Abstract:

The representations of rebetiko among the intellectual elites of the left between the civil war and the dictatorship are ambivalent. Although certain minority voices highlighted the musical interest of the genre, the majority of leftist intellectuals dwelt on its themes in order to stigmatise its lack of combativeness, its fatalism, and its apology for drugs and pornography – all signs, according to them, of belonging to the lumpen-proletariat or to reactionary forces. This view, which was dominant from the forties to the sixties, is nonetheless challenged by certain progressive elites. Yet even though the greater part of leftist elite discourse up until the military coup condemned rebetiko, the popular classes adopted it en masse, sensitive to the fact that it belonged to a tradition of dissidence.

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