Bulletin

Issue: January/February 2006

Awards

Music ‘therapy’ may partly explain its wide appeal: Rebetica, the ‘globalised blues’ of Greece

Ebetica, also known as Piraeus Blues, have become a popular and lucrative element of world music over the last 20 years. Melbourne, as Australia’s most Greek city, boasts several rebetica bands and has long been a centre of scholarship on the genre.

Professor Stathis Gauntlett, Head of Greek Studies in the School of Historical and European Studies at La Trobe University, has been researching rebetica and other Greek oral traditions since 1970.

He is the author of a well-reviewed book published in Greek in Athens in 2001, Rebetica Songs. A contribution to a scholarly approach. He also helped compile the entries for the words ‘rebetica’ and ‘rebetis’ (the hero of the songs), for the on-line Oxford English Dictionary, taking into account 80 years of documented usage in English and a range of spellings.

Recently invited to contribute an article on rebetica to the Athenian journal Archaeologia kai Technes, for an issue devoted to suicide in Greece, Professor Gauntlett decided to test another cross-cultural parallel with rebetica.

In a paper titled Rebetico Noir, he explored parallels between rebetica and blues. ‘Rebetica are basically songs of complaint, deploring everything from the behaviour of one’s lover to the weather.

‘American blues complain of similar things. There’s an old saying that if you play blues backwards, your woman comes home, you get out of jail, and your dog comes back to life. Mutatis mutandis, if you play rebetica backwards, you become a total abstainer with the help of the woman who drove you to drink or drugs in the first place, people stop picking on you – notably the police – and your mother smiles for the first time since the day you were born.

‘This gives some idea of how the themes and social milieu of rebetica connect also with “art noir”.

‘Rebetica tell hard-luck stories – the plight of victims, ranging from those unlucky in love, unwilling migrants, invalids and the dispossessed to prisoners, vagabonds and small-time criminals.

‘As in film noir, the colour black dramatically permeates the visual landscape of rebetica verses. The Greek adjective “mavros” is applied to a wide range of nouns, both concrete and abstract (life, soul, fate, prison, exile); even the intoxicant of preference in rebetica is hashish, “the little black stuff”.

‘Black is also the basis of the sartorial code of the protagonist rebetis, his mourning mother-figure, and “Charos”, the lurking grim reaper. Even the mandatory femme fatale has a “black” heart.

‘If rebetica form the soundtrack to twentieth-century Greece, the implied film would surely be a rather melodramatic film noir. It’s a paradox that in a country boasting more than 300 days of blinding sunlight per annum, the most popular songs should be set at night or under cloudy skies,’ he added.

‘That tells you something about modern Greek history, which has featured a brutal Nazi occupation, several dictatorships, five years of ferocious civil war, and the aftermath of ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. It’s not surprising that rebetica often contain indictments of an oppressive society, but also express despair at the human condition.

‘Curiously though, only a handful of rebetica speak openly of suicide. Perhaps it’s because the rebetis tends to direct his aggression against others rather than himself. Perhaps it’s because suicide was illegal in Greece, and pre-emptive censorship applied to sound recordings in Greece from 1937.

‘But then again, some songs talk of music as a cure for depression, particularly when played on the bouzouki, the rebetica instrument par excellence. The instrumental interludes in recorded rebetica are indeed often incongruously cheerful and uplifting, even in the most desperate songs. This music therapy may partly explain the global appeal of rebetica!’