{"id":2817,"date":"2014-06-05T18:17:57","date_gmt":"2014-06-05T22:17:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=2817"},"modified":"2014-06-05T18:17:57","modified_gmt":"2014-06-05T22:17:57","slug":"rembetika-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=2817","title":{"rendered":"Rembetika again"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Anthropologists are prone to connoisseurship of subcultures, appreciating niceties of identity and keeping weather eyes peeled for boundary-defining shibboleths. Lowlifes and marginal folk seem especially attractive, perhaps because they offer exciting alternatives to the bourgeois stolidity of the <i>Buena Gente<\/i>. In this realm I have more than 30 years of fascination with the Greek underworld of the <i>re[m]betes<\/i> and the musical genres grouped under the &#8216;re[m]betika\/o&#8217; rubric. Basic source materials include Gail Holst&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Road-Rembetika-sub-culture-sorrow-hashish\/dp\/9607120078\/\"><b>Road to Rembetika: Music of a Greek sub-culture songs love, sorrow &amp; hashish<\/b><\/a> (1975) and Elias Petropoulos&#8217; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Songs-The-Greek-Underworld-Tradition\/dp\/0863563988\/\"><b>Songs of the Greek Underworld: The Rebetika Tradition<\/b><\/a> (2000).<\/p>\n<p>\nTo assist your exploration if this is unfamiliar territory, there&#8217;s a BBC documentary:<center><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/9cPbCXWGJMo?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/center>and Music of the Outsiders<center><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/j_nOoZCGtd8?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/center><br \/>\nand Kostas Feris&#8217; feature film <b>Rembetiko<\/b> (1983)<center><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/TckEsmGH83c?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/center>and literally hundreds of CD reissues of classic music from the 1920s and 1930s, such as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Rembetika-Greek-Music-From-Underworld\/dp\/B000FOQHJO\/\">Rembetika: Greek Music From the Underworld<\/a> &#8230; or search &#8216;rembetika&#8217; and &#8216;rebetika&#8217; and &#8216;rebetiko&#8217; and &#8216;rembetiko&#8217; in Spotify or other streaming services.<\/p>\n<p>\nToday I came across a really delicious vein of text in Patrick Leigh Fermor&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/The-Broken-Road-Review-Classics\/dp\/1590177541\/\"><b>The Broken Road<\/b><\/a>, replete with the trademarked style for which he is celebrated. He&#8217;s describing two dance forms, <i>hasapikos<\/i> and <i>zembekiko<\/i>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>They are, in fact, <b>the quintessence of fatalism and morose solitude, a consolation and an anodyne in individual calamity<\/b>, and with the songs that accompany them create a hard metrical and choreographic counterspell. They have another black mark against them: they are linked with low life in refugee quarters, with drunken cellars and hashish-smoking dens and waterfront bars, with idle hours spent over the nargileh, and with a dandified trick of flicking those tasseled and time-killing amber beads. Traditionally they are accompanied by a sartorial style, now largely obsolete: pointed shoes, peg-top trousers held up by a red sash, the jacket worn loose on the shoulders with sleeves hanging \u201a and by twisted moustaches, a quiff falling over the forehead, and the cap aslant on the back of the head. With this goes a relaxed gait, a languid syncopated flick of the beads round the index finger held in the small of the back, a cigarette in the corner of the mouth, <b>a faintly derisive smile, a poker face, an unflurriable deliberation of gesture and a dangerous ironic light in the veiled eyes<\/b>. (pp 244-245)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Downright ethnographic, isn&#8217;t it? You really <i>should<\/i> just get the book and read it&#8230;<br \/>\n<center><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/jzR9aoNo7Bs?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/4jMBYx76txU?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><br \/>\n<\/center><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Anthropologists are prone to connoisseurship of subcultures, appreciating niceties of identity and keeping weather eyes peeled for boundary-defining shibboleths. Lowlifes and marginal folk seem especially attractive, perhaps because they offer exciting alternatives to the bourgeois stolidity of the Buena Gente. In this realm I have more than 30 years of fascination with the Greek underworld [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-musics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2817"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2817\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2818,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2817\/revisions\/2818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}