Rebetiko is one of the most popular forms of Greek music. It is the best known. This musical genre emerged at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, when it came into contact with the musical forms of Asia Minor at the turn of the century. It emerged and was played in the deprived districts of the Greek capital during the decade of the Great Catastrophe, one of the social, human and economic traumas still very much alive in contemporary Greek society.
Today, as in the past, this music is played in the taverns of some of Athens' underworld neighbourhoods. A nostalgic atmosphere pervades these evenings, marked by the presence of the musicians of yesteryear. At these evenings, anyone can let themselves dance to the sounds of bouzoukis and guitars, to atone for an existence oscillating between disarray and endless crisis, both the current one and the one our forebears must have lived through in the 1920s.
Rebetiko is still the voice of the Greeks, one of the last musical escapes while their society and the country's politics, now as at the time of the emergence of this music, are in ruins.
This project and its title are a reference to Sotira Bellou's album Laika Proastia. I'll let you find out.