Greek music

This is Loe of The Amazing Book Stealing Family typing, who has now decided to procrastinate terribly and therefore to write an essay on Greek music from a nonGreek point of view. Feel free to skip it entirely. I will still be your (girl)friend/ crazy bookstealing family member.

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On the occasion of the announcement that Anna Vissi, the diva of Greek music, is going to come over to give a concert in The Netherlands in October (I’m soooooooo there baby), I thought it would be fun to write a post on Greek music from an ‘outsiders’ point of view.

Greek music isn’t easy to get introduced to. In greek restaurants they only play Dancing Zorba type of traditional instrumental music, and I always thought this was the be all and end all of Greek music.
Not so 😀
The fiddly bouzouki solos are surely a big part of even modern greek music such as pop and dance music, but there’s a whole lot more to it.

There is especially a whole lot more to the different rhythms of songs. Something I can’t get my head around at all. Kat often tells me: “This is a {so&so} rhythm, can you hear?” I consider myself to have a reasonable sense of rhythm and music, but I can’t tell these rhythms apart even if my life depended upon it. I suppose it takes an upbringing with Greek music to instill this kind of thing.
I also had the false belief that there was only one type of Greek dance: the “hoppa” put your hands sideways and swing your legs around a bit in whatever way you feel like. Not true either. Each of the rhythms has a specific dance to go with it, telling its own kind of story.

So with all the prejudices about it in one’s head, it is kind of hard to take an objective look at/listen to the modern music. Thankfully, Kat introduced me to it and pointed me right at the kinds of music she was sure I would enjoy. So she introduced me to the following singers I now consider to be the divas of Greek modern music:

1. Anna Vissi (of course I put her first, or she’ll come poke my eye out in October). She sings everything from Cypriot folk music, to Eurodance, to opera. Here’s an example of her passionate live version of To Gkazi (The Gas) . That would indeed be the gas oven that she sticks her head into to commit suicide because the guy she kinda fancied forgot to phone her the next day.

   

2. Kaiti Garbi. She sings mostly poppy kind of songs and up tempo ballads. She is also quite cute, because whenever she does a live appearance or concert, something always goes wrong. She fails to be on stage in time, she trips, she loses her voice in the middle of it etc. She has a very deep smooth silky voice though, so she can get away with anything 🙂 Here’s her most popular song Esena Mono (Only you).

   

3. Eleftheria Arvanitaki. She is a bohemian kind of folksy singer. She is kind of like the Greek Alanis Morisette. Most of her songs are way too folksy and traditional sounding for my taste, but a lot of them are very poetic and beautiful. Here’s her most famous song Dinata (Strong).

   

4. Natassa Theodoridou. She has this impossibly deep voice, combined with her very sexy greek accent and ehm… yeah I like her music too 😀 Here is her song Tis Diskoles Stigmes (The Difficult Moments).

   

I’m not very into male singers in general (I wonder why 😉 ), but there are a couple of male Greek singers I enjoy listening to. Christos Dantis is my absolute favourite though. He’s quite like Marco Borsato or Clouseau or David Gray. Here is his song Xoris Esena (Without You).

Another good thing about Greek music is that all the singers keep doing duets with each other. Or let’s say that Kaiti Garbi keeps doing duets with everyone else. So here they all are in different combinations:

1. Kaiti Garbi + Anna Vissi
   Kalitera I Dio Mas (We’re better off with just the two of us)
   (nice subtext going on in this video for the so inclined 😉 )

   They also made another video for this song, which is equally
   funny and cute, in my opinion: Version 2.

2. Kaiti Garbi + Natassa Theodoridou
   Epitelous (Finally)

3. Kaiti Garbi + Christos Dantis
   Spaciba Baby (Cheers Babe (auf Russian))

4. Eleftheria Arvanitaki + nobody, poor thing. So here’s another song of hers I like
   Gia ton mation sou to chroma (For the colour of your eyes)

Lastly, I’ll leave you with how to identify if a song is truly Greek or not:

1. Does it have a bouzouki solo in it at some point?

2. Does it start off with one instrument (preferably the bouzouki) playing the catchy melody for four measurements, then the whole frikkin’ orchestra drowning the one instrument out for four measurements, then the lonesome instrument again, and then the singer gently takes over? (Until the chorus comes around…then there’s no such thing as a gentle greek singer.)

3. Does it sound like a very happy song, but when you translate the lyrics it turns out to be about divorces and untimely deaths?

4. In the lyrics, does one of the following happen?
   a. the singer drinks his/herself to death over love (lost)
   b. the singer sticks his/her head in the gas oven to commit suicide over love (lost)
   c. the singer hasn’t come out of his/her bed/house for months waiting for the phone to ring
   d. the singer is so happily in love, that he/she dies
   e. the singer is so happily in love, that it hurts and he/she wants to die

   They didn’t invent the word pathos for nothing.

 

Well, phew 🙂 I got a little bit carried away there, as usual. I don’t think anyone will actually read to this point, so I might as well reveal some ugly (book stealing) secret here, but nah… Done enough typing for the day. So there you have it, Greek music in a nutshell. The nut being a coconut of monstrous proportions.

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