Few words about rebetiko. Rebetiko plural rebetika ( pronounced [reˈbetiko] and ρεμπέτικα respectively), occasionally transliterated as Rembetiko, is a term used today to designate originally disparate kinds of urban Greek folk music which have come to be grouped together since the so-called rebetika revival, which started in the 1960s and developed further from the early 1970s onwards. Initially a music associated with the lower classes, rebetiko later reached greater general acceptance as the rough edges of its overt subcultural character were softened and polished, sometimes to the point of unrecognizability. Then, when the original form was almost forgotten, and its original protagonists either dead, or in some cases almost consigned to oblivion, it became, from the 1960s onwards, a revived musical form of wide popularity, especially among younger people of the time. Rebetiko probably originated in the music of the larger Greek cities, most of them coastal, in todays Greece and Asia Minor during the Ottoman era. In these cities the cradles of rebetiko were likely to be the ouzeri, the hashish dens (tekedes) with hookahs, coffee shops and even the prison. In view of the paucity of documentation prior to the era of sound recordings it is difficult to assert further facts on the very early history of this music.There is a certain amount of recorded Greek material from the first two decades of the 20th century, recorded in Constantinople/Istanbul, in Egypt and in America, of which isolated examples have some bearing on rebetiko, such as in the very first case of the use of the word itself on a record label. But there are no recordings from this early period which give an inkling of the local music of Piraeus such as first emerged on disc in 1931 .
Posted on: Sat, 29 Nov 2014 17:36:04 +0000
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