A pinch, in rebetiko slang, is a pinch of a powdered, inhaled drug. This song was also recorded, in 1934, as I’m a drug addict.
But this is interesting because the lyricist, Emilios Savvidis, was said to be a harsh critic of rebetiko and hasiklidikas (the hashish songs of the genre). Metapedia reports he was a member of the censorship board for the Metaxas dictatorship. A rather heated debate at rebetiko.sealabds.net raises some doubt about that. (These linked pages are in Greek.)
Born to a wealthy Greek family in Istanbul, Savvidis abandoned his studies (to become a dentist) in Vienna and wound up in Athens, where he went to work as a journalist. Over the next three decades, he worked as journalist, playwright, critic, lyricist and folklorist in Athens and Thessaloniki.
He wrote the lyrics for light songs and rebetiko, beginning in the 1930s and continuing into the 1940s. He also published an essay in 1937 that called for an end to songs from the “sad past.”
Savvidis called on the Deputy Press Ministry to put a stop to “the various disgusts that one could hear from the loudspeakers of cafes and holiday centers. The ‘hasisia’, the ‘bouzoukia’, the ‘loulades’ and the ‘clays’, the incomprehensible rebetiko expressions that had flooded all over Greece, from the moment these lines were written, are now irretrievably traced back to the history of the sad past… From now on we will hear that our lyricists and composers will write more beautifully, subtly and gently.”
It’s not clear if Savvidis objected to bouzoukis and rebetiko because of the lyrics, or if he railed against old styles to argue for new ones. It’s possible that, like many Greeks at the time, he thought the future of Greek music lay in a closer identification with “sophisticated” Western European music.
What is clearer is that he wrote what the people wanted to hear, whether it was the hashish songs of the early 1930s or his lighter songs (songs like Beautiful Athens or the tango Sis Kebab).
That was surely the case when in 1934 he added the very druggy lyrics to Ioannidis Sosos’s song Pinch when I imbibe. (Just a note: When Haris Alexiou recorded her version of the song in 1977, when censorship was again in force in Greece, she changed the title to Ouzo when I imbibe.)
Leave a Reply