Made in Greece: Studies in Popular Music ed. by Dafni Tragaki (review)

Made in Greece is the fourteenth book of the Routledge Global Popular Music Series edited by Franco Fabbri and Goffredo Plastino. The series concerns cases of popular music outside the English-speaking world. Every volume examines a different country. Made in Greece involves seventeen scholars from Greek, American, and British universities who draw from ethnomusicology, performance studies, music education, media theory, sociology, social and cultural anthropology, and literature studies. It comprises a preface, an introduction, fifteen main chapters, a coda, and an afterword. The fifteen main chapters are organized symmetrically in five parts. In Part I "Hugely Popular," Leonidas Economou, Ioannis Polychronakis, and Ioannis Tsioulakis examine stereotypical cases. In Part II "Art Song Trajectories" and Part III "Greekness beyond Greekness," Polina Tambakaki, Panagiotis A. Kanellopoulos, Dimitris Varelopoulos, Stathis Gourgouris, Marilou Polymeropoulou, and Danae Stefanou broaden the discussion of the popular through the examination of entechno (the art song), Lena Platonos's work, chipmusic, and experimental avant-garde. In Part IV "Counter-Stories," Anna Papaeti, Aspasia Theodosiou, and Lambrini Styliou focus mostly on minorities, while in Part V "Present Musical Pasts," Ioannis Papadatos and Kevin Dawe, Panayotis Panopoulos, and Dafni Tragaki deal with issues of regionalism and historical continuity. In the coda, Gail Holst-Warhaft examines international receptions of Greek music. Tragaki, the editor, frames the volume with a preface, an introduction, and an afterword.

Echoing broader musicological trends, popular music is approached as a fluid and "contingent" (xi) state that can potentially characterize every musical genre. Definitions of stylistic im/purity emerging out of essentializing conceptualizations of the people and quantified notions of popularity are avoided. Instead the authors focus on discursive and practical negotiations and representations of music popularity as these can be traced through processes of performance, production, reception, and circulation. This approach allows a critical deconstruction of the purist and hierarchical distinction between high, folk, and popular art. However, the authors do not adopt a blindly polemical stance, they recognize the distinction as part of the very discourses that define popular music in close relation to the dichotomy of the global versus local. Hence, they offer historically situated and ethnographically nuanced analyses of Greek localizations and negotiations of modernity, cosmopolitanism, and globality. As a result, they provide fresh insights into Greek identity themes: meanings and experiences of Greekness; the Orientalist binary of West/Europe versus East; the modernist binary of tradition versus progress; and issues of center and periphery (for a summary see 1–15).

A summary of these themes per chapter follows. Economou questions the aesthetics-based theory regarding the birth of the popular song (laiko). Based on socio-historical criteria, he demonstrates the emergence of the genre as the result of a recording industry-led popularization of rebetiko's affective tropes and styles and of the adoption of song themes of a wider appeal. By focusing on the continuity between the two genres, he demonstrates laiko as a vocalization of subaltern affective resistance to the traumatic modernization of the post-1940s. In his analysis, Greekness emerges as affective belonging beyond the dichotomies of West versus East, modernity versus tradition, and local versus global.

Tsioulakis examines the West versus East dichotomy in cases of nightclub dance music of high commercial value. He describes how Orientalist tropes are realized performatively through a cultural specification of a presentation(West)-participation(East) continuum. More importantly, he demonstrates how issues of ideological identification can take primacy over commercial recipes as long as they also support commercially differentiating strategies. The crude divide of commercial versus cultural/ideological dissolves under an illumination of the neoliberal strategies that inform music practice.

In the second part of the volume, the distinction between high and low art is examined through the individual/personal versus collective/massive dichotomy. Focusing on Greek art songs, the authors demonstrate the exceptionally popular and hence commercial character of individuality. Using Rancière's dissensus theory, Kanellopoulos shows how Hatzidakis composed...