Rebetika and popular Greek songs about the pain of death and the vanity of this world.
Authentic 78 rpm recordings 1935 - 1956

Singing is a singular means of entertainment and expression, a creative force that is directly accessible by the poorer sectors of society. Musicologists agree that the earliest songs were created in the outdoors as a way of synchronising group labour and later evolved as accompaniments to events such as weddings, fetes and celebrations of local or national heroes, and also to express love.
As societies changed and the economic conditions that led entire social groups into poverty began to emerge, the subject-matter of songs also changed focus and new elements were introduced into the art. Thus, for example, the shanty towns of America produced rhythm ‘n’ blues. In Cuba, the son was born, in Portugal it was the fado, in Argentina the tango and in Piraeus it was the rebetiko.
The evolutionary course of all of these genres is pretty much the same. At first they were received by musical and social establishments as being songs of the underworld and unworthy of being viewed as art. They also shared common themes. Love, death, poverty, distress and everyday troubles were the dominant themes of the lyrics, accompanied by a general disdain for all manner of authority. The bohemian lifestyle of the songs’ protagonists, contempt for money and all material possessions, and the tragic end that inevitably befalls those on the fringes of society are also common motifs.

The origins of rebetiko

Rebetiko songs began to emerge in areas that experienced the first large concentrations of urban populations, such as Smyrna, Constantinople and Thessaloniki. That was where, as far back as the mid-19th century, this Greek genre that catered to the needs of the newly introduced populations, the urban song, was heard.
Rebetiko, in its earliest manifestations, arose from the first generation of internal migrants moving from the countryside to the city. The characteristic sound that differentiates it from typical popular, or demotic, music is the multifaceted nature of the social groups it lent expression to, in contrast to demotic music which came from close-knit agricultural societies and which could be defined by local idioms, common ethnic roots, etc. If, for example, we were to study the social evolution of Smyrna, we would observe that other than the native populations, whose origins are lost in the centuries, the city also had large numbers of settlers from the broader Greek-speaking region. The same goes for Constantinople, or present-day Istanbul. Furthermore the presence of minority populations of Muslims, as well as minorities from Armenia, Jews and merchants, diplomats and military personnel from the West was more acutely felt in Smyrna. Together they composed a diverse minority group. Within this great melting-pot, all the different forms of cultural expression were given room to grow. Thus the musicians of the Greek majority were called upon to represent this multicultural mosaic of different ethnicities.
Expressing just this cultural variety is what gave birth to the first urban songs which, naturally, belonged to many different categories as they were first and foremost influenced by local traditions and then by a broader cultural spectrum which begins in the European-style music of the Ionian Islands and spans all the way to the music of the Near East.
The years between 1850 and 1922 can be defined as a period of coexistence, co-evolution and communication between the genres, during which the younger of the two – rebetiko – emerged from the older styles. However, its final form arose from a series of influences related to specific features and factors that came from the Greek territories.
Rebetiko was deeply influenced by the music of the church, which The songs of Smyrna and Constantinople – considered the first points of origin of a Greek urban culture in modern history (along with the Ionian Islands, which developed in parallel but also in the opposite direction) – travelled to the free Greek world via the first groups of musicians to tour the territories in the second half of the 19th century. These songs arrived in all the major provincial cities and, of course, to Athens and Piraeus. A plethora of music cafes (kafodeia, santour or café-aman) were created around this new musical genre that had flooded Greek urban centres and was embraced by the broad working-class, among others, despite the outcry from European-minded intellectuals who feared the return of a Turkish cultural occupation.
The 1922 Asia Minor disaster and the ensuing Treaty of Lausanne was followed by extensive population exchanges between Greece and Turkey. Thousands of Greeks from Asia Minor moved to Greek cities, bringing with them their musical traditions.
“Rebetiko, therefore, was established by immigration. From that point on all it needed was to be cleansed from within: foreign elements had to go, the subject-matter needed to be adapted to more popular themes, vulgarities had to be got rid of and the disparate voices had to merged in such a way so that rebetiko could spread out even further.” (Historical and aesthetic development of rebetiko, by Dinos Christianopoulos, Diagonios, 1961, Issue 1).

Rebetiko’s jump from the confines of prison to the open horizons of the cafes and nightclubs of migrants’ quarters in big cities marked its first qualitative leap. From songs of the underground, rebetiko was now poised to conquer the proletarian masses of the migrants’ quarters, whose residents formed an important part of the core that would contribute to the shifts in the tight-knit merchant/land-owner character of the Greek economy. The change in the quality of the music was not immediately felt. It was in fact a slow and tortured process, experiencing the same slow and tortured pace of the economy in Greece’s biggest urban centres.

The subject-matter of rebetiko is much the same as all other genres of music, such as love, but it is also about bravado. At first the dominant themes were love and drugs – prison – lawlessness. Gradually as rebetiko became more popular with the masses, the songs with more provocative themes became sidelined and more subjects related to society at large began to emerge, with love, naturally, always holding the top spot.
Rebetiko songs have been written about love, drugs (cocaine, etc.) and drug dens, prisons, family relations (such as mothers), death, leaving the homeland, politics (satires), the military and war, the “small” things of everyday life, exotic places, poverty, particular people, work, illness, prostitution, the sadness and small laments of life, etc.