BOY BAND OF HATE

Hezbollah launches boy band to stardom (CNN) (Hat tip: Sandy D.)

YAMOUN, West Bank (AP) -- They were struggling in a boy band, working the West Bank wedding circuit and dreaming of stardom. Now the five singers who make up the Northern Band have come a little closer to their goal, with help from an unwitting ally -- Hezbollah guerrilla chief Hassan Nasrallah. At the height of the Israel-Hezbollah war, the band wrote new lyrics, in praise of Nasrallah, for an old tune. The "Hawk of Lebanon" song tapped into Nasrallah's huge popularity among Palestinians and became an instant hit. The song is being played on Arab TV networks, used as a ring tone for cell phones, passed around on e-mail and distributed on pirate CDs and tapes. Music stores have trouble keeping up with demand, in part because Israeli soldiers have confiscated some Nasrallah tapes and CDs at checkpoints.

Basking in its newfound success, the band has doubled its fee per performance to 1,000 shekels ($230). At a recent wedding in the town of Ramallah, the band was asked to play the Nasrallah song six times. Lead singer and manager Alaa Abu al-Haija, 28, said he gives the audiences what they want to hear. "I see people turning toward Islam, so I have to sing to that," said Alaa, sitting in the living room of his family's two-story house in the northern West Bank village of Yamoun. The lyrics consist of constant repetition of a few simple rhymes: "Hey, you, hawk of Lebanon. Hey, you, Nasrallah. Your men are from Hezbollah and victory is yours with God's help." Alaa and his two younger brothers and band partners -- Nour, 25, and Mohammed, 22 -- are already working on the next song about Nasrallah. Alaa also wrote the Hamas election song, to the same tune as the Nasrallah anthem, but it never reached the same popularity.