Bollywood Trajectories and Audibilities of Race in Greek Popular Song

This chapter explores “Indoprepi” songs in postwar Greek musical production. Indoprepi is a genre comprising diverse forms of adaptation: In particular, tunes and songs from Bollywood films screened in Greek popular cinemas from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. Through Tim Ingold’s concept of “wayfaring, " the author raises questions concerning the mobilities, disembodied trajectories, transmediality, circulation, appropriation, and popularity of musical objects, including the cartographies of transnational regimes of melodramatic affectivities made in sound/film. As a cosmopolitan and intertextual genre made of “copies” and mobile, intersecting musical fragments-effectively remapping Greek popular song in the Middle East and the global South-Indoprepi is a promising case study for re-thinking the racial question in mainstream epistemologies and sensibilities of Greekness in music as well as its public/national memory. In the light of recent adaptation theories coming from film and literary studies, the author takes Indoprepi as a point of departure for exploring theoretical issues around the ethnomusicological study of adaptation, referentiality, and translatability, including their attendant desires, politics, and pleasures. © 2022 Taylor & Francis

A Head Full of Gold: A Discussion with Yiannis Angelakas

This chapter deals with a life so rich that it already appears to last forever, as is often the case with people whose work is understood to be a watershed in the history, in this case of Greek popular music. It owes a lot to Yiannis Angelakas, whose contribution to the “final cut” - in film-making terms - of transcribed discussions was immensely helpful. Yiannis Angelakas began his musical trajectories as the singer of the Thessaloniki-based punk Rock group Trypes which became immensely popular during the 1980s and 1990s. In the midst of the 1990s the degeneration and stupefaction of neohellenic “socialist” society was successfully completed. The media and the private TV-channels of the upper urban class imposed their vulgarity and fake-glamorous aesthetics next to the cheap popular song as official national culture. The big-bang eventually took place in 1993 with fourth album, Ennia Pliromena Tragoudia. © 2019 Taylor and Francis

Preface

[No abstract available

Made in Greece: Studies in Popular Music

Made in Greece: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive and thorough introduction to the history, sociology, and musicology of contemporary Greek popular music. Each essay covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of pop music in Greece, first presenting a general description of the history and background of popular music in Greece, followed by essays, written by leading scholars of Greek music, that are organized into thematic sections: Hugely Popular, Art-song Trajectories, Greekness beyond Greekness, Counter Stories, and Present Musical Pasts. © 2019 Taylor and Francis

Past Forward: Creative Re-inventions of Urban Popular Song in the Music of Sokratis Malamas

This chapter explores rebetiko and laiko, “present pasts” in Hyussen’s terms, in the music of the renowned songwriter and lyricist Sokratis Malamas, one of the most popular representatives of the entechnolaiko genre in contemporary Greece. In Germany young Malamas emerges as a sort of “cosmopolitan patriot”, in Appiah’s terms, “attached to home of his or her own, with its own particularities, but taking pleasure from the presence of other, different places that are home to other, different people”. Malamas’ voice steps firmly upon the melodic line, evolving without the fluctuations and plethoric embellishments featuring contemporary laiko song “arabesk” aesthetics. Malamas returned to Germany to study electrical engineering while continuing to take classical guitar lessons, which he had already started in Thessaloniki. Papazoglou “discovered” Malamas performing his early songs in the boites of Thessaloniki. Such a melancholic resistance defines Malamas’ reluctance to enter the field of the “world music” market. © 2019 Taylor and Francis

Introduction: Greek Popular Music Studies?

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The location is a suburban mansion with a spacious, grassy garden and a swimming pool, the fortress-home of the mysterious family featured in the widely discussed film Dogtooth. Dogtooth represents what has been termed the “third wave” or “weird wave” in Greek independent cinema, and was awarded the “Un Certain Regard” prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The 1960s’ cliches of the Greek musical self widely circulated on the big screen have of course been variously undermined in Greek cultural production ever since their materialization as cliches. The brief reflection on the global production of Greek popular music commonplaces given above could perhaps serve as a critical point for the reconsideration of its master narratives and epistemologies. The frictions and connections narrated in dominant epistemologies and public intimacies of Greek popular music regulate its positionality among others in terms of emplacement. © 2019 Taylor and Francis

Rebetiko Past, Performativity, and the Political: The Music of Yiannis Angelakas

This article examines the ways rebetiko's past is re-invented today in the creative re-workings by the musician-poet-singer Yiannis Angelakas, whose popularity in Greece has been escalating since the mid-2000s. In what ways is the musical past remembered in the context of neoliberal political definitions of the current financial crisis? What kind of rebetiko ontologies are performatively enacted within the "state of exception?" The exploration of the central questions is based on ethnographic research addressing the sentimental worlds emerging through musical performativity, the translatability of the rebetiko past, and the sensorial metaphors employed in experimentation with rebetiko songs. Angelakas's re-making of rebetiko's past becomes a way of producing alternative histories and utopias lived in music. Drawing from Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou's theory of "the performative in the political" and their discussions on the concept of "dispossession," the article concludes that contemporary rebetiko nostalgia in the music of Angelakas is a form of resistance both within and against the normative politics of the "state of exception" and the moral imperative of post-political consensus

From Eurovision to Asiavision: the Eurovision Asia Song Contest and negotiation of Australia’s cultural identities

Australia’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest and involvement in the organisation of the Asian version of Eurovision (the Eurovision Asia Song Contest) through broadcaster SBS has been celebrated, questioned and criticised. In this article, I examine Australia’s role in the organisation of the Eurovision Asia Song Contest in the context of Australia’s relationship with the region, and what this reveals about Australia’s cultural identity and place in this Asia-Pacific region. If Eurovision was conceived as a post-war project to unify Europe, I argue that for the Eurovision Asia Song Contest to become a reality, it needs to have a framework that takes into account the region’s own historical, political and geo-political contexts rather than having a Eurocentric model imposed on it