ABSTRACT
The ways in which a younger generation of the 1960s negotiated with the system of popular music proposed by the high-popular will be surveyed with special reference to the work of the Greek songwriter Dionysis Savvopoulos. The singer-songwriter Savvopoulos provides a powerful example of an artist struggling to assert his position in the cultural system while also absorbing the sociopolitical context of the 1960s, which in Greece took a dramatic turn after the dictatorship of 1967. Savvopoulos's later work would challenge more directly, as we shall see, both culture industry practices and the artistic authority of the high-popular. But for the moment he was mapping out the territory: he both complied with the industry and presented himself as part of the high-popular, while emitting a dissonant sound that could open the space to rethink ideology. While Mikes Theodorakis praised the authenticity and topicality of popular culture, Savvopoulos's poetics focused on the opposite, a well-organized, strategic mimicry.
