Notice Board

“Rap-Betika:” Authenticity and Symbolic Boundaries in Greek Rap Music
Dr. Athena Elafros, Assistant Professor, Keuka College

How have rap artists in Greece made their music Greek? How do local and transnational elements of popular culture adapt in relation to one another in this era of globalization? Drawing upon 23 interviews with hip hop practitioners, this talk refines and extends Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of cultural production by situating rap music in Athens, Greece within the Greek popular music field. Greek rap artists, instead of legitimating themselves within the Greek music scene by reference to album sales and other economic criteria, instead legitimate their music in aesthetic terms. One of the principal strategies to legitimate rap music as an integral component of Greek popular culture is by means of local authentication, in which artists emphasize the local, indigenous, and historical elements of rap music in Greece. These practitioners emphasize how rap music adapts to the local setting of Greece. A key example of this localization is a fusion of rap with the early twentieth-century Athenian popular music genre rebetika: “rap-betika”. According to these claims, authentic rap music is music which roots itself to authentic “Greek elements” such as rebetika (sometimes referred to as the urban blues). However, there is a long and complex history of othering and cultural appropriation involving rebetika in Greece. Like rap music, rebetika was a ξενόφερτο“foreign-brought” music genre associated with Anatolian (or Turkish) Greeks. It was criminalized and banned during various points in Greek history. Through the social processes of Hellenization, masculinization, and westernization, rebetika was incorporated into the Greek popular music cannon. A similar process can be seen at work in contemporary rap music in Greece. This case study highlights the need to re-conceptualize Bourdieu's concept of cultural fields within a transnational framework, a framework that highlights the interplay of transnational cultural production with local strategies of legitimation. 

May 23, 2017
9:00 am
Room C610