Both, of course. Each where it is useful.
…etc. (the whole post)
For years now, I have tended towards a view very close to Loukas’s:
We have population movements caused by refugee flows and by internal (and external) migration. Masses of people move from villages to cities. They abandon the rural culture in which they themselves and all the countless generations of their ancestors had grown up, and try / are forced to integrate into the culture of the cities – a culture which they not only did not possess and found foreign, strange and hostile, but which had not even been definitively formed within the very cities that received them, since these too were constantly undergoing upheavals and ruptures in their social structure.
In his village, the future migrant / refugee had a musical code through which he expressed himself. This code was shared by all his fellow villagers, perhaps also by people from neighbouring villages (otherwise there might have been minor differences), and was certainly related to that of the more distant inhabitants of the wider region, and so on – and, deep down, was no different from all the corresponding codes throughout Greece; only the surface varied from region to region.
He knew this code, expressed himself through it, and carried it with him to the city.
Except that here he now had other things to express. In the pre-modern village, the individual was inextricably bound to the community, which, thanks to centuries of collective experience, had found ways of regulating its own life and, to a great extent, the lives of its members as well. Knowledge was primarily inherited and empirical; it consisted of certain fundamental, immutable truths.
Folk songs speak more about eternal, immutable truths (at least as they saw them) than about individuals. The names of their heroes, when they are not symbolic (Areti, Evdokia), are usually indefinite (Giannos and Marigo – that is, anyone; in other words, we are telling a story that did not happen in a specific place and time, but is simply always liable to happen to anyone, in this form or a similar one). Even historical songs, which refer to specific events or people, often elevate the incidental into the eternal (for example, by repeating stock verses from older songs, which the listener knows to be older and thus connects the specific event with the general truth).
Here in the city, though, the tough guy has to fend for himself. The community is not there for him to rely on, but even if it were, its collective empirical wisdom would be useless, since conditions here are entirely different and unprecedented. In the city, the ordinary working-class person is forced to turn more towards himself. He becomes individualised. From then on, his songs speak of individuals who face various situations from the real lives of the urban working classes.
The beautiful women in the songs are no longer “a slender lass”; they are specific women with names, backgrounds and professions, flesh-and-blood women.
But the code in which he expresses all this remains the one he knew from his homeland: the same traditional poetic metres (almost exclusively iambic and trochaic), with their rhymes; the same musical modes and rhythms.
Of course, we do not have songs with rebetiko (urban popular) themes that are, musically speaking, say, Epirote, Pontic or Cretan. (And if such songs did exist somewhere and I simply do not know about them, they remained confined to particular circles and did not have an overall influence.) We do have certain specific forms, chiefly the various nine-beat rhythms, which, among all the traditions of Greek folk music, point mainly to western Asia Minor. There must be some explanation for why people originating from anywhere in the Greek world ended up collectively adopting these forms rather than those of some other region, but the fact remains that the way these tunes work with these couplets is exactly how tunes with a different sound from Crete, Thrace or more or less anywhere else would work with the same couplets.
To sum up:
Early urban popular song is musically rooted in pre-existing local folk traditions. Its distinctiveness lies in what it expresses: the individuality discovered by the former inhabitant of the pre-modern village when he comes to integrate into the lower strata of urban society.
