Popular Music

http://journals.cambridge.org/PMU

Additional services for Popular Music:

Email alerts: Click here

Subscriptions: Click here
Commercial reprints: Click here
Terms of use : Click here

Songs of the Greek Underworld: the Rebetika Tradition. By Elias

Petropoulos. Translated and introduced by Ed Emery, additional text by
Ed Emery. London: Saqi Books. Line drawings, photographs, musical
examples, discography. 165 pp

Kevin Dawe

Popular Music / Volume 22 / Issue 01 / January 2003, pp 109 - 116

DOI: 10.1017/S0261143003243075, Published online: 10 March 2003

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0261143003243075

How to cite this article:

Kevin Dawe (2003). Popular Music, 22, pp 109-116 doi:10.1017/S0261143003243075

Request Permissions : Click here

Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/PMU, IP address: 169.230.243.252 on 17 Mar 2015

Popular Music (2003) Volume 22/1. Copyright  2003 Cambridge University Press, pp. 109–116.
Printed in the United Kingdom

Reviews

Global Repertoires: Popular Music within and beyond the Transnational Music
Industry. Edited by Andreas Gebesmair and Alfred Smudits. Aldershot, UK, and
Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2001. xi + 176 pp.
The Unbroken Circle: Tradition and Innovation in the Music of Ry Cooder and Taj
Mahal. By Fred Metting. Lanham, Maryland and London: Scarecrow Press, 2001.
xviii + 293 pp. DOI:10.1017/S0261143003213076

There has hardly been a more fetishised concept than globalisation in the last few
years. I have never subscribed to the notion that ours is the era of the ‘end of
history’, yet I have to confess that the amount of hype that globalisation and trans-
nationalism receive practically blots out the ways that that the musical globe was
global before. (Recent publications that usefully chronicle some instances of earlier
globalisations of music are E. Taylor Atkins’ Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan
[reviewed in this issue], and Andrew Jones’s Yellow Music: Media Culture and Col-
onial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age).
At the same time, it is obvious that whatever our globalisation is, it is different
from previous ones. However, it is not always clear from these essays that the
authors have a particularly nuanced view of our globalisation. Some of the essays
do not address the question at all, even though they were all part of a 1999 confer-
ence entitled, simply, ‘Music and Globalisation’, held in Vienna. For example,
Alenka Barber-Kersovan contributed an interesting essay on popular music in ex-
Yugoslavia that is mainly a report from the front. It is useful to have such a report,
but it does not really engage with theoretical issues surrounding globalisation/
transnationalism that move beyond the mentions of ‘US hegemony’ or ‘cultural
imperialism’ which are frequent in the globalisation literature but seldom pro-
ductively addressed.
The introduction, which was solely authored by Andreas Gebesmair, could
have done more of a service in sorting out these larger overarching threads, particu-
larly as they relate to current writings and theorising about globalisation. Most of
the authors, unfortunately, do not appear to be all that conversant with writings on
globalisation and transnationalism in the last decade or so. Arjun Appadurai, argu-
ably the most influential social science theorist of the phenomenon, barely appears;
and no one seems to have heard of the useful attempt by Roland Robertson and
others to move beyond the tired global/local framework by employing the term
‘glocalisation’. Indeed, the editors and authors are so focused on the globalisation
issue that they overlook the ways in which what we call globalisation is bound up
in a complicated way with other phenomena, such as tourism, the changing nature
of life in cities, and the development of digital technology, to name just three.
Despite the theoretical shortcomings of most of the essays, however, they are
frequently rich in information and ethnographic detail. To be fair to Barber-
Kersovan, her essay is particularly eye-opening in its description of popular music
109
110 Reviews

in the ex-Yugoslavia. For example, as a way of combating what was perceived as

American or western, the regime in Serbia advocated anything newly composed,
including, according to Barber-Kersovan, the ‘Newly Composed Folk Song’.
Deborah Pacini Hernandez provides a thoughtful discussion of the workings
of the globalised music industry and Latino musicians and fans. Pacini Hernandez
discusses the ways that the music industry creates huge, homogeneous categories
such as ‘Latin music’, categories that become hegemonic throughout the world of
popular music, and even in many fans’ minds. She then productively examines the
actual diversity within the category of ‘Latin music’, marked by country of origin,
long-time residents and newer immigrants, young and old, before embarking on an
insightful discussion of new immigration patterns of Latinos and Chicanos and
their effects on regional musics.
Some of the lacunae and tensions left unexamined by many authors in this
volume are of concern to Krister Malm, author of the only essay to take a long
view on the globalisation question. Malm effectively captures the paradoxes facing
anyone who attempts to study the global phenomenon of popular music today,
noting that there is more musical homogeneity than ever before, but also more
diversity and multiculturality; more hybrid styles but more movements toward
purity and authenticity. And his list continues.
While many of the essays collected here fruitfully add to our knowledge of
some local scenes, this volume unfortunately does not make any real advances
beyond the extant published discussions on music, or more generally in the realm
of theories of the globalisation of music, or globalisation more generally.
Fred Metting’s The Unbroken Circle is a fan’s-eye-view of Ry Cooder and Taj
Mahal, whose careers were somewhat parallel and indeed intertwined for a time
while the two were in a band called the Rising Sons in the mid-1960s. Metting,
an English professor at the University of New Hampshire, rehearses well-known
arguments concerning the nature of tradition and the genesis of contemporary
African-American musical styles, stories already familiar to any scholar of popular
music. But it is an engagingly written book, and his enthusiasm for his subjects is
infectious.

Timothy D. Taylor
Columbia University

Sounds English: Transnational Popular Music. By Nabeel Zuberi. Chicago: Uni-

versity of Illinois Press, 2001. 276 pp. DOI:10.1017/S0261143003223072

As the notion of globalisation becomes increasingly accepted within academic

circles, one counterpoint to such processes has been a concentration on national or
local (the two are often conflated) issues. In many ways a reassertion of national
identity has been part of the response to globalisation. The United Kingdom of
Great Britain and Northern Ireland (to give it its full title) has often been the site of
such assertions. As Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales achieved political devol-
ution, the role of the UK’s largest country, England, has been the subject of a great
deal of political and cultural comment. It seems that rarely a week goes by without a
new book on Englishness or Britishness being published. Popular music is generally
marginalised within such texts; however, the Britpop period of the 1990s witnessed
a plethora of writings on nationality and popular music in the modern era and
 Reviews 111

highlighted the ways in which pop can inform and shape national identity. This
book is thus timely. But, more than that, it offers a new take and new insights.
Part of the new take is that Zuberi is, in his words, ‘a middle class Pakistani-
Brit’. He thus offers a perspective which has hitherto been absent from the academic
discourse on Britpop and its precursors. This perspective is also often a particularly
personal one as Zuberi writes of being driven away from England by its racism. He
tells us that: ‘I had to leave England (for New Zealand) and write a book in order
to really become English’ (p. 14).
Zuberi writes of being both inside and outside of Englishness – at the same
time that he was also becoming submerged in parts of ‘so-called quintessentially
English culture’, ‘the ontological reality of racism made me a Paki’ (p. 26). It is this
positioning which makes the book very refreshing in places. Zuberi’s discussion of
British artists from ethnic minority backgrounds is a welcome change to the white-
ness that characterised both Britpop and the academic discussion around it. Zuberi
draws attention to those who were omitted from the discourse of Britpop such as
Apache Indian, Bill Sagoo, Fundamenta, Hustlers HC and Talvin Singh. Indeed,
one strength of the book is how it illustrates just what a contribution British-born
Asians have made to its popular music scene. However, this is not pure celebration,
as Zuberi sadly notes that much of the more militant music of British-born Asians
seems to celebrate the violence which is needed in anti-racist struggles, rather than
seeing it as a necessary evil (p. 222). However, the frustration on which such anger
is built can be understood by reading Zuberi’s accounts of the racism he suffered
and by reflecting on his astute observation that subcultural theory in the UK has
too often concentrated on white youths and missed out ethnic minority youths (pp.
52–3).
The book’s ideological stance is described by its author as being ‘aligned with
various approaches we might place under the rubric of transnational cultural stud-
ies’ (p. 7). It is clearly post-colonial, but also anti-postmodern. Zuberi has clearly
had too much personal experience of being attacked for his skin colour to believe
that identities are merely things to be played with. But he also knows that ‘the
national can be a slippery concept’ (p. 9) and writes that to understand sound in
terms of being black or white is too essentialist (p. 68). Thus Zuberi sees that
modern pop is a hybrid. However, he also shows that an individual’s view of
Englishness and their own locale is shaped by ethnicity. Thus, he says, The Smith’s
(white) Manchester is a very different one from that of A Guy Called Gerald.
At times the book seems to lose its way. Part of the problem here is that Zuberi
is too keen to cover too many areas and to describe music which, while it may have
been made in the UK, does not seem to have anything particularly British about it
or to be engaging in debates around Britishness. For example, much of the dis-
cussion of the Pet Shop Boys examines their persona and their gayness, rather than
anything which is especially English. Similarly, the chapter on dance is about the
relationship between pop and the body, rather than national identity. Thus the book
lacks focus in places. (Zuberi is also guilty of conflating Britain and England in
ways which are unfortunate in the post-devolution world and which do a disservice
to the more subtle approach he generally adopts.)
Parts of the text also lack sufficient thought. For example, it may have been
better to omit a reference to the Hillsborough disaster (in which ninety-six Liverpool
football fans died) rather than simply note in passing that it coincided with the rise
of rave. It is also disappointing to read again that the 1994 Criminal Justice Act was
112 Reviews

aimed at music with ‘repetitive beats’, when the Act actually aims at all forms of
music, including that characterised by having repetitive beats. However, these are
relatively rare blemishes in a book which is never less than thought-provoking and,
on occasion, inspired.
Zuberi ends by saying that popular music has helped him to see both the real
and the imagined England and it is such sentiments which are part of the strength
of this book. Not only has Zuberi chosen a topical subject, he has also illustrated
perennial themes within Popular Music Studies – those of the power of music to
influence the lives of individuals, communities and societies. Popular music
remains a key site for contested notions of national identity. Sounds English makes
us see why the battle lines are drawn and why the battle is so worthwhile.

Martin Cloonan
University of Glasgow

Singing Our Way to Victory: French Cultural Politics and Music During the Great
War. By Regina M. Sweeney. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.
355 pp. DOI:10.1017/S0261143003233079

One way of describing this book is to say that it tells a musical history of the First
World War, except that such a description might prompt thoughts of Andrew Lloyd
Webber or worse. But it would not be entirely inaccurate. Regina Sweeney chron-
icles the war – from the mobilisation of the troops to their return to civilian life –
through the music and the songs that marked the war’s story. She claims boldly
that ‘singing provides a broad perspective on ‘‘total war’’. The question of what
people sang takes us from government censors and prime ministers down to the
frozen soldiers in the abyss at Verdun’ (p. 2). She is as good as her word. Her
detailed study provides a persuasive case study of the ways in which songs animate
and organise the social and political world; or as she puts it: ‘songs were integral
to the expressivity of daily life; they were neither insignificant nor merely illustra-
tive’ (p. 18).
Focusing on the French experience of the war, Singing Our Way to Victory
shows how songs, and musical entertainment generally, were deployed by both the
authorities and the troops to promote their own, often conflicting, interests. It charts
the use of songs as propaganda for the state and the military authorities, as protest
for those who opposed those powers, and as a source of comfort for those who had
to endure the war’s terrors.
Towards the end of the book, Sweeney notes that one of the persisting issues
in the historiography of the 1914–18 war is ‘how men could live under such terrible
circumstances and not give up’ (p. 236). She does not pretend that it is the singing
and the songs that hold the answer (it is not a matter of ‘Singin’ in the rain’), but
what she does demonstrate, with great eloquence, is how music features in a per-
suasive explanation of the way otherwise intolerable conditions were managed.
Music was censored to screen the soldiers from attitudes and emotions that
were thought not conducive to morale, and that morale was raised by the visit of
singing stars who distributed their sheet music. But music was also used to organise
those troops. She notes that music has ‘power, order, motion, even predictability –
all things the army needed’ (p. 171). Songs could be used to produce the routines
and aggression that the war’s prosecution required. And to survive, the soldiers
 Reviews 113

evolved a musical subculture that created a kind of normality, or one that shielded
them from the experience of normality that they brought within them from home.
When all this failed, these soldiers retaliated through satirical songs.
Throughout, Sweeney avoids easy dichotomies, revealing the ambiguities and
complexities of the way songs were woven into the experience of war. The singing
of songs was linked to citizenship. Before the war, the French government was
already convinced that singing ‘proper’ was important to good citizenship, and
patriotism was inculcated by the hymns sung in school. During the war, this same
thought led military authorities to censorship (especially where it spoke of trans-
gressive behaviour) and to propaganda (‘to teach proper deportment’) (p. 90). Songs
about politics and sex, songs about heroism and nationalism, form the repertoire
that Sweeney examines, revealing, she argues, the realities of the lives of the singers.
But songs do not just document, they also transform, turning ‘doubts into
confidence’(p. 55). She observes how sexual desire and fantasy were written into
the texts of songs that spoke of the farewell of soldiers bound for the front and on
their return on leave.
Although the book is richly illustrated with pictures and song sheets,
Sweeney’s approach tends to privilege lyrics over melody; the voices are less viv-
idly evoked than the words and sentiments. Assumptions, too, are made about the
relationship between songs and experience. But these, perhaps inevitable, features
of the approach are generously compensated for by the wonderfully full account of
the way music marked and maintained lives under the most terrible of conditions.

John Street
University of East Anglia

Songs of the Greek Underworld: the Rebetika Tradition. By Elias Petropoulos.

Translated and introduced by Ed Emery, additional text by Ed Emery. London:
Saqi Books. Line drawings, photographs, musical examples, discography. 165 pp.
DOI:10.1017/S0261143003243075

This book is as much about Elias Petropoulos as it is rebetika popular song. It tells
us as much about a life spent researching Greek popular culture as it does the
culture of rebetika. Petropoulos obviously possesses an extraordinary knowledge
of this form of Greek popular song and it is no surprise that for a long time he has
been regarded as the world authority on the subject. We are exceptionally lucky
then to have this book out in print again and available in English. This first imprint
by Saqi Books comes out at a time when several young Greek and non-Greek stud-
ents are in the process of researching or completing Ph.D.s on rebetika and its
revival.
The publication of one of his early works, Rebetika Songs, earned Petropoulos
a five-month prison sentence under the Greek Junta in 1968. Petropoulos has lived
in Paris since 1975. He is portrayed and portrays himself as a ‘free thinker’ in Songs
of the Greek Underworld, a book which pulls no punches in its broad and eclectic
synthesis of ideas about rebetika song. Depending on one’s sense of humour, one
may find oneself chuckling or laughing out loud whilst reading this book. Alterna-
tively one may throw down the book in disgust! For me, Petropoulos’s dry and
black humour is in keeping with his constant firing of bullets at Greek academic
writing (with its often-nationalist stance). The jarring effect of his rough and ready
114 Reviews

humour not only keeps the reader on his or her toes but also seems to reflect the
reality of the harsh world inhabited by those who sang and performed rebetika, not
to mention their fierce individualism and apparently indomitable spirit.
Rebetiko song (circa late 1850s to 1950s) was the song of the rebetes (pl.), but
who were the rebetes and what were their songs about? Petropoulos writes:
A monstrous mythology began to be constructed around the nature of the rebetis [sing.],
which made any sober assessment very difficult. There is no fixed type of rebetis. I tried to
show that each era had its own type of rebetis, and also that every era had its different
gradings of rebetes. On the one hand there is underworld, and on the other there are the
rebetes. In no sense are the underworld and the world of the rebetes the same: they can be
imagined as two circles which run into each other but do not entirely overlap; (. . .) the
rebetes chose marginality. (p. 42)

Again, the rebetes represented ‘a changing mosaic of qualities’ (p. 61); and rebetika
songs unfold ‘the whole contradictory panorama of the rebetiko way of life’ (p. 68).
In his investigation of cosmopolitan roots of rebetika, Petropoulos provides a
fascinating discussion of the ways in which this culture was influenced by Ottoman
social structures, language and musical ideas. Not just Turkish but Albanian, gypsy
and Jewish culture too. He talks about the way they dressed, their weapons and
styles of fighting, their sexuality, their use of hashish and life in prison and the
themes which form the substance of their song. Petropoulos notes: ‘I have a blind
and groundless conviction . . . the music of the rebetika tradition is an amalgam of
the melodic / rhythmic resonances of the peoples of Asia Minor, combined with
the local songs of the land that is now Greece, and the amalgam was effected by
that small and multi-ethnic caste known as the rebetes’ (p. 74).
Readers might be disappointed to hear then that Petropoulos takes only forty-
five pages to tell us about the musical culture of rebetes and the songs and dances
produced by them. He includes limited discussion of the musical components that
made up rebetika, though his description of the dances and their metrical structures
are refreshingly straightforward and interesting. The rest of the book has been writ-
ten and compiled by London-based writer, Ed Emery. This makes for a somewhat
confusing compilation and I am unsure whether a better introduction to the subject
is produced in the end. Petropoulos’s essay could almost stand alone. However, in
Songs of the Greek Underworld, we not only have one of the best essays ever likely
to be written on rebetika (Petropuolos) but also an introduction to Petropuolos’s
other works (a bibliography is included), an introduction to the historical and social
setting of rebetika, transcriptions of twenty-one rebetika songs (with lyrics, vocal
and bouzouki parts scored out), transcriptions of the musical modes used in rebetika,
and three other appendices concerned with the ‘state of rebetika studies’. However,
I cannot judge the accuracy of these transcriptions without all the recordings.
Appendix C, ‘A Note on Xenofon’ hardly makes the point about multi-culturalism
in rebetika. I would rather have had a clear photograph of Petropoulos here,
strangely missing from the book. (Is he in hiding?)
There is a need for the editor to put the many Greek and Turkish terms used
throughout the book into a glossary. Also, the zither described as a santouri in the
notes to the photographs on pages 21 and 27 is in fact a kanoun. A santouri is a
hammered dulcimer; there are plucked, trapezoid zithers in the photographs. I am
also unhappy with the explanation of the nature of the musical modes used in
rebetika (p. 148). But this is a point relevant to a lot of other books on the subject.
The modes of the Arab and Turkish makam system use microtones that are omitted
 Reviews 115

here. One cannot just label modes ‘Usak’ or ‘Hijazkar’ (as it does in the book) in an
attempt to align rebetika modes (dhromoi) with makam if they do not include the
essential microtones that help to define them. Makam (in the fullest sense of the
word) were never available on the fixed fret, tempered bouzouki as we know it.
However, earlier instruments with the same name might well have had movable
frets that provided for the production of microtones. Early rebetika ensembles
included the fretless plucked lute, the Arab oud, for instance. There is, perhaps, a
trace of makam left in bouzouki performance with its opening unmetred taksim.
Finally, no mention of Gail Holst’s book The Road to Rembetika: Music of a Greek
Subculture: Songs of Love, Sorrow and Hashish (Athens: Denise Harvey, 1975 [1994,
3rd edition]) leaves me wondering why.

Kevin Dawe
University of Leeds

Cultures of Popular Music. By Andy Bennett. Buckingham: Open University

Press, 2001. ix + 194 pp.
Understanding Popular Music, Second Edition. By Roy Shuker. London: Rout-
ledge, 2001. xiv + 286 pp. DOI:10.1017/S0261143003253071

The increasing number of textbooks in culture and media studies clearly reflects
some maturity of the fields. It shows that the stage has been reached where there
is a reasonably codified body of knowledge that can safely be communicated to
students as a base for their work. It also signifies that publishers have reached
similar decisions about the nature of the market. For specialists and researchers in
the fields, such codification of their innovations in textbook form can offer a prompt
to concern over solidification of a body of knowledge to the detriment of the ‘dang-
ers’ and spark of doing new things. In this sense, textbooks can be seen as a mechan-
ism of conservatism and cleaning up of a discipline. Not surprisingly, as someone
who has engaged in such writing myself, my view is different, as I suggest that
textbooks can actually help to shape the future evolution of work in a field and can
be a prompt (rather than a block) to innovation. These issues are compounded by
the development of more specialist fields like the study of popular music, where
such concerns are also germane. There are a set of interrelated themes here concern-
ing the role of textbooks in disciplinary and interdisciplinary innovation; the bound-
aries of such intellectual fields; and how we communicate them and the specific
research they contain to new groups of students.
Andy Bennett’s book is part of a series, Issues in Cultural and Media Studies,
which now contains a number of volumes. The text consists of discussion of a
number of genres (or periods) of popular music discussed in a wider cultural con-
text. Broadly following a chronological path, he begins with the post-war period,
moving through 1960s rock, heavy metal, punk, reggae, rap and hip hop, bhangra
and Asian dance, dance and club culture, youth and music-making before conclud-
ing with consideration of contemporary youth. Most of the chapters follow a similar
format, beginning with a discussion of the origins of the form, looking at the sub-
stance of the form itself, before considering the ways in which it has been globalised
or taken up and developed in new hybrid and perhaps unexpected ways.
There seem to be two main strengths to this approach. First, the concern to go
beyond examination of the established rock/pop canon is to be welcomed. It clearly
116 Reviews

shows some of the international dimensions of contemporary music production and

consumption. Second, Bennett seeks to emphasise the cultural context of music.
This leads to an emphasis on the audience for popular music. Again this is to be
welcomed, but ultimately the book could have made rather more of it, as there was
more scope for consideration of audience processes than it actually delivers. I have
every expectation that students will make good use of this book. However, in read-
ing it all the way through, I found the approach to become rather over formulaic,
but this is unlikely to be the mode in which it is consumed by the majority of its
readers, who will ‘dip in and out’.
Roy Shuker has produced a second, extensively revised edition of his success-
ful text. The book broadly follows the format of the first edition, but with ‘greater
attention to the role of technology; gender politics and music; the process of making
music, and the associated continuum of success involved; the current popularity of
dance/electronic music; and the cross-over success of country music’ (p. xii). Shuker
has also added two new chapters. This means that the book moves through an
initial discussion that locates popular music in the context of popular culture, before
discussing the music industry, technology, music policy and the debates around
globalisation, the music press, the making of music, the star process, musicology
and music texts, film and video, and concluding with discussions of the audience
and cultural politics.
Again, I am sure that the book will be well used by students. It offers a wel-
come (extended) breadth of coverage and is particularly strong on industry and
production processes of music. The discussion of stardom seemed to be rather
descriptive to my mind, and the consideration of the audience again rather trunc-
ated. However, this should not detract from the fact that the book will be continuing
to be recommended reading on many courses.
These books are therefore perfectly adequate representations of a corpus of
received work that we should be asking our students to learn. However, I think
that there are clear areas where the study of popular music is advancing to which
they might have paid more attention. For example, there is clearly innovation in
the understanding of the role of music in the performance of everyday life and the
reconstitution of audience processes that seem to warrant greater space. Moreover,
it seems that there is a potential danger of overlooking the innovations that could
affect the field that are taking place in related areas. For example, Richard Peterson’s
work on cycles and production of music and culture continues to be represented,
but one searches in vain for consideration of the omnivore/univore thesis. This is
all the more surprising given the key role of the study of music in the development
of these arguments.
In conclusion, these books can be welcomed as representing an important
point in the further codification of the knowledge that is necessary if the study of
popular music is to advance. The rider seems to be that our representations in that
regard need to be clearly scrutinised to avoid the depiction of an over-codified and
self-reproducing area of work. Once a field becomes too clear there is a danger that
the reader will not sufficiently appreciate not only the pleasures of study but also
the contingency that should be a part of academic innovation.

Brian Longhurst
University of Salford