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Late one night during the Metaxa dictatorship the 17 year- old Mihalis Yenitsaris was making his way home in the Athens/Piraeus area of Greece. He was, in his own words "stoned, a little demon with horns". He was called over by a policeman in big boots. The policeman looked at him and asked him if he was a hashish smoker. " What’s that you’re carrying?" he asked. "A bouzouki! Don’t you know that it’s forbidden to play bouzouki at this time of night?" He then grabbed Mihalis’ bouzouki and smashed it to bits. Mihalis was a tad miffed and head butted the policeman, thus earning himself his first prison sentence of six months. This is the very stuff of rembetika.
Rembetika, being a Greek phenomenon, is inevitably, difficult to define and full of contradictions. It is a style of music that has been referred to as ‘the Greek Blues’. Its roots, like those of blues, run through a number of times and places. There is clearly a trace of Byzantine music in it. Its more recent roots are to be found in the Greek prisons of the 19th century where music was banned. Prisoners made their own instruments, such as the baglama, which was played quietly so that the guards could not hear it. Its heyday, it is generally agreed, was the 1920’s and 30’s. The consequences of Greece’s failure to conquer Turkey in 1922 were the exchanges of populations between the two countries. Between 1.5 and 2 million Greek speaking residents of Turkey became refugees, mainly crowding into urban ghettos around Athens, Piraeus and Thessaloniki. Life was hard in this community of the ‘sub-proletariat’. What has been described as ‘a new music’ came out of this experience and along with it a style of life.
‘Rembetes’ or ‘Mangas’ were socially excluded. According to experts, ‘mangas’ can be translated as ‘wide-boy’ or ‘spiv’. The photographs from the late 20’s and early 30’s show men in gangster style sharp suits that Al Capone and co. would have not found unfamiliar. Although some claim that Mangas were peaceful people and ‘Gentlemen’, (where have we heard that one before?), many carried knives. To some being a Mangas was a vocation: they did not marry and preferred prostitutes. They would meet in cafes and tekes (hash dens,) to smoke hash, make music and dance.
The authorities tried to stamp them out. Following one raid on a teke Mihalis Yenitsaris was sentenced to 2 years in prison and 3 years in exile on an island, (which he recalls in a lovely song.) The Rembetes’ music leaked out into the local populations and their suppression by the authorities aided their appeal to Greece’s urban working class. It was a limited music of resistance.
The music is usually made by a small group of musicians playing some combination of the bouzouki, baglama, guitar, zither, accordion and oud. The singers have gravely voices, presumably the result of overdoing it with the nargiles, (water pipe.) The Mangas created their own secret language which makes translation of their lyrics for one with limited key stage 1 Greek almost impossible. However, I am reliably told that most of the songs are about hash smoking prostitutes, prison and the hardship of life. Cool or what?
Well I like it! I came to it crablike as I pursued the Great Greek Fantasy, (GGF,) through which I indulge my petit bourgeois tendencies in the name of coping with my alienation. Essentially this means that I am likely to get very excited about anything Greek from the seas to the plastic salt pots. This is not to say that I lose all my critical faculties but I found Greek music easy to like. Then one day, Channel Four had a documentary about Rembetika, which, to the regret of many friends and acquaintances, I taped. The tale of Rembetika was narrated by tight buttocks George Dalaras. He, through his own musical abilities and his part in the revival of Rembetika has become a superstar. He was part of new generation, who, in the late 60’s and 70’s rediscovered Rembetika. That this should coincide with the repressive Colonels’ Junta in Greece and the march of hippies in the West should be of no surprise. Songs of rebellion were embraced by the oppressed as a form of resistance.
To what extent there has ever been ‘working class culture’ is open to debate. Rembetika has been seen in Greece as a music that was popular with the working class. It became synonymous with resistance but seems to have had very little real political content. Its significance as a music of resistance is now only historical. Its incorporation into the mainstream came relatively late. For the petit bourgeoisie it is a curiosity and the working classes are more and more the victims of popular global pap culture oozing in from the west.
If you like blues and are happy to cope with a bit of the East, you’ll probably like Rembetika. If you want to find out more there is stuff on the net or better still get yourself up Green Lanes in North London, to the Trehantiri Record Shop which claims to have the world’s biggest selection of Greek music, including a lot of Rembetika. There are numerous compilations which are a good start – ‘History of Rembetika Vols. 1- 4,398’, ‘Banned Rembetika 1927 –1935’, ‘Rembetika of the World’ and much more. Then, if you develop a taste for it, buy some by your favourite artists. From a rain lashed flat In Exeter it is easy to get romantic notions about the life of the Mangas. Mihalis Yenitsaris is one of my favourite Rembetes. In one song he asks that when he dies, they stand his coffin in the corner and blow hashish smoke over him so that he can enter the other world stoned. This is particularly poignant, as in the video he explains how he would smoke his nargiles in the morning, the afternoon and at night every day until a few months previously when he had a throat operation.