JANE COWAN (University of Sussex, Great Britain)

Recent Developments in Greek Popular Music

This paper will examine recent developments in contemporary popular music in Greece.

In the mid nineties, the appeal of popular music (laiki) among the Greek public increased dramatically: public preferences transgressed age, class and educational barriers to converge into what constituted a mass audience for contemporary laika songs and artists.

These songscombine elements of folk, western pop music, and rembetika (the earlier, original version of laika songs, from which the more commercialized contemporary laika songs developed) music styles. In this way, they invest in and build on an already existing cultural capital.

The result is a hybrid genre, often criticized for its raw and short-lived commercial nature by the more "artistic" strand of the laika songmakers.

This intense feeling of commercialism is largely created by the media exposure that the majority of these artists receive: television, anmd radio interviews and shows, extensive press and magazine coverage, gossip networks, the music industry itself, the night-club scene of live-entertainment across Greece, and heavy lobbying and profile-making by PR spin doctors, have all converged to construct the Current popular music scene in Greece.

The issues to be addressed in this paper, then, are: a) the relationship between the global and the local in the Greek popular music scene; b) the presence of the popular music scene in everyday lifestyle; c) issues of the symbolic production of Greek popular music through the mass media.