ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses on the process by which a certain model of popular music came to be related to an idea of national authenticity. Franco Fabbri has looked at how genres of popular music shape its production and consumption, analysing their function as sets of semiotic, economic, behavioural, and social rules that evolve into codes and conventions. Genres arrange their own position in a more or less stable system familiar to both producers and consumers of music. The author explores document the emergence in both countries of similar genres which, even though they were an amalgam of different styles and histories, succeeded in producing a concrete genealogy and system for Greek and French national popular music. They introduced a semi-mythological idealization of a unity of music with poetry which was not analysed but only reiterated as a critical fixation. The idea of the high-popular is linked to the larger issue of cultural hierarchy in the twentieth century.
