Talk:Rebetiko

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Contents

[edit] Reason for Redirect: Google Test

  • 48,500 for ρεμπέτικα
  • 12,700 for ρεμπέτικο

I'm thinking we should switch it to having the plural be the main article, and the singular being the redirect. --Jpbrenna 19:14, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

Updated Google Test
  • Results 1 - 10 of about 44,200 for ρεμπέτικα. (0.27 seconds)<---Greek Winner
  • Results 1 - 10 of about 13,200 for ρεμπέτικο. (0.27 seconds)
  • Results 1 - 10 of about 43,400 for rebetika. (0.51 seconds)
  • Results 1 - 10 of about 17,600 for rembetika. (0.04 seconds)
  • Results 1 - 10 of about 1,810 for rempetika. (0.58 seconds)
  • Results 1 - 10 of about 74,300 for rebetiko. (0.14 seconds)
  • Results 1 - 10 of about 117,000 for rembetiko. (0.21 seconds) <---Overall Winner
  • Results 1 - 10 of about 1,370 for rempetiko. (0.43 seconds)
If we went solely by Google Tests, this article would be entitled rembetiko. If we went solely by Greek Google tests; however, the plural would win. --Jpbrenna 05:07, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Omissions & inaccuracies

These aren't exhaustive, but I'm listing them here as things that need to be attended to; other editors should feel free to add their own entries (though please don't remove anything unless the work has been done, or a reason has been given):

[edit] Omissions

  1. The origins of rembetika in cafe aman and smyrniotika.
  2. The rôle of rembetika in politics (and especially World War II).
  3. Laws relating specifically to the rembetes and their culture.
  4. Details of popular instrumentation, and the development of the form (see below).
  5. Effects on later Greek music (especially laiki and the New Composers).
  6. The U.S. experience, especially the relationships between emigrant rembetes and both jazz and klezmer.
  7. A list of prominent composers, musicians, and singers would be nice.
  8. Non-Greek language rebetika (Turkish, Ladino) and the necessary multilingualism of early performers
  9. The importance of Istanbul in rebetika. Though it's fashionable to talk about Smyrnaika, some of the most famous rebetika performers of all time, including Rosa Eskenazi, were based primarily in Istanbul before moving to Greece. eliotbates (talk) 10:49, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Corrections

  1. The bouzouki and baglamas were later arrivals, though they certainly became closely associated with rembetika. More usual at the beginning were laouto, clarino, and violin.
  2. The lyrics of the very early recordings were also bowdlerised — it wasn't just the later ones.
  3. The reference to opium dens is puzzling. Surely it should say hashish? (Anonymous by paranoia.)
The Greek article said literally, opium dens. They may have meant a more general "drug-den." I understand that hashsish was the drug of choice, but I wouldn't be surprised if a little opium made its in too. I need to finish translating the Greek article.
Presumably an article by someone opposed to the goings on in tekkedes? I'm translating a book about hasiklidikes (very slowly) and see some reference to cocaine and heroin, besides hashish, but none to opium. (Anonymous by paranoia.)

[edit] Discussion

This is all just off the top of my head, and my own relevant books are all in boxes in the garage waiting for it to be converted into a library (kochinin Befti — and that gives a clue as to where I learnt my Greek). Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 14:10, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Page move

I moved this page back to Rebetico, as there was a complaint about the move to Rebetika, on the grounds that there was no consensus to move it. I also checked Google: there are 43,400 entries for rebetika, and 74,200 for rebetiko — not that this is a sufficient reason, but I took it into account. It also seemed odd to use the plural as the title, though there may have been a good reason. The editor who wants to move it should try to get the agreement of the other editors on the page first. Many thanks, SlimVirgin (talk) 04:33, May 25, 2005 (UTC)

You're Googling in Latin-alphabet characters. Try Googling in Greek.

--Jpbrenna 04:49, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

This is the English Wikipedia, and anyway, Google shouldn't determine the issue. Please try to get the agreement of the other editors before making any further moves. SlimVirgin (talk) 04:53, May 25, 2005 (UTC)

I must say that I've never heard anyone refer to it as "rebetiko"; the term is generally used in the plural, and the Wikipedia policy is to use the name that's in general use. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 13:21, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

It was Arberor who complained about it, if that helps. SlimVirgin (talk) 15:25, May 25, 2005 (UTC)
Thanks — I've leeft him a message asking him to join in the discussion here. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 15:40, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

I'm not exactly expert in Greek, but I use the word Rebetiko to mean the style or musical genre. Rebetika is what I say when I am refering to the body of work as a whole. But that's just me, and I am fairly often wildly wrong about things. I would say leave it as it is and concentrate on the other things that need to be done. Which I mean to get on with as soon as I have time. The Real Walrus 09:23, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

It's refered to as "To Rempetiko tragoudi" - Ρεμπετικο τραγουδι or simply the "rempetiko" - Το ρεμπετικο as well as "ta rempetika tragoudia" (rempetika songs) or simply "rempetika". Both are correct and widely used.

[edit] Excerpt from the Music of Greece page

Popular music

Rembétika was Greece's first popular music, arising in the urban areas of Greece. Its popularity has waxed and waned, as has its relationship with the government. Newer forms of popular music include laïkó and éntekhno. [edit]

Rembétika

Rembétika evolved from traditions of the urban poor. Refugees and drug-users, criminals and the itinerant, the earliest rembétika musicians were scorned by mainstream society. They sang heartrending tales of drug abuse, prison and violence, usually accompanied by the boxoúki, a sort of lute derived from the Byzantine tambourás and related to the Turkish saz. [edit]

Turkish origins

By the beginning of the 20th century, music-cafés were popular in Istanbul and Smyrna, primarily owned by Greeks, alongside Jews and Armenians. The bands were led by a female vocalist, typically, and included a violin and a sandoúri. The improvised songs typically exclaimed aman aman, which led to the name amanédhes or café-aman. Musicians of this period included Marika Papagika, Agapios Tomboulis, Rosa Eskenazi and Rita Abatzi.

In 1923, many ethnic Greeks from Asia Minor fled to Greece as a result of the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922). They settled in poor neighborhoods in Pireás, Thessaloníki and Athens. Many of these immigrants were highly educated, and included songwriter Vangelis Papazoglou and Panayiotis Toundas, composer and leader of Odeon Records' Greek subsidiary.

One Turkish tradition that came with the Greek migrants was the tekés, or hashish dens. Groups of men would sit in a circle and smoke hashish from a hookah, and improvised music of various kinds was common. Out of this music scene came two of the earliest legends of modern Greek history, Artemis and Markos Vamvakaris. They played in a quartet with Batis and Stratos Payioumtzis. Vamvakaris became perhaps the first star of Greek music after beginning a solo career.

The above is exerpted for convenience. If you go to the page, you'll not that just below it, they refer to inconsistently refer to "laiko", then to "indiyoftika". At the top, they discuss dhimotika. There needs to be a consensus reached fast, and based on the general Greek usage, I would go with plurals for all genres except Neo Kyma -- which is, of course, a literal translation of "New Wave" in the singular. --Jpbrenna 04:49, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
"One Turkish tradition" etc, sort of suggests that the Greeks were suddenly corrupted, while they had in fact been growing their own for a very long time, and smoking it as well. Markos refers to cannabis being cultivated on Syros, for instance. The Real Walrus 15:44, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Protected

Jp, you can't change the name of the article in the text to Rebetika, while leaving the title as Rebetiko. I've protected this page until you and the other editors have decided on a title. Also, can you tell, when you moved the page, did you do it by cutting and pasting, because we seem to have lost the edit history? SlimVirgin (talk) 05:38, May 25, 2005 (UTC)

I am pretty sure that I did it by going to "Move" after breaking the redirect, not by copy/paste. That's usually what I do: I did it earlier today on another article in the Achaemenid dynasty series. I'll check my edit history and see though. --Jpbrenna 07:08, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Transcript of from Yahoo! Msgr Offline Convo

Verbatim - except IM name withheld to protect her privacy. She is a ntive Greek-speaker, fluent in English, with a degree from Oxford (which you might think would have given her more polish, but that's for a different discussion)

damn. the more I think of it the more I get confused!
hmm, I think to rempetiko/ta rempetika is almost interchangable. But if you were to say laiko, you'd :only mean a particular song
but it depends on the context, so I can't say for certain
I'd say the canonical use would be the plural
usually the singular needs something following
most often tragoudi, or more rarely palko (scene)
laiko tragoudi, or laika. To rempetiko, or rempetika

--Jpbrenna 18:45, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Page move

I've been holding off from editing until there's some consensus on my suggestions and the article title. As there seem to be two voices here arguing for a change, and none arguing against (I've twice contacted the person who complained, asking him to argue his case here, but he seems not to want to), I'll make the move myself over the weekend. I'll allow another day or so to give people a chance to oppose.

Then, if there's no objection to my suggestions above, I'll get started on some of them. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 08:21, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

Beware Greeks bearing articles! Look what they've done: Ρεμπέτικη μουσική, very cleverly supporting neither dog in this fight. Actually, I'd go with that, except "Rebetic Music" and "Lay Music (for laika)" would sound rather stilted in English.

--Jpbrenna 17:02, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Sandbox - Multilingual Coordination

Rebetika is the name for a type of music that originated at the margins of the Greek-speaking world, later widely influencing the emergence of laika.

The music itself emerged largely in the urban centers of Greece - in Athens & Peiraeus, in Thessaloniki and on Siros.

[edit] Material Move

The Greek article provides an excellent base to work from. I am currently translating it. Below is material (some of it added by me before I discovered the Greek article) that didn't fit into the more chronological structure of the Greek version. When the translation is done, we can mine this for material to include in the appropriate sections. --Jpbrenna 21:13, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Rebetes

Rebetika are the songs of the Greek underworld, sung by the so-called rebetes (Greek: ρεμπέτης). Rebetes were the unconventional people who lived outside the social order. They first appeared after the Greek war of Independence of 1821. They rejected many traditional mores regarding marriage, courtship, dress, speech, and the work ethic. They often went so far as to reject the use of umbrellas and hand-holding with girlfriends. Many smoked hashish and considered a prison record a badge of honor. Despite this often anti-social exterior, many rebetes displayed a social conscience and helped the poor and weak. They spoke a rich slang derived from a variety of sources, accompanied with the ebullient gestures common to the Mediterranean.


Many rebetika songs originated in prison or in hookah houses. There, the rebetes would sing with a slow, hoarse voice – usually the result of heavy tobacco or or hashish use, but sometimes purposely affected – one after the other. Every singer added a distich that often had no connection to the previous verse. There was no refrain. The singing was often accompanied by a bouzouki or baglamas.

By 1955 when Greece began to produce long play records in large numbers, the original rebetika had vanished. The production of the rebetika songs is done without the spirit or the complicity of the underworld. Lyrics include refrains and are not necessarily hashish-inspired. Still, many songs still included an echo of earlier themes: Vassilis Tsitsanis's To Vapori Ap' Tin Persia begins:

Το βαπόρι απ' την Περσία
πιάστηκε στην Κορινθία
Τόννοι έντεκα γεμάτο
με χασίσι μυρωδάτο
The ship from Persia,
went down off Corinth,
It was filled with eleven tons
of sweet-smelling hashish

[edit] Non-existent sections, etc.

When someone wants to add a section, they can, but a host of section headings with no text just looks messy and ugly (a stub has to have some content). The "list of songs" is surely absurd; it would run into the thousands, at least. If someone wants to make a separate list, they're welcome — but it would be a quixotic enterprise. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 7 July 2005 11:48 (UTC)

The stubs will be filled in soon. They will help my friend, who isn't too familiar with Wiki markup, to do her thing more easily. As for the list of songs, that wasn't my doing. It should be a separate list. --Jpbrenna 7 July 2005 12:51 (UTC)

I merged the zeibekiko and hasapiko stubs into this article. It seemed a logical spot; neither form seemed to have enough substance to be its own article. Hope this helps - Her Pegship 20:08, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

I've left a message at your Talk page. Neither dance is unique to rembetika, and if they are to be merged into a larger article (which does seem a reasonable move), I think that it should be something more general, such as Greek traditional dance, or Traditional Greek dance, or Traditional dances of Greece, or something like that. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 22:04, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Mulitilingual coordination

Is on hold. My friend has expressed reservations about some of the things asserted in the Greek article. She also feels that the list of performer bios will only be filled in by some "absolute fanatic of obscure rebetika figures." Little does she realize that is exactly the sort of person we rely on to get things done on Wikipedia ;) --Jpbrenna 8 July 2005 20:16 (UTC)

Correction. The material she has trouble with is in the English article, not the Greek. Also, she objects to me using quotes around my paraphrase of her comments, so please ignore them. I know you all are beginning to think that "she" is a figment of my imagination or manifestation of multiple personality disorder, but I assure you she does exist, and hopefully will soon prove her existence by doing some translation. --Jpbrenna 22:42, 9 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Dances

The article currently claims that all rembetika dances were either zeimbekiko or hasapiko; surely this is wrong? Of course those were by far the most common, but I've certainly heard tsifteteli and karsilama (and sometimes hasaposerviko). Of course, modern tourist versions are full of syrtakis, but we can ignore them... --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 21:17, 20 September 2005 (UTC)


True, as well as "sousta"

[edit] Rebetes

The introduction says that the first rebetes appeared after the revolution of 1821.I'm not sure but i think that they first appeared between the refugees of the Asia minor disaster in 1922.... that's when the songs themselves first appeared in any case, so i think it makes more sense...Padem 08:31, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Categories

There is no mention of Rebetiko in the list of musical genres, but I can not see how to add it. <anon>

[edit] Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Loukas Daralas

Loukas Daralas is mentioned here as a signficant person in this area. If somebody is familiar with him, you wish to add something to the article, and the AFD discussion. --Rob 11:22, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Questions

Can someone provide me with a source before I remove the following claim:
"They first appeared after the Greek War of Independence of 1821." Miskin 22:41, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

There is nothing serious in the literature about the subject to support this claim. During and after the years of the 1821 Revolution, Greek songs were almost all folk songs, demotika. Rebetiko was born out of the urbanisation of mainland Greece in the early years of the 20th century combined with the waves of immigrants who came from Asia Minor after the Greek defeat by the Turks, in the 1920s, and brought with them various musical idioms. The themes, the instruments and the verses of the Rebetika bear out that the birth of Rebetiko came about from the meeting of indigenous, Greek music and Asia Minor music, with mostly the latter defining the genre. -The Gnome (talk) 13:01, 19 November 2007 (UTC)


"Many early rebetic songs were about drugs, especially Hashish which led Rebetiko to be criminalized." I think you are mistaken, but have no references to back myself up. Rebetiko was criminalized by the fascist Metaxas because he wanted Greek music to be like Western Classical music, but Rebetiko was and still is based on scales (dromoi) derived from Ottoman Makams and other middle eastern music. Hashish was probably made illegal for different reasons, such as America exporting its war on Drugs. The Real Walrus 14:13, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Better opening paragraph needed

I'm marking with bold my suggestions herebelow for the opening paragraph. The current definition is not accurate and not well written either, in my opinion. (The case for rebetika appearing "after 1821" for instance is baseless.)

{ Rebetika were the songs of the Greek urban underground, written or sung by the so-called rebetes (Greek: ρεμπέτης rebetis, plural: ρεμπέτες rebetes). Rebetes were unconventional people who lived mostly at the margins of society or even outside it, as outlaws. The main pioneers of rebetika have been the immigrants from the Greek diaspora of Asia Minor.

The songs, often compared to genres like American blues, are full of grief, passion, romance, and bitterness. They are generally slow, melancholic songs about the misfortunes and the affairs of the heart of simple ordinary men. Many early rebetika songs were about drug use, especially hashish, which led Rebetiko to be criminalized during the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas in 1936. Not until 1947, when Manos Hadjidakis, through a series of lectures and articles, introduced rebetika to a wider audience were these songs accepted as a legitimate music style. Damianakos Stathis noted that the rebetika songs of the first period were mostly the singing expression of the lumpenproletariat. A lot of rebetika songs are for dancing, zeibekiko and hasapiko being very common, but they also include tsifteteli, karsilamas and other dance styles. } -The Gnome 19:31, 12 November 2007 (UTC)