The tradition of rebetika song is at the root of all that is most vibrant and subversive in the popular music of modern Greece. In its origins it is the music of the poor, the dispossessed,
the refugees and the migrants who came to Greece from Asia Minor before and after the First World War.
The Greek edition of this book is entitled Rebetology, thus according this musical and social subculture its rightful place in the academic study of Greek culture. Written as a broad-brush
introduction to rebetika song, this concise and well-argued book details the everyday life of the rebetes who they were, where they came from, how they dressed, their weapons and styles of
fighting, their sexual preferences, their culture of hashish and of prison life, all of which form the substance of their songs.
Petropoulos flies in the face of traditional Greek academia with his painstaking explanation of how this apparently most Greek of musical cultures has thoroughly cosmopolitan roots; Turkish,
Albanian, gypsy and Jewish. By tracing the figure of the rebetis back to the Ottoman empire, he shows how the language and music of rebetika song were imbued with Turkish influences, and how
its ethos was one of free love, criminal behaviours and a challenge to established social norms.
Songs of the Greek Underworld is not only a learned and erudite text, accompanied by breakdowns of the rhythms and metric patterns of the different musics and their associated dances, but a
salutary reminder of the shared cultural roots of Turkey and Greece. The book includes the text of songs from the tradition, and over ten line drawings by A. Kanavakis and 34
photographs.
