Preface

[No abstract available

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

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