According to this discussion on Jewish Lyrics, Ya’alili:

is a combination of the sepharadic “Ya’lah”, a common phrase in sephardic songs which roughly translates as “come on”, and “li li li”, a common filler in yiddish songs (BTW, the word for ‘song’ in yiddish is “leid”).

The lyrics–though it’s worth reading the whole discussion at the above link–can be roughly translated as follows:

Ya’alili, dance my beloved

It should be fortunate, may it be,
G-d willing, it will be

The bridegroom, sephardi
the attractive bride, ashkenazi

Mother Imeinu [our mother] sephardi,
Mama Rachel, ashkenazi

Baba Salli [a famous rabbi] sephardi,
Rabbi Nachman, ashkenazi

It should be fortunate, may it be,
G-d willing, it will be

Ya’alili, dance my beloved

Gina Gina sephardi
may we hear more ashkenazi

Yosef our father, sephardi
the eith day, ashkenazi

days for joy, sephardi,
have a good yom tov, ashkenazi

It should be fortunate, may it be,
G-d willing, it will be

The other thing Violet Blue pointed me towards is an explicit erotic music video by the group The Good The Bad, whose music, now that I’ve listened to a bit of it, I like a lot, especially the fact that it is all instrumental. The video, however, which starts out as compellingly sexy, devolves into cliche when a porn-star-orgasmic-voice-over intrudes into what might have been a really interesting exploration–to the degree one could do this in a music video–of the woman’s relationship to music and to the guitar as her instrument. Here it is so you can decide for yourselves:

‘030’ by The Good The Bad (UNCUT) from 030 on Vimeo.

What struck me most about Kimmelman’s article, though, was not what he had to say about the similarities between what Tehran was trying to do last month and what Moscow did during the Cold War, but rather what he had to say about the differences:

The difference now isn’t just that the Tehran orchestra playing a pathetic Peace and Friendship Symphony is such a far cry from Emil Gilels playing Beethoven’s Emperor concerto. More fundamentally, it’s that a tour by an anointed symphony orchestra from the other side barely registers in the Western political consciousness. In an Internet age when everyone’s supposedly savvy to crude propaganda, the presumption seems to be that the Iranian tour doesn’t even rise to the threshold of newsworthiness.

But this presumption is a result of what the American musicologist Richard Taruskin calls a common fallacy. The fallacy, he has written, consists in turning “a blind eye on the morally or politically dubious aspects of serious music,” as if “the only legitimate object of praise or censure in art” is whether it’s good or not.

“Art is not blameless,” Mr. Taruskin writes. “Art can inflict harm.”

We take the blame-worthiness of art for granted when it comes to popular culture, criticizing Avatar, for example, for being yet one more movie about a white guy who saves a nature-loving people of color or the writers of a show like Battle Star Galactica for how they write rape into the show’s narrative; but it is good to be reminded that no art, not even classical music, is without political significance, that it too can be used as propaganda, to reinforce, or to subvert, the status quo.

In the conclusion to his review, Kimmelman quotes an Iranian businessman living in Geneva. This man was angry because he kept “seeing Ahmadinejad’s face in the music.” He said, however, that his heart “goes out to the musicians. They’re victims like the rest of us.“