A Brief History of Hip Hop in Athens, Greece." Pp

Athena Elafros. 2013. "Mapping the Hip Hop Transnation: A Brief History of Hip Hop in Athens, Greece." Pp. 55-69 in Hip Hop in Europe: Cultural Identities and Transnational Flows, edited by Sina A. Nitzsche and Walter Grünzweig. Berlin/Münster: LIT Verlag. -Preprint- “[...] Hip hop is a world language and it’s not only in the borders of our country or in our continent.” Eversor, MC and producer in Athens Since the early 1990s, hip hop culture has become a transnational global art form (Potter 10) which has not only spread “from the margins to the mainstream” (Stapleton 219), but across the globe, with hip hop cultures in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Algeria, Lebanon, Nigeria, and South Africa, to name a few examples. Hip hop began as a predominantly African American, Puerto Rican, and Latin American youth culture in the South Bronx and consisted of the four elements of graffiti, break dancing, turntablism and MCing. Hip Hop’s cultural influences may be traced back to numerous African diasporic traditions such as the African bardic traditions, storytelling, and toast traditions, ritualized games, blues, soul and funk music, especially the music of James Brown, North American black churches, the Black Arts Movement, and Jamaican Sound System culture. Hip hop spread to other countries predominantly through flows of popular media such as records, movies, and television as well as flows of people who brought these popular media around the globe. As a result of these transnational flows of media and people, hip hop culture, both in its formation and dissemination, is a “diasporic cultural form” (Gilroy 70). With many of its roots in African American culture, hip hop culture has since become a vehicle for global youth affiliations and a tool for reworking local identities all over the world (Mitchell 2001b, 1-2). Though most US academic commentaries on rap used to be restricted to the United States and African American contexts (Mitchell 2001b, 3), this is no longer the case as there are now a wealth of studies of hip hop culture outside the United States (Elflein, Bennett, Mitchell 2001a, Androutsopoulos and Scholz 2002 and 2003, Fernandes, Somolon 2005 1 and 2009, Condry, Kahf, Motley and Henderson, and others). This contribution seeks to contribute to this literature by offering a broad overview of the history of hip hop in Athens, Greece. In particular, it seeks to understand hip hop culture as a transnational art form that transcends national borders while being simultaneously rooted in specific geographical localities. This brief history of the hip hop transnation is based on twenty three interviews with MCs, producers, DJs, industry professionals, and others involved in hip hop in Athens, and on an analysis of the relevant secondary literature. All of the interviews of hip hop practitioners were conducted in person in Athens from January until August 2009. Interviews were primarily conducted in Greek, though some were conducted in English and a few were conducted in Greek and English. Respondents were given the option not to remain anonymous, so that they could be credited for their ideas on the music-making process. Of the twenty three interviewed, only one respondent chose to remain anonymous. The Global Recording Industry and Greek Popular Music: Local and International Repertoires The global recording industry is a very concentrated market. In 2009, there were four major corporate record labels: Vivendi Universal, which controlled 31.9% of the global music market, Sony BMG, which held 25%, Warner which held 20.3%, and EMI which held 9.4% of the market. Independent labels accounted for the remaining 13.4% (Rayna and Striukova 212-213). Despite the economic dominance of a handful of major companies, there are very strong indigenous music making traditions in Greece, and Greece has a thriving Greek popular music market. The recording industry in Greece is largely based in Athens, a city that is home to most of the major record labels and some of the largest recording studios in the eastern Mediterranean (Dawe 222). Historically, the sale of Anglo-American music was at its peak from 1975 to 1980 (Papageorgiou 1997, 68), but since that time, Greek music sales have been steadily on the rise. Prior to 1976, Greek music sales accounted for the majority of sales in the Greek popular music market. This changed during the period from 1976 until 1980, when the international share of the music market doubled from 25% to 50% (Papageorgiou 1997, 77). From the 1990s and onwards, Greek popular music has been slowly regaining popularity. For example, in the 1990s, the 2 popular music market in Greece was roughly divided in half, with 50% of the sales for international music and 50% for Greek music (Papageorgiou 1997, 77). The market share of indigenous music has increased even further in the last decade. In 2009, according to Alexandros Patakis, Marketing Manager, International Repertoire, Universal Music in Greece, music sales were divided along the following lines: 63% of sales were of local repertoire (Greek music) and 37% were international repertoire (non-Greek music). Of these sales, a large share of the Greek music market is taken up by Greek pop music, which is an urban hybrid merging Greek lyrics with western pop-rock influences and/or eastern elements (such as Egyptian and Turkish arabesk), and popular music (laiko/λαϊκό), which ranges from what is considered a more authentic style with roots in rebetika (the urban blues), to versions closer to Greek pop (Kallimopoulou 3). When speaking of Greek popular music in Greece, this paper focuses primarily on the 63% of music sales of the local repertoire (which includes traditional and popular Greek genres, as well as North American genres performed by Greek artists, such as rap, reggae, rock, etc.). These genres include rebetika, an urban folk style of music that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in the ports of the Aegean Sea and was associated with ‘disreputable’ elements in society, such as the ‘Greek underworld,’ drugs, hardship, and prostitution (Tragaki 25); laika, a broad-based genre of Greek popular music that originally emerged as a simplification of rebetika in order to make this type of music more broadly marketable (Papageorgiou 1997, 69); entehna, a popular genre of music that combines elements of western art music, Greek musical forms, such as rebetika, and poetry (Kallimopoulou 3); political songs that sought to challenge the status quo of the 1960s and 1970s; new wave laika, such as Greek pop and contemporary folk music, disparagingly referred to as ‘dog music,’ a style of music that merges traditional laika styles with pop music and Arabic and Asian musical forms (Papageorgiou 2005, 121-122) as well as Greek versions of rock, rap, reggae, and other Western genres. It is within this thriving indigenous market of Greek song, spanning the entire spectrum from laika to Greek pop (Kallimopoulou 210) that rap music and hip hop culture need to be situated. Similar to the rebetika, laika, new wave laika, and localized forms of rock, punk, and reggae, rap music had a difficult time gaining legitimacy within the popular music industry 3 in Greece. This is because rap music was seen as a “foreign brought” (ξενόφερτο) musical form according to Mhdenisths (pronounced Midenistis, which when translated means Nihilist), an MC signed to a major record label. For many artists at the time of my interviews, rap music was still an ‘alternative’ (Stereo Mike, MC/producer/song writer/sound engineer) or ‘independent’ (Diveno) genre, on the outskirts of the Greek popular music mainstream. One of the primary reasons for this alternative status was that hip hop had a difficult time breaking into the Greek popular music industry. For Diveno, a producer/composer from the suburbs of Athens, the reasons for this are simple: Θα ήταν πάρα πολύ εύκολο να γίνει, εάν η Ελλάδα δεν είχε πάρα πολύ δυνατά χαρακτηριστικά σαν μουσική. Η παραδοσιακή μουσική, η οποία εξελίχθηκε μετά σε λαϊκή μουσική, κρατούσε πάρα πολύ πίσω όλα τα ανεξάρτητα ρεύματα. Οποιοδήποτε ανεξάρτητο ρεύμα μουσικής προσπάθησε να βγει στην Ελλάδα, τα βρήκε πάρα πολύ δύσκολα [τα] πράγματα, όπως ήταν το κίνημα του rock to 1980s, το οποίο κατάφερε να φτάσει σε ένα σημείο και να αποκτήσει οπαδούς, αλλά σταμάτησε. Το hip-hop ξεκίνησε με τον ίδιο τρόπο. It would have been very easy [to enter the mainstream] if Greece did not have very strong characteristics with regard to music. Greek traditional music [παραδοσιακή μουσική], which later evolved into Greek popular music [λαϊκή μουσική], held back all of the independent currents in music. Whichever independent current in music attempted to make it in Greece, it found things to be very difficult, like the rock movement of the 1980s, which managed to get to a certain point and obtain fans, but then stopped. Hip hop began along the same lines. (Diveno, my translation) This is the background context of the international recording industry and Greek popular music industry that shapes the transmission and formation of hip hop culture in Greece. Movement: Movies, Television, and People Edward Said once noted that “Like people and schools of criticism, ideas and theories travel - from person to person, from situation to situation, from one period to another” (226). Similar to ideas and theories, music also travels, from person to person, from computer to computer, from one country to another. In this instance, hip hop music and culture have travelled from the United States to many different countries around the world. In Europe, the first traces of hip hop culture go back to the mid-1980s, but the development of national scenes and markets did not occur until the 1990s (Androutsopoulos and Scholz 2003, 464).

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