Road To Rembetika - Gail Holst

ROAD TO REMBETIKA - GAIL HOLST

If as Mark Perry of Alternative TV once surmised in the song How Much Longer that "the Punks don't know nothing, the straights don't know nothing, the hippies don't know nothing, you don't know nothing, we don't know nothing" then who, I ask, might know anything? The Greeks, perhaps? And if so, do they have a word for it? Yes and yes. And the word is 'rembetika', meaning 'an expression of the artistic potential of the masses of the sub-proletariat of Greek towns'.

You've got to admire the Greeks and pay them due respect for the way they took a stand against austerity measures as imposed by the Greek government at the behest of the European Union. Against police armed with guns they rioted again and again through the streets of Athens, eating CS gas for breakfast and laughing in the face of State oppression.

At various times it seemed as though they were on the point of pushing their country over into a state of Anarchy, in its true meaning of the word. Sadly, the heritage of being the cradle of democracy in the end won over and faith was put into the electing of anti-austerity politician Alexis Tsipras of the Syriza Party who, as is the wont of all politicians, let his constituency down by buckling and implementing the austerity measures as demanded by the EU and the IMF.

The Greeks certainly put the English to shame who put up practically no fight whatsoever against austerity measures as demanded not by the EU but by the Conservative government; and then in a twinkling of an eye voted not against David Cameron, George Osborne and the rest of the Eton/Oxford Mafia responsible for imposing austerity but against the EU. As if the EU was to blame for it being grim up North.

"We will not say that Greeks fight like heroes," said Winston Churchill once upon a time "But we will say that heroes fight like Greeks." And he was right.

According to Gail Holst, author of Road To Rembetika - Music of a Greek Sub-culture, Songs of Love, Sorrow & Hashish, 'Pre-war rembetika is hashish music', meaning the songs and the music played in the taverns of the port of Piraeus in Greece during the 1920s and 1930s was hashish-fuelled. Rembetika was the voice of the dispossessed, of those who held a natural dislike of the police along with any other form of authority. It was the voice of the voiceless, the result of cultures colliding where Turkish immigrants met Greek proletariats; bonding over their mutual social and economic position and in their adverse relationship to the mainstream of Greek society.

Recognising their commonality as in it was they who were trapped in poverty, they who were harassed by police and always they who were ending up in jail; they sparked off from one and other via a shared love of music and hash.

Their musical instruments were four-string prototypes of the bouzouki, and between them they developed their own slang, their own dress-style, and their own particular swagger. They had their own taverns where they could sing, dance and smoke marijuana to their heart's content, and when laws against the smoking and sale of hashish were introduced and started to be enforced by police, they simply became more closer-knit so as to protect themselves from prosecution.

Those who lived the anti-authoritarian lifestyle to the full were called 'rembetes' or 'manges' and were defined not only by their defiance in the face of poverty and repression and their refusal to be submissive before the police but in their conspicuous generosity, their spontaneity, and their knowing how to enjoy themselves.

Rembetika was urban folk. The expression and the mirror of working class life, dreams, loves and sorrows as experienced by the Greek sub-proletariat. Gail Holst compares it to the urban blues of New Orleans, Chicago and Harlem but to widen the field of reference, it could just as easily be compared to many other forms of music or culture born from the working class. Meaning, rembetika was R&B, rembetika was Rap, rembetika was Soul, Garage, Oi!, Grime, etc, etc. Rembetika was Punk - Greek style.

Being a musician herself, in her book Holst focusses a lot upon the actual music as in the instruments, the scales, the metres and the rhythms. Half of her book is taken up with the translations of the rembetika lyrics. She does, however, touch upon the relationship of rembetika with politics and the observations she comes up with are interesting.

Holst points out that there is less publicity about the sufferings of the Greeks during the second World War than about other Europeans. During the years of Italian and then German occupation, for example, not only did the entire Jewish population of Greece perish but hundreds of thousands of Greeks died of starvation. During the following Greek civil war and the interference of the British and later American governments, the witch-hunting of communists became open warfare with even napalm being used against them. According to Holst, it was rembetika songs that were sung all over the country by a population which felt them to be an expression of their collective suffering and rage.

During the dictatorship years in Greece (bolstered, it must be remembered, by America) rembetika wasn't tolerated at all. Ostensibly the persecution was against hashish smoking but because of the association between hash and rembetika, musicians were given much harsher sentences than other offenders. Even the Left had no time for the rembetes and were as rigid and intolerant of them as the Right-wing establishment, essentially because they were not organisable. The rembetes, the manges and rembetika was ungovernable.

Rembetika then, is clearly not just a form of music but more a state of mind and a way of life. Holst explains, however, that once the record companies got involved and rembetika became popular with the mainstream of Greek society, it lost its power to represent that state of mind. The musicianship became much more sophisticated and the association with hashish watered down. The form became vulgarised and associated with merely the smashing of plates and drunken dancing in expensive clubs and bars.

For all that, the spirit of rembetika had been cast in stone and every decade or so its tomb would be raided by younger generations seeking inspiration and something a little more real than what they might have on offer to them at the time. Moreover, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the spirit would suddenly appear in some other form besides music; be it in working class literature, art or film. Or even as riots against austerity.

That same 'spirit of rembetika' is, of course, not totally unique to Greece but can also be found within England, emanating primarily - like in Greece - from the working class. In England it might be referred to as the 'spirit of Albion' and, just as in Greece it's neither of the Left or the Right but is instead ungovernable. When it has appeared as, for example, in the form of Punk, like rembetika it too has been assimilated, watered down and sold back as a commodity for mainstream society though not before sending out shockwaves affecting the whole of society.

When next it might appear and in what form is anyone's guess but that's the beauty of it. Music, literature, art, and film can all be used as 'an expression of the artistic potential of the masses of the sub-proletariat' and can occur at any time. As can riots, uprisings and insurrection erupting throughout the land...

John Serpico

Junky - William Burroughs

JUNKY - WILLIAM BURROUGHS

Ever wondered how William Burroughs started his career in heroin? No, me neither. In an interview recently with Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones conducted at The Strand book store in New York, Jones revealed that he wasn't a great reader. No surprise there, really, but there was more. He went on to say that he's only ever actually read one book in his life and even now he couldn't say what it was about. And that book? Junky by William Burroughs.

Was Steve Jones being deliberately funny, I wonder? I mean, if you pick up a copy of Junky and you've never seen it before, there's a bit of a clue going on in the title as to what it's about. Or am I just being guilty of judging a book by its cover?

For the record, Burroughs first came into contact with heroin in the early 1940s when he was asked if he knew of anyone who might want to buy a stolen tommy-gun along with five one-half grain syrettes of morphine tartrate? Like Jarvis Cocker in Common People when being told by a girl at St Martin's College that she'd like to sleep with someone like him, Burroughs replied "I'll see what I can do."

In such circumstances it would have been rude not to have sampled the goods but road testing the tommy-gun was out of the question so that only left the morphine...

Before too long it's all pills 'n' thrills and bellyaches as Burroughs develops a healthy heroin habit and starts regaling us with tales of hustling doctors for prescriptions, robbing drunks on the subway, pushing 'the product', and encountering fellow denizens of the drug world.

All good stuff, of course, especially to a teenager or if read decades ago when this kind of subject matter was considered 'underground'. Unfortunately, in this day and age when you're viewed as being weird if you don't do drugs it's all very quaint and dare I say, innocent?

Might I also say that perhaps nowadays Junky should be kept in the 'Teen' section of any public library because reading it isn't going to entice anyone to experiment with heroin and in fact if anything it's going to put you off: 'I felt a cold burn over the whole surface of my body as though the skin was one solid hive. It seemed like ants were crawling around under the skin.' You'd be better off with a cup of cocoa, a biscuit and a quiet night in.

Junky was William Burroughs' first published novel and gives not the slightest hint of the experimentation and subject matters of his books to come. There's certainly nothing in it to suggest the Naked Lunch was in the offing. Then again, he hadn't yet killed his wife and in fact, she's even mentioned in Junky after he's arrested for possession and she gets him a lawyer and medical help when he's going cold turkey.

'Once a junky always a junky,' writes Burroughs but is that really true? I guess for Burroughs it was and for some, heroin is the end of the line and the only way out for them is dead but then for others it's just another gateway drug. For Burroughs, heroin led to yage, and as he puts it: 'The uncut kick that opens out instead of narrowing down like junk.'

Yage (along with the William Tell incident with his wife, and the meeting with Brion Gysin, it should be said) opened out Burroughs' writing into the full-blown mind bombs of his later works and as Norman Mailer put it, for Burroughs to become 'The only living American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.'

These later works of Burroughs were years ahead of their time and in fact, I would argue that the world is still trying to catch up. But as for Junky, it hasn't really stood the test of time and this is accentuated by the inclusion of the glossary at the back of the book containing such gems as: 'Cat... A man. Chick... A woman. Dig... To size up, to understand, to like, or enjoy. Hep or Hip... Someone who knows the score. Someone who understands 'jive talk'. Someone who is 'with it'. Square... The opposite of hip. Someone who does not understand the jive.'

Are you hip? Do you know the score? Are you with it or are you square? Can you dig it? To the public library with you if not, to the 'Teen' section and pick up a copy of Junky. You've got a long way to go but you've got to start somewhere. Bear in mind, however, that cultural elitism is now passé. It's out the window. Anyone can now be hip, anyone can be a Sex Pistol, and anyone can be a junky. The future is yours. Or as the great philosopher Arthur Daly once said: "The world is your lobster"...

John Serpico

The Plague - Albert Camus

THE PLAGUE - ALBERT CAMUS

In an obscure, nondescript town on the Algerian coast, rats suddenly begin dying; crawling out from their hideaways onto hallways and into gutters where they spit blood and convulse before being trodden underfoot without due care. The numbers of these dying rats rapidly escalates causing murmurs of concern due to the nuisance of it all and the lack of any action from the municipality in dealing with clearing away the carcasses. It's only when people also begin to fall ill and start dying that the idea that there might be something more serious going on starts to take hold.

It's soon obvious that both rats and people are dying in the same horrific manner though it's only when the number of people dying escalates exponentially that it's decided this might be an emergency situation but even then a significant number are still loathe to believe it. By this time, however, it's too late and plague has taken hold.

The thing about the works of Albert Camus is that they never age, they're never out of step or irrelevant to the times they're being read in. When first published in 1947, The Plague was read as a metaphysical novel with the plague being a symbol of the German occupation of France during the Second World War. It can still be read this way, I guess, just as it can still be read as a straightforward narrative but this is 2017 and we're all living in a new age where a vote on membership of the European Union has led to Britain being delivered on a plate to the hard Right and where in America a sleazebag, millionaire, sexual predator has been made President. Both of these events, particularly the latter, begs the question: Are we living in neo-Fascist times?

There's a lot going on in The Plague and though some of it is unambiguous, most of it is subtext and between the lines, most notably the pursuing of some of the common themes found in other books by Camus such as the question of suicide. At one point, Camus describes a sermon as delivered by a preacher in the midst of the epidemic: 'If the chronicles of the Black death at Marseille were to be trusted, only four of the eighty-one monks in the Mercy Monastery survived the epidemic, and of these four three took flight. But when he read that chronicle, Father Paneloux had found his thoughts fixed on that monk who had stayed on by himself, despite the death of his seventy-one companions, and, above all, despite the example of his three brothers who had fled. And, bringing down his fist on the edge of the pulpit, Father Paneloux cried in a ringing voice: 'My brothers, each one of us must be the one who stays!.'

If, as suggested by another character in the book that plague is 'just life, no more than that', then what the preacher is alluding to is that one should not try to escape from life but to remain within it. Suicide is not legitimate.

At another point in the book, Camus describes another character reading what is taken to be a detective novel: 'I was thinking of people who took an interest in you only to make trouble for you. Only I've been reading that detective story. It's about a poor devil who's arrested one fine morning all of a sudden. People had been taking an interest in him and he knew nothing about it. They were talking about him and he knew nothing about it. They were talking about him in offices, entering his name on card-indexes. Now do you think that's fair? Do you think people have a right to treat a man like that?'

Detective story? Is Camus talking about Franz Kafka's The Trial here?

Elsewhere in the book, another character describes a conversation overheard in a tobacconist's shop one day: 'An animated conversation was in progress and the woman behind the counter started airing her views about a murder case which had created some stir in Algiers. A young commercial employee had killed an Algerian on a beach. 'I always say,' the woman began 'If they clapped all that scum in jail, decent folks could breathe more freely.'

Clearly, this is in reference to one of Camus' own books, The Stranger. All these things (and more), however, are academic and for students of philosophy and literature to pore over because we're all now living in a new age and what's of greater interest (to me, at least) is the symbolism of plague to the election of President Donald Trump.

Since Trump's election victory there's been much talk about Fascism and whether we'd recognise it if it arrived tomorrow? It's a good question because Fascism is not going to come knocking at our door in jackboots, Sieg Heiling, with a Swastika on its sleeve. No, it would come in another form. In a suit and tie, probably, but just as ugly. And would it announce itself to be Fascist and wear the name like a badge of honour? Of course it wouldn't. So how would we know of its arrival or if, as suggested by some, that it's arrived already with Trump? The answer is that we wouldn't.

Like the rats appearing in Camus' novel, the signs would be there but we wouldn't pay them much attention. We would turn a blind eye and put up with the inconveniences until such a time that the truth is just too discomforting to ignore but by then it would be too late and plague/Fascism would have taken hold.

In Camus' book, when the town's gates are closed and a ban put in place to prohibit people entering and leaving, consternation ensues as people suddenly find themselves cut off from their families and loved ones. The situation is made worse by actually closing the gates some hours before the official order is made known to the public. The similarities to Trump’s Muslim travel ban and the subsequent chaos that ensued at airports is strikingly similar.

What Trump did that day was cruel and inept, serving as a warning shot of what his Presidency was going to be like. The subsequent protests triggered by the ban served, however, as an inspiration and as a sign of what might be expected as a response to such actions. Or as Camus puts it: 'What's true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves. All the same, when you see the misery it brings, you'd need to be a madman, or a coward, or stone blind, to give in tamely to the plague.'

Elsewhere in the book, Camus contemplates what the future might hold if the epidemic spreads: 'We may see again the Saturnalia of Milan, men and women dancing round graves,' he writes. 'Saturnalia', however, is how Margaret Thatcher described the inner city riots of 1981 that blew up in practically every major city in Britain two years after she came to power. So, might we be seeing whirlwind riots across the USA soon?

'We learn in times of pestilence,' continues Camus 'That there are more things to admire in men than to despise.' This is true, but if history teaches us anything it is that such concepts are not enough to prevent a nation state sleepwalking into Fascism. Once there, however, just as important as knowing what to do about it is to understand what led to it so as not to ever have it repeated. Or as Camus puts it: 'We might try to explain the phenomenon of the plague, but, above all, we should learn what it had to teach us.'

The Plague by Albert Camus is considered by many to be his finest book and I tend to agree. It's certainly his most beautifully written. It's a book that is unlikely to ever age and to be always relevant to the time it's being read in. It's organic and its symbolism applicable to all kinds of things: Nazi occupation of France, Ebola in Africa, turbo capitalism, the absurdity of life, and so on and so forth. Even the election of Donald Trump. It's a classic of world literature. Profound, astonishing, thought provoking and unquestionably brilliant.

John Serpico