Rebetiko Past, Performativity, and the Political: The Music of Yiannis Angelakas

Abstract

This article examines the ways rebetiko’s past is re-invented today in the creative re-workings by the musician-poet-singer Yiannis Angelakas, whose popularity in Greece has been escalating since the mid-2000s. In what ways is the musical past remembered in the context of neoliberal political definitions of the current financial crisis? What kind of rebetiko ontologies are performatively enacted within the “state of exception?” The exploration of the central questions is based on ethnographic research addressing the sentimental worlds emerging through musical performativity, the translatability of the rebetiko past, and the sensorial metaphors employed in experimentation with rebetiko songs. Angelakas’s re-making of rebetiko’s past becomes a way of producing alternative histories and utopias lived in music. Drawing from Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou’s theory of “the performative in the political” and their discussions on the concept of “dispossession,” the article concludes that contemporary rebetiko nostalgia in the music of Angelakas is a form of resistance both within and against the normative politics of the “state of exception” and the moral imperative of post-political consensus.