ABSTRACT

In piecing together a mosaic of the Mediterranean in music, the bits that make up Greece do not fit neatly or fall easily into place. However, one can see patterns emerging that, if correctly placed in relation to the backdrop of their social and cultural setting, provide interesting perspectives on a number of important issues. Greece is a major geographical, cultural, and political crossroads situated between the “East” and the “West,” that is, a part of a region where the continents of Europe and Asia meet and run into each other around the Greater and Eastern Mediterranean area. It is this “between worlds” setting that today, perhaps more than ever before in the history of Greece, shapes Greek musical sensibilities. Here, in a region of contested homelands and shared cultural traits, an East-West musical orientation and indeed consciousness is explored, negotiated, contested, worked out, developed, defined, expressed, and given high profile in the popular music industry. In this chapter, I explore the work of a range of recording artists active in Greece in the 1990s and into 2000, focusing on performers of laïkó (popular music originating in the 1950s and 1960s). I concentrate on new wave laïkó (emergent in the 1980s) and its interaction with regional Greek “folk” musics, rembetika (originally “Oriental” songs from the Piraeus underworld from around 1900 that developed in various forms up to the 1950s), and global pop, rock, jazz, and rap.