Ребетико: городская музыка Греции

Greek music genre
the Greek music genre

Rebetiko (ρεμπέτικο, ), plural rebetika (ρεμπέτικα ), occasionally transliterated as rembetiko or rebetico, is a term used today to designate originally disparate kinds of urban Greek music which in the 1930s went through a process of musical syncretism and developed into a more distinctive musical genre. Rebetiko briefly can be described as the urban popular song of the Greeks, especially the poorest, from the late 19th century to the 1950s, and served as the basis for further developments in popular Greek music. The music, which was partly forgotten, was rediscoved during the so called rebetika revival, which started in the 1960s and developed further from the early 1970s onwards.

The word rebetiko (plural rebetika) is an adjectival form derived from the Greek word rebetis (ρεμπέτης, ). The word rebetis is today construed to mean a person who embodies aspects of character, dress, behavior, morals and ethics associated with a particular subculture. where the word ῥεμπιτός is defined as a 'wanderer', 'blind', 'misguided', etc.

Although nowadays treated as a single genre, rebetiko is, musically speaking, a synthesis of elements of European music, the music of the various areas of the Greek mainland and the Greek islands, Greek Orthodox ecclesiastical chant, often referred to as Byzantine music, and the modal traditions of Ottoman art music and café music. Although known in the rebetiko context, and often referred to in song lyrics, well before it was allowed into the recording studio, the bouzouki was first commercially recorded not in Greece, but in America, in 1926, when the Peloponnesian musician Konstandinos Kokotis (1878 – after 1948) recorded two Peloponnesian folk songs with the accordionist Ioannis Sfondilias. reveals that less than 7% of recorded rebetiko songs have drug related themes.|group="nb" Rebetiko songs emphasizing such matters have come to be called hasiklidika (χασικλίδικα), counterculture of Greece (especially of the great urban centers: Athens, Piraeus, and Thessaloniki). Mangas was a label for men belonging to the working class, behaving in a particularly arrogant/presumptuous way, and dressing with a very typical vesture composed of a woolen hat (kavouraki, καβουράκι), a jacket (they usually wore only one of its sleeves), a tight belt (used as a knife case), stripe pants, and pointy shoes. Other features of their appearance were their long moustache, their bead chaplets (κομπολόγια, sing. κομπολόι), and their idiosyncratic manneristic limp walking (κουτσό βάδισμα). A related social group were the Koutsavakides (κουτσαβάκηδες, sing. κουτσαβάκης); the two terms are occasionally used interchangeably.

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.