SONGS OF THE GREEK UNDERWORLD
تاريخ النشر: 01/01/2000
الناشر: دار الساقي للطباعة والنشر
نبذة الناشر:The tradition of rebetika song is at the root of all that is most vibrant and subversive in the popular music of modern Greece. In its origins it is the misic of the poor, the dispossessed. The refugees and the migrants who came to Greece from asia Minor before and ...after the first world war.
The Greek edition of this book is entitled Rebetology, thus according tis musical and social subculture its rightful place in the academic study of Greek culture. Written as a broad-brush introduction to rebetika song, this concise and well-argued book details the everyday life of the rebetes-who they were, where they came from, how they dressed, their weapons and styles of fighting, their sexual preferences, their culture of hashish and of prison life, all of which form the substance of their songs.
petropoulos flies in the face of traditional Greek academia with his painstaking explanation of how this apparently most Greek of musical cultures has thoroughly cosmopolitan roots; turkish, albanian, gypsy and jewish. By tracing the figure of the rebetes back to the Ottoman empire, he shows how the language and music of rebetika song were imbued with turkish influences, and how its ethos was one of free love criminal behaviours and a challenge to established socual norms.
Songs of the Greek Underworld is not only a learned and erudite text, accompaned by breakdowns of the rhythms and metric patterns of the different musics and their associated dances, but a salutary reminder of the shared cultural roots of turkey and Greece. The book includes the text of songs from the tradition, and over ten line drawings by A. Kanavakis and 34 photographs.
Elias petropoulos is a poet, collector of songs, and a determined documentor of the manners and mores of the Greeks. His free-thinking views on sexuality, criminality, drugs and religion have made him anathema to establishment Greece. The publication of rebetika Songs (rebetika traghoudhia) earned him a five-month prison sentence under the Greek junta in 1968. At the age of 70, living in paris as a self-willed exile, he is a powerhouse of ethnographic and literary activity. His other books include the manual of the Good thief, Holy hashish:18 texts on the Underworld and the social History of the condom. إقرأ المزيد