I used to have the vague idea that rebetiko died somewhere around 1954 and all we got after that were covers and compilation albums from the good old days. As I dig deeper into the music, it’s starting to dawn on me that rebetiko might never have died at all.
In 1985, Nikos Papazoglou, one of the best and most popular Greek singers of the past 50 years, released the song The Manges Don’t Exist Anymore, a song that gained further traction with Greek audiences when it was recorded by Haris Alexiou a few years later.
The lyrics are poetic and, where rebetiko songs from 50 years earlier were often rich with slang, this song is rich with metaphor.
The manges don’t exist anymore / they have been run over by the train, / they’ve been sailing with a boat / and with a hookah turned off.
The baglama grew up / and became like a ship, / old sorrows on its hold / and its bow into nowhere.
The song was written by Manois Rasoulis (lyrics) and Nikos Xydakis (music) and I think you can read it at least two ways. One is as a lament for a bygone day that no have passed us by. The music has “grown up” and all the sorrow it held has been packed into the hold of a ship going nowhere.
The second possible interpretation is this is a song that protests the way old rebetiko and the ideal of the manges has been romanticized: looking at it as if Rasoulis is saying, perhaps a little sardonically, “Hey, guys, the manges are gone. Their time has passed. Get over it.”
Either way, that’s about as rebetiko a way of looking at things as you can get, I think. And, like old rebetiko, it relies on words and a simple melodic approach – with plenty of room of musical improvisation – to tell us a story.
This version of The Manges Don’t Exist Anymore is a great one. It’s from the ERT TV show Music Box and features a stellar line-up of musicians and singers. The opening instrumentation gives it a nice Asia Minor tinge, while the melodic progression fits firmly into a more modern mix of folk-rebetiko-rock and more. (The older man in black standing at the left end of the line of singers is the composer, Xydakis.)
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