A new book about rebetiko song and more by my friend and collaborator in Rebet Asker, Leonidas Kioussis.
''Rebetiko song is a specific, distinct genre of Greek song that has existed for a century. It is found to be a functional, contemporary body of artistic taste and recreational preference, shaping conscious and subconscious behaviours, as well as the adoption of values. “Internal” analyses of its value, its legends and its characterisations, which do not include the environment in which it is born and has developed to this day, lead nowhere. The entirety of this environment is the period of globalisation.
The people of this period experience it through their inner world and their subconscious and conscious human qualities. This collective unconscious, through which the Greek people participate in its various periods, has its foundations in their collective actions. Through 1821, 1922 and 1940, and their “noes” that were detrimental to globalisation, they shaped their subconscious. In the interval between 1922 and 1940, this rebellion, these “noes”, acquired lyrics and music from the lower productive class of the time, rising into art and an exploration of all aspects of its everyday life. ‘’
Leonidas Kioussis
What kind of globalisation was taking place in 1821, 1922 and 1940, and how exactly do the events of Greek history in those years constitute a “no”/rebellion against globalisation? I’m curious to understand exactly what the author means by globalisation, because it seems to me that words lose their meaning when we use them like this.
Globalisation was what was happening in the world economy from roughly 1990 to 2010 — let’s call it neoliberalism, broadly speaking. The events from the collapse of actually existing socialism to the international financial crisis are recent, and those of us who are 30 and over remember them. There are also several parallels with what was happening 100 years earlier: the old liberalism of the period before 1914. In both cases, economic liberalism also had cultural consequences. Certainly, the old liberalism, at least in the Eastern Mediterranean, does not go back as far as 1821. Whatever liberalisation was brought about by the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca was a long way from the conditions prevailing in our region in 1908, or even in 1878, and there is certainly no resemblance whatsoever to 1998.
The First World War was the complete collapse of the old liberalism. What was at stake in 1922 was where the border between Greece and Turkey would lie, and the fate of the populations who found themselves on the “wrong” side of the border. The old global system had already collapsed when the war broke out, and the new one that gradually began to take shape from 1919 onwards was anything but globalised: it marked the end of the empires of Central and Eastern Europe — the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires — and their replacement by nation-states.
1940 was a period clearly distinct both from the era of old liberalism and from that of globalised neoliberalism. Even the Americans came to believe in state intervention after the Wall Street Crash and adopted Keynesianism.
I’m not saying this to diminish the significance of events such as those of 1821 or 1940. Greece was ahead of its time and on the “right side of history”, as the cliché goes.