The behavioural sciences first engaged with songs now called rebetika in the interwar years, when research into the psychopathology of cannabis use in Greece noted the musical accompaniment to smoking rituals. The post-war sequel to that early skirmish took an ominous turn in a claim attributed to the president of the first Panhellenic Psychiatry Congress that a recent upsurge in mental illness among Greeks was linked to the popularity of melancholic bouzouki music. Rebetika were finally indicted by name as a threat to the Greek national psyche in 1977 at the height of a rebetika revival which had exalted rebetes (the antinomian roisterers feted in the songs) into role-models for everyone up to the imminent prime minister, Andreas Papandreou. In defiance of the Zeitgeist, the psychiatrist N. Papayiannis revealed an unsavoury cocktail of personality disorders lurking within the song-texts (‘Η ψυχοπαθολογία του ρεμπέτικου’, Ο Πολίτης 12, 1977: 46–52). The clinical picture featured conditions ranging from sadomasochism to schizophrenia, all readily traceable via repressed eroticism to an unresolved Oedipus complex and overprotective mothers. Electra was also on the loose in rebetika, but unlike ancient Greek drama, the drug-addled maundering of the rebetes and their undignified zeybekikos dance offered no catharsis, only self-destruction. Unsurprisingly rebetophiles remonstrated vigorously with Dr Papayiannis in subsequent issues of the same journal, and the whole discipline of psychology was impugned as conniving with the forces of reaction to disguise the political causes of Greek problems. New and equally rancorous controversies soon preoccupied rebetologists in the decades of PASOK-sponsored ‘rebetomania’ that followed, but it was still with some foreboding that I attended an international conference on rebetika convened by the Psychology Department of the University of Crete in April 1996. In the event, with Papandreou now on his deathbed, none of the delegates saw fit to pathologize rebetiá as a form of psychosis. The in-house offerings were bent on extracting insights into the ‘ego-ecology’ of contemporary consumers of rebetika from the statistical analysis of survey-data.
It is with current conceptualisations of rebetika as revealed by surveys that Daniel Koglin is also primarily concerned in Greek Rebetiko from a Psychocultural Perspective: Same Songs Changing Minds. The somewhat delphic subtitle is apparently intended to point up (inter alia) the paradox that rebetika cannot remain the same, however exactly performers imitate historic prototypes, because of what inevitably occurs between the ears of listeners — who include Turks as well as Greeks in Koglin's surveys. The book is indebted to the aforementioned Cretan research for validation of some of its methodological assumptions and for the key concept charmolypi (‘sweet sorrow’), of which more presently. In contrast with Papayiannis’ censorious psychopathology, Koglin's analysis is free of the asperity which still stalks rebetology. The book is also exceptional in this field for its unstintingly rigorous attention to detail and nuance, in which the author displays exemplary perfectionism and flair. And yet it is a remarkably ‘laid-back’ book: readers are invited to tackle the five main chapters in any order they wish, and the arguments are allowed to amble ‘in a spiral fashion’ (20) through detours, leisurely digressions and periodic reprises. Every step is cautiously hedged with disclaimers, reservations and a devotion to transparency that borders on self-deprecation where the author admits to indulging himself with ‘loose thinking’ (20, 187) and a ‘too lengthy excursion’ (89). The same authorial tactic is deployed in presenting the rather lame findings of some laborious computations: ‘the questionnaire data showed that — surprise, surprise — fans had a greater average liking for the songs (1.8) than non-fans (2.5)’ (163). Whether such disarming self-irony rescues the overall user-friendliness of this very expensive book is a moot point. In the same spirit of qui s'accuse s'excuse, this reviewer must now risk appearing churlish by wondering aloud as to the need for a further disclaimer along the lines: ‘Readers interested in rebetika rather than a statistician's picnic can stop after Chapter 3’. Chapter 4 (‘Semantic space of rebetiko’), by far the book's longest, is a quantification romp replete with graphs, tables, figures, a bubble chart and a scree plot that will surely enrapture measurement-addicts, numerologists and anyone undeterred by sentences such as ‘In analogy to the eigenvalue, the communality is the sum of squares of factor loadings for each row of the structure matrix’ (171) or unfazed by the recourse to algebra to quantify the distance between the concepts ‘rebetiko’ and ‘halk music’ (184). Whilst the old butcher's maxim ‘ο κιμάς κόπτεται ενώπιον του πελάτου’ is assuredly as valid (metaphorically) in rebetology as in Piraeus meat market, pace the shade of Markos Vamvakaris and other genii loci, I would gladly have traded the pages lavished on the explication of (often nugatory) number-grinding for a larger typeface in the remainder. The barest statistical highlights would surely have sufficed in this book, as opposed to its earlier incarnation as a doctoral dissertation, particularly as the number of rebetika involved is of necessity exceedingly modest — the total sample of 6 songs (by just 3 composers) stands in egregious disproportion to the tsunami of statistical analysis it triggers. Inevitably, the selection of songs is highly contestable (e.g. core themes such as violence are not represented), and there is endless scope for all kinds of slippage and mismatch to skew the data and vitiate their correlation, as the author honourably admits. Nor are sceptics likely to be won over retrospectively by the meagre results of so much earnest ado: with very few exceptions the findings range from the underwhelming to the totally predictable. Among the least banal is a confirmation of the ‘ambivalent feel’ to the genre. Koglin traces this in his 36 Athenian respondents to a ‘sweet sorrow’ or ‘joyful grief’ ultimately rooted in Orthodox spirituality (so that rebetika arguably mediate between increasing Greek secularization and religiosity), and in his 18 Istanbulites, to a nostalgia for the Ottoman past of their city (cf. Orhan Pamuk's hüzün, the Istanbul blues). These moods challenge the discredited myths instilled by nationalist governments at both ends of the Aegean. A related finding is the alleged ‘multistability’ behind the ambivalences in rebetika — one might have mistaken the clash of contraries for mere cognitive dissonance. But overall, apart from some novel relabelling and the metrics, the modicum of new insights yielded by ‘semantic differentiation’ is very modest indeed, and it is hard to share the author's professed amazement (130) that his labour-intensive tool of choice, Osgood's psychometrics, has largely been shunned from 1957 to date by ethnomusicologists.
An oasis amid the arid calculations of Chapter 4 can be found in the parenthetic typology of ‘fan types’ for rebetika (164 f.): ‘mangas fans’ identify with the protagonists of songs and try to live like them; they are not to be confused with shallow ‘pseudo-fans’, nor with ‘intellectual fans’ (alias ‘rebetologists’), nor ‘impressario fans’. Together they all form a complex ‘Rebetiko Nation’, local and global, on-line and off-line, with a collective identity that is celebrated in various forms of emotional release (168). I should now reassure all branches of this imagined community that even the resolutely innumerate among them will find much to enjoy in the book's Introduction, the warm-up Chapters 1–3 and parts of Chapter 5, albeit mostly in the form of refinement of existing knowledge. Methodological promiscuity being one of the boasts of this book, Koglin's qualitative observations on the songs and the associated lore still entail a fair amount of theoretical throat-clearing across several disciplines, but they are generally acute and sophisticated.
Chapter 1 (‘Telling tales’) offers a nuanced review of rebetology, noting that the songs are almost as much talked about as listened to and that disputes about rebetika tend to acquire a momentum of their own, almost oblivious to the object of debate (cf. Chapter 4!). Accordingly generic characteristics can be seen as ascribed to rebetika through verbal discourse rather than inhering in the songs themselves, whence some of the conspicuous ambiguity of the term. Chapter 2 (‘Performing rites’) pursues the ‘numinous undertones’ of the journalistic discourse into a thought-provoking discussion of rebetic religiosity (which might have been balanced by consideration of irreverent songs like Tsitsanis’ ‘Λιτανεία’) and an account of the associated rituals. The argument is not best served by the interpolation (65 f.) of a grotesque scene of ritual combat and sacramental ‘ophthalmophagy’ from the warped imagination of Petros Pikros, disgraced communist and author of the novel Toumbeki. . . (1927). Unaware of the title's all-important punctuation, Koglin translates it as ‘argot’, whereas the ellipses suggest a conspiratorial wink and pregnant pause, all better rendered as ‘Shtum. . .’. The claim that the excerpt illustrates how deeply religious imagery pervades rebetiko discourse is unconvincing; the scene is one of several parodic spoofs of religion in Pikros' implausible ‘Lumpenography’. More persuasive is the account of the ritual rebetiko glendi as a discursive complement to the previously discussed mythology (86 ff.). Its principal contemporary sites, rebetadika, are seen as a Foucaultian heterotopia, a themed musical playground where all ages and social classes can engage in ritualized dissipation. Every gesture refers to an idealized past and a code of conduct deemed more humane than the current norms for social life. The emotional texture and visceral impact of the rebetiko glendi allegedly amount to a quasi-religious experience, inasmuch as the choreographed spontaneity simultaneously reminds patrons of ‘their impotence in the face of overpowering might’. Reprising this theme later (202), Koglin attributes a therapeutic effect to rebetika, both cathartic and empowering, in contrast with Papayiannis’ diagnosis of forty years ago.
Chapter 3 gives an account of the popularity of rebetika in Turkey since the 1980s. It is indeed intriguing that intellectual élites on both sides of the Aegean should resort to what was once regarded as the effluvia of Greek mass-culture to express their contemporary identities and anti-establishment sentiments. Again Koglin foregrounds the role of semantic ambiguity in these fascinations and the paradox that what Greeks see as eastern, Turks see as western. Where Greeks see the legacy of pristine Ionian Hellenism, Turks see Ottoman cultural pluralism. Identifying with rebetika makes Turks feel part of Europe without sacrificing their (Ottoman) musical identity, while Greeks can hark back to the glory days of ‘Our Levant’. All this is hardly counter-intuitive, but neatly restated (cf. Koglin's previous paper ‘Marginality, a key concept in understanding the resurgence of rebetiko in Turkey’ Music & Politics 2/1, 2008: 1–39).
A meandering final chapter (‘Rebetiko as a conceptual and experiential system’) takes in some more tangential snatches of theory and tweaks some issues raised earlier. Rebetika are finally declared to be ‘constituent parts of a semantic complex, one of whose primary goals is to transmit culture-specific systems of judgement such as emotions and social values’ (208 — original italics). The genre is then defined as ‘a discursive process whose aim is to transmit not “views” of the world in the original Greek sense of theoria, but a conceptual framework for a shared experience’ (208 — original italics). ‘Goals’ and ‘aim’ smack of intentionalism, but these definitions are otherwise blandly unexceptionable, except perhaps to unreconstructed naive referentialists. Unlike the 1977 diagnosis, Koglin's psychocultural perspective is unlikely to perturb the ‘Rebetiko Nation’.
