shirt printed in Hebrew?
Remember when in the band Culture Club’s 1982 hit video “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,” Boy George became a legend in the Jewish world for wearing a t-shirt printed in Hebrew?
And yet, if you understood some Hebrew and read the shirt closely, you knew something about it was strange.
“I had a shirt that said ‘Tarbut Agadah,’ but that was a mistake, right?” British singer Boy George asked with a smile in an interview ahead of one of his performances in Israel.
Instead of translating the band’s name, “Culture Club” into Hebrew, the shirt said תרבות אגדה or “Legend Culture.”
It all began with a line of T-shirts by designer Sue Clowes, who loved both the Hebrew alphabet and Boy George. She decided to surprise him by printing the name of his band in Hebrew on a shirt.
Sue’s dictionary (remember those things called dictionaries?) translated “culture” correctly as “tarbut.”
But it defined the word “club” as “agudah,” meaning association or society, which is not exactly the right slant.
And she also followed the English order of the words, with the modifier before the noun when in Hebrew you would typically put the noun before the modifier.
The sum total of the words in Hebrew didn’t really convey the meaning of the idiomatic English expression and overall, it was a clumsy translation.
But Sue trusted her dictionary, and the “תרבות אגדה” or “Legend Culture” shirt, became a legend in its own roundabout way.
“It was before Instagram and before the internet,” Sue later recalled. “I loved the Hebrew script, which I thought was incredibly beautiful and unique, so I copied it into my sketchbook – but apparently I copied it incorrectly. And yes, it probably doesn’t say what I intended it to say, but it still turned out to be cultural.”
It didn’t just turn out to be “cultural.” It became a cult classic.
And that was only the first chapter in Boy George’s special connection with the Jewish people and the State of Israel – a relationship that became next-level after October 7, when Boy George repeatedly chose to express his support for Israel, even as many of his peers in the international music world chose to criticize it.
This week, that affection reached another milestone when the singer unveiled his new song, “We Will Dance Again.”
“You say genocide, I say war.
When you’re attacked, that’s what the army’s for.
Does it get ugly? You bet it does,
When I know you wanna kill every last one of us…
We will dance again,
And there will be no war.
But if you’re ever confused
I stand with the Jews.
I don’t feel brave,
I just need to behave
like a human.”
Like we said, truly a legend.
The quotations are taken from Boy George’s 2017 interview with Shirit Gal for Ynet, and from Sue Clowes’s interview with Itay Yaakov, also for Ynet, earlier this year.
