Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
THE SOUND OF THE UNDERGROUND
This “Golden Age” of rembétika was short-lived, as the music's association with a drug-laced
underworld would prove its undoing. During the strait-laced
Metaxás dictatorship
tangos
and frothy Italianate love songs were encouraged instead and musicians with
uncompromising lyrics and lifestyles were blackballed. In Athens, even possession of a
bouzoúki
or
baglamás
became a criminal offence and several performers did jail time. Others
went to Thessaloníki, where the local police chief was a big fan of the music and allowed its
practitioners to smoke in private.
The unfortunate rembétes incurred disapproval from the puritanical Left as well as the
puritanical Right; the growing
Communist Party
of the 1930s considered the music and its
habitués hopelessly decadent and politically unevolved. Despite this, rembétika was strangely
popular among the rank-and-file on both sides of the 1946-49 civil war - perhaps the only
taste uniting a fatally polarized country.
Ironically, the original rembétika material was rescued from oblivion by the 1967-74
colonels' junta
. Along with various other features of Greek culture, most rembétika verses
were banned. The generation coming of age under the dictatorship took a closer look at the
forbidden fruit and derived solace, and deeper meanings, from the nominally apolitical lyrics.
When the junta fell in 1974 - even a little before - there was an outpouring of reissued
recordings of the old masters.
overdose in 1943;
baglamá
-player Yiorgos Tsoros, better known as
Batis
, an indifferent
musician but another excellent composer; and
Markos Vamvakaris
, who became the
linchpin of the group. Though a master instrumentalist, he initially considered that his
voice, ruined perhaps from too much hash-smoking, wasn't fit for singing. But he soon
bowed to the encouragement of record label Columbia, and his gravelly, unmistakable
delivery set the standard for male rembétic vocals until the 1940s.
In the late 1940s, several
rembétisses
(female rembétika vocalists) sang with
Vassilis
Tsitsanis
, the most significant composer and
bouzoúki
player after Vamvakaris. Tsitsanis
performed almost up to his death in 1984 - his funeral in Athens was attended by
nearly a quarter of a million people.
The éntekhno revolution
The “Westernization” of rembétika that began with Tsitsanis preceded the rise of the
éntekhno music
that emerged during the late 1950s.
Éntekhno
, literally “artistic” or
“sophisticated”, was an orchestral genre where folk or rembétika instrumentation and
melodies became part of a much larger symphonic fabric, but with a still recognizably
Greek sound.
Its first and most famous exponents were
Manos Hatzidhakis
and
Mikis Theodhorakis
,
both classically trained musicians. They combined not only rembétic and Byzantine
influences with orchestral arrangements, but also successfully used the country's rich
poetic tradition
.
The downside of increased sophistication was an inevitable distancing from
indigenous roots, in particular the modal scale which had served since antiquity. And
with its catchy tunes,
éntekhno
fell prey to the demands of the local film industry
- writing a soundtrack became a composer's obligatory rite of passage - and at its worst
degenerated to muzak cover versions.
Laïká: son of rembétika
Diametrically opposed to
éntekhno
was the
laïká
(“popular”) music of the 1950s and
1960s, its gritty, tough style directly linked to rembétika, undiluted by Western
influences.
Laïká
used time signatures common in Turkey and was mistakenly known
overseas as belly-dance music. Once again, these “debased” oriental influences were
much to the chagrin of those who also objected to the apolitical, decadent, escapist
song content.
