Popular music criticism is conducted almost entirely in English. This is not a neutral fact. It means that the canon of important popular music — the records that matter, the artists who shaped the form, the moments that changed everything — has been compiled almost exclusively by people working in one linguistic and cultural tradition. The Rolling Stone list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time is largely a list of records made in English, reviewed in English, and distributed through the infrastructure of the Anglo-American music industry. This is presented as a universal ranking. It is, in fact, a provincial one.
The music in this series exists almost entirely outside that canon. Jacques Brel is acknowledged — briefly, as an influence on other singers — but his recordings are rarely placed alongside Dylan's or Reed's as documents of equivalent artistic ambition. Fabrizio De André is entirely absent. Franco Battiato is entirely absent. Mikis Theodorakis appears, if at all, as background to the Zorba the Greek film, not as one of the most politically significant composers of the twentieth century. Aphrodite's Child's 666 — perhaps the most ambitious concept album ever made in rock music — has no place in any list that would regard the comparable ambition of Tommy or The Wall as self-evident.
The reason is not quality. The reason is language, and what language carries: distribution networks, critical infrastructure, cultural legitimacy, the chain of reference by which one generation of listeners finds what the previous generation valued. The artists in this series were operating inside traditions that did not connect to that chain. They were not lesser. They were simply elsewhere.
Antonio Gramsci, writing from prison in the 1930s, described hegemony as the process by which a dominant group maintains power not through force alone but through the organisation of consent — through establishing its own values, aesthetics, and ways of understanding the world as universal common sense. The Anglo-American critical monopoly over popular music is a precise instance of this. It does not require conspiracy. It requires only that the institutions of evaluation — the magazines, the awards, the charts, the streaming algorithms — were built in one place and have remained there, expanding their reach without acknowledging their partiality.
The Gramscian reading of this series is that the music here represents what he called subaltern culture: culture produced outside the dominant framework, answering to its own traditions, frequently more formally complex and philosophically serious than the culture that dominates it, but structurally excluded from the centres of recognition. The word subaltern here does not mean inferior. It means positioned below the threshold at which power chooses to look.
The argument this series makes is simple: the artists gathered here were not making second-rate Anglo-American music. They were making first-rate European music. The distinction matters enormously. Second-rate Anglo-American music is music that aspires to the standards of the dominant tradition and falls short. First-rate European music is music that operates inside entirely different standards — literary, classical, operatic, vernacular, religious — and achieves things that the Anglo-American tradition was not even attempting.
Brel was not trying to write like Dylan. He was trying to write like Verlaine and performing like a man possessed by something he couldn't name. De André was not trying to write like Leonard Cohen. He was translating the Genoese underclass into ballads whose formal sophistication draws on the Italian lyric tradition going back centuries. Battiato was not trying to write like Brian Eno. He was trying to reconcile Sufi mysticism with the Italian art song tradition and electronic composition, which is a completely different and arguably more ambitious project than ambient music.
Understanding this is the precondition for hearing the music properly. As long as you listen to it in comparison to Anglo-American rock, you will hear only absence — the absence of a certain kind of guitar sound, a certain attitude toward rhythm, a certain relationship to the body. Listen to it on its own terms, and you hear a music of extraordinary richness that has simply been conducting its conversation in rooms the English-speaking world never entered.
When Scott Walker attempted English-language versions of Brel's songs in the mid-1960s, he produced beautiful records — and records that are recognisably not what Brel was doing. The English versions of Amsterdam and Jackie are fine songs. The originals are something else: performances in which the French language is being used as a percussive, rhythmic, and phonological instrument, in which the sounds of the words — not their meanings alone — are carrying emotional weight that the translated meaning cannot reproduce. Brel's Amsterdam in French has a density of consonants and a physical, almost spitting quality to the delivery that the English version, rendered reasonable and singable, cannot approximate. The translation is accurate. The music is gone.
This is not a complaint about translation. It is an observation about what the music was doing in the first place. Brel was writing songs in which French — specifically the Northern French of a Belgian from Schaerbeek, not the soft Southern French of the chanson tradition — was exploited for its phonological possibilities as much as its semantic ones. The hard-k sounds, the rolled-r, the nasal vowels: these are not decorative. They are structural. Remove them and you have a different song.
Brel's great 1962 song about Belgium — and specifically about the Flemish plain of his childhood — is called Le Plat Pays. The English translation is almost always "flat country" or "my flat land." These translations are accurate. They miss everything. Plat in French carries connotations of flatness, plainness, dullness, the absence of relief — all at once. It is self-deprecating and loving simultaneously in a way that English cannot hold. "Flat country" sounds merely geographical. Plat pays sounds like a man describing the place he left in full knowledge of what he was leaving, and loving it precisely for the absence of the spectacular. The untranslatable is not a word. It is an attitude.
The same problem attaches to Gainsbourg, though for opposite reasons. Where Brel's language is dense and phonologically loaded, Gainsbourg's is slippery, ironic, full of puns and double meanings that are frequently obscene beneath a surface of elegant diction. Je t'aime… moi non plus (1969) was banned by the BBC and reached number one in the UK — the paradox of the record that was heard everywhere and understood nowhere. The English-speaking audience heard the sounds: Birkin's breathiness, Gainsbourg's measured baritone, the suggestion of what they were doing. The French-speaking audience heard all of that, and also the joke — because the title means roughly "I love you neither do I," and the grammatical incorrectness of moi non plus is deliberate: it is a refusal to say "I love you too," which is the conventional response, replaced with something that sounds like agreement but is actually a qualified and ironic withholding. The record is funnier in French. It is also more serious.
Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the cultural field — the structured space within which artistic production occurs, with its own logic, its own forms of capital, its own rules for what counts as legitimate and illegitimate — is useful here. The European popular music tradition in this series was operating within fields that had their own logic: the French chanson tradition, the Italian cantautore tradition, the Greek laïká tradition. These fields had their own critics, their own institutions, their own forms of consecration. An artist could be taken seriously — could accumulate cultural capital — within these fields without any reference to the Anglo-American field at all.
What the Anglosphere hegemony produced was not the destruction of these fields but their delegitimisation: the sense, gradually installed from the 1960s onward, that the field that really mattered was the English-language one, and that success within a national or linguistic field was a secondary achievement. The artists in this series largely refused this delegitimisation. They continued to operate within their own fields, on their own terms. The consequence was invisibility in the dominant discourse. The music, however, remained.
Italian presents the sharpest case. The cantautori — singer-songwriters — who emerged in Italy in the late 1950s and flourished through the 1970s represent perhaps the richest tradition of literary popular songwriting in the world. De André drew on Villon and Pavese. Paolo Conte drew on the Italian jazz tradition and provincial literary nostalgia. Lucio Battisti — who does not feature prominently in this series but deserves acknowledgment — was writing pop songs of extraordinary harmonic sophistication for a mass Italian audience. None of this reached the English-speaking world in any systematic way. The occasional song became known — Azzurro, Volare — but the corpus remained invisible.
The reason is not simply language. It is that Italian popular music existed within a cultural field shaped by opera, by the literary tradition, by a different relationship between the intellectual and the popular. In Italy, a singer-songwriter who read Pasolini was not an anomaly but an expected figure. The idea that a popular musician might also be a serious literary intelligence was built into the tradition. In the Anglo-American world, this combination exists — Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell — but it is experienced as exceptional, as an achievement against the grain of the form. In Italy, it was the form.
In the late 1970s, Jacques Brel was approached several times by American record labels interested in an English-language album. He declined each time. His explanation was characteristically direct: he said that his songs were not stories set to music, but music that required these specific words in this specific language to exist at all, and that recording them in English would be like performing surgery with garden tools — technically possible, achieving nothing you wanted to achieve.
He did, however, record a small number of songs in French for the American market, with slightly simplified production, as concessions to the commercial context. He considered these among the worst things he had ever made. The version of Amsterdam he recorded for American release in 1968 is tidy, technically competent, and almost entirely without the violence of the original 1964 recording. It sold adequately. He never mentioned it in interviews.
Aphrodite's Child formed in Athens in 1967, the year the military junta took power. Vangelis, Roussos, Loukas Sideras, and Silver Koulouris had been performing together under various configurations when the coup made it necessary — or at least advisable — to leave. They drove to Paris. Their car broke down in Marseille. They stayed in Paris, recorded demos, and eventually secured a contract with Philips. Their early singles — including Rain and Tears (1968), a song based on Pachelbel's Canon — were improbably successful across Europe, reaching number one in France, Belgium, and several other markets. They were not, at this point, the band that would record 666. They were a moderately successful European pop group with an interesting keyboard player.
The transformation happened because Vangelis refused to stop working. Between their pop singles and the recording of 666, he was absorbing everything: progressive rock, electronic music, the emerging synthesizer technology, his own Greek musical heritage, Orthodox liturgical music, the atmosphere of late-1960s Paris. He was not synthesising these influences into a coherent style. He was accumulating them, waiting to see what the accumulation would produce.
The key to understanding 666 — and the key to understanding why it could only have been made by Greeks — is the Orthodox Christian sensory tradition. The Greek Orthodox church is, by any measure, a more physically immersive religious experience than its Western Protestant counterpart. Incense, icons, chant, the full choreography of the liturgy, the quality of light through specific windows — all of this constitutes a total sensory environment in which the sacred and the physical are not separated. The spiritual experience is bodily. The body is a medium for spiritual experience.
Demis Roussos on the track Aegian Sea — one of the album's most overwhelming moments — is not performing in any recognisable pop music register. He is singing in the manner of a Byzantine cantor pushed to extremity, the counter-tenor voice deployed at full volume over Vangelis's synthesizer drones and the slow build of the arrangement. There is nothing transgressive about this in the context it comes from. It is devotional. The fact that it sounds, to ears trained on Anglo-American rock, like something alarming, is a measure of how much those ears are missing.
Katanyktikós describes a quality of religious feeling specific to the Orthodox tradition — a combination of compunction, tenderness, and overwhelming sorrow that produces a particular kind of devout tears. It is not grief exactly, and not ecstasy exactly. It is the emotional state of simultaneous unworthiness and grace, the feeling of being held and broken at the same time. There is no English equivalent. The closest is perhaps "contrition," but that word is cold and juridical. Katanyktikós is warm, somatic, and overwhelming. Roussos's vocal performances on 666, whatever Vangelis intended compositionally, achieve this quality. He is not, at those moments, a pop singer.
Irene Papas's contribution to 666 is perhaps the most extreme thing on an extreme record. The track called ∞ (Infinity) requires her to perform what can only be described as an extended ecstatic state — between singing, speaking, and something that has no name in Western music vocabulary but exists in the Orthodox liturgy as the sound the voice makes when language has given out and only the body remains. Papas was, at this point, one of the most respected theatrical and film actresses in Europe. She performs the track as though it is the most natural thing she has ever done, because in the tradition she was raised in, it is.
Demis Roussos is one of the strangest figures in European popular music, and his strangeness illuminates everything about this series' central argument. The man who performed Aegian Sea with the ecstatic intensity of a Byzantine cantor was, three years later, recording Forever and Ever for the easy listening market and becoming — in a kaftan and with a beard — one of the most commercially successful MOR artists in Europe. The arc is not a fall from grace. It is something more interesting: a voice that was, briefly, placed in conditions that demanded everything it had, and then placed in conditions that demanded almost nothing.
The "naughty Orthodox monk" quality — the combination of genuine religious sensuality with cheerful commercial appetite — is very specifically Mediterranean. The Orthodox Church is not a tradition that views physical pleasure as a theological problem in the way that Northern European Protestantism does. A man who could perform with total sacred commitment in the morning might perform with total secular enjoyment in the evening. These are not contradictions in the tradition he came from. They are the same capacity for full engagement, directed at different material.
Roland Barthes, in his 1972 essay "The Grain of the Voice," described a quality he heard in certain singers — specifically in the Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin — that he called la graine, the grain. This was not the conventional measure of vocal quality: not range, not purity, not control. It was something more physical — the specific texture of a particular body meeting a particular language, the friction between the voice and the words, the sense of a real organism producing sound in a real moment rather than executing a technique. Barthes found this quality in bass-baritone voices of a specific tradition; he also found its absence in what he called "pheno-song" — the kind of technically accomplished singing that communicates emotion through performance without the physical grain. Brel has grain to an almost alarming degree. Gainsbourg has something more ambiguous: a studied anti-grain, a flatness that is itself a kind of physical statement.
Brel performed as though each performance was the last expenditure of a finite resource. The footage of his live concerts in the 1960s — the sweat, the physical collapse into the music, the way his face moves through every emotion the song contains — is uncomfortable to watch in the way that great performance is always uncomfortable: it costs the performer something real. He retired from performing in 1967, at 38, at the height of his reputation, saying that he had nothing left to give that he had not already given, and that continuing would be a form of fraud. He then went to the Marquesas Islands, learned to fly small aircraft, made a film, and returned to recording once more before his death from lung cancer in 1978. The retirement was not theatrical. It was an accurate assessment of a resource he had depleted.
The scale of his influence on what came after is difficult to overstate but easy to misread. The English-language artists who covered his songs — Scott Walker, David Bowie, Terry Jacks — absorbed the surface: the romantic despair, the theatrical lyric, the dramatic chord changes. What they could not absorb was the physicality, which is specific to the French and to a particular tradition of male performance in which the body's complete commitment to the emotional statement is not considered excessive. Brel was not an extreme version of normal. He was a precise version of what his tradition asked for.
"Tenderness" is correct. It misses the physical specificity of la tendresse in French, which carries the sense of something bruised or bruisable — the tenderised quality of flesh, not just the emotional softness. Brel uses the word throughout his work with full awareness of both registers. When he sings of la tendresse he is singing about the quality of being open to damage — emotionally and physically simultaneously. The English word "tenderness" is primarily emotional. The French word is also somatic. His songs about it are also, in a register that translation cannot preserve, about the body.
Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971) is the record that Gainsbourg's career had been building toward without knowing it. A concept album about a middle-aged man who runs over a teenage girl on a bicycle with his Rolls-Royce and falls in love with her — which sounds like a provocation and is, but is also a genuine study in the dynamics of power, age, desire, and destruction that uses the concept album form with a rigour that most concept albums never achieve. Jean-Claude Vannier's string arrangements are among the most beautiful and disturbing in French popular music. Gainsbourg's vocal performance — flat, measured, almost narrated — refuses to perform the emotion the music provides; you supply it yourself, which is the more complete form of implication.
The record was not a commercial success. Gainsbourg was already famous in France for Je t'aime and for his reputation as a provocateur, and the album was considered difficult. It has been subsequently re-evaluated as his masterpiece, and as one of the greatest albums in any genre, by the generation that discovered it in the 1990s. Beck cited it as a primary influence on Mutations. Air and Serge Gainsbourg's shadow falls across the entire French pop tradition of the 1990s and 2000s.
In 1986, on a French television programme, Gainsbourg met Whitney Houston. She was 23, recently emerged as the most commercially successful female vocalist in the world, and was performing a modest promotional appearance. Gainsbourg, who was 58 and deeply drunk, told her on live television, with precise diction and complete composure, that he wanted to sleep with her. Houston's response was a combination of embarrassment and genuine bewilderment. The French studio audience received the comment as entirely characteristic. The clip circulated for years as evidence of Gainsbourg's incorrigibility.
What the clip actually demonstrates is the gap between two completely different cultural frameworks for what a public statement about desire means. In Gainsbourg's framework — a framework that runs from Baudelaire through the Surrealists to his own tradition — the public declaration of desire for a specific person is a philosophical act: an assertion that the body has its own intelligence and that pretending otherwise is hypocrisy. In the American framework Houston was operating in, it was simply offensive. Both frameworks are coherent. They cannot both be right.
De André's background was bourgeois — his father was a professor, his family comfortable. This makes his sustained attention to the Genoese underclass all the more deliberate. It was not autobiography; it was choice. He chose, early and permanently, to write about the people who were not being written about, to use the Italian lyric tradition — which had a centuries-long relationship with the literary treatment of poverty and marginality, from Dante's Inferno to Pavese's novels — in service of people who would not normally appear in it.
His first significant work, La Guerra di Piero (1964), was an anti-war song that told the story of a soldier who refuses to shoot an enemy soldier and is killed for the hesitation. The melody is based on an old Genoese folk song. The lyric is written with the precision of formal verse: metrically strict, imagistically exact, building to a final image of extraordinary bleakness. It was immediately controversial — not for its form, which was traditional, but for its content, which was entirely out of step with the official Italian relationship to the Second World War. It was also immediately recognisable as a work of genuine literary seriousness, which is why it was controversial rather than simply ignored.
Creuza de mä (1984) — the title translates roughly as "path to the sea" in Genoese dialect — is the most extreme act of localism in Italian popular music. De André recorded the entire album in Genoese, a dialect that was spoken by perhaps half a million people in and around the city of Genoa, and that most Italians outside that region found incomprehensible. The decision was not nostalgic or folkloristic. It was a philosophical statement about where music comes from and what it carries: the specific sounds of a specific place, the intonations shaped by a specific history of trade, migration, poverty, and the proximity of the sea.
The album was a critical success — recognised immediately as a masterpiece by Italian critics, who could not entirely understand the dialect either. It influenced the subsequent generation of Italian songwriters more than almost any other single record. It also, inevitably, went entirely unnoticed outside Italy. You cannot translate a work whose entire argument is about the untranslatability of place.
The Genoese word for the narrow alleyways that run through the old city is not merely a synonym for "alley" or "lane." The caruggi are a specific architectural and social form: so narrow that two people can barely pass, so tall that sunlight reaches the ground only briefly at midday, forming a labyrinthine network in which Genoa's poorest inhabitants lived in conditions of physical intimacy with their neighbours that the word "neighbourhood" cannot convey. De André wrote about the caruggi repeatedly — about the prostitutes who worked there, the sailors who passed through, the children who grew up in them. The word contains the social world. "Alley" contains only the geography.
In 1979, De André and his partner Dori Ghezzi were kidnapped by Sardinian bandits and held for ransom for four months in the mountains. The kidnapping was carried out by the barbagia — the traditional Sardinian bandit class, operating by a code of conduct that had its own internal logic of honour and recompense. De André later described the four months not with horror but with a complicated fascination: he had entered a world with its own laws, its own culture, its own legitimacy in its own terms, and found it more coherent than the bourgeois world from which he had been taken. He wrote about his captors with respect. His album L'Indiano (1981), made partly in response to the experience, reflects on marginal cultures that develop their own integrity precisely because they are excluded from the dominant order.
When De André was released after four months, he held a press conference in Genoa. The journalists expected trauma. They got a complicated lecture about Sardinian social structure and the rationality of the bandit tradition in a context of centuries of mainland exploitation. He had spent four months listening to his captors, understanding their world, and was more interested in explaining it than in his own ordeal. One journalist asked if he was angry. He said that anger was the correct response to injustice, and that he had found the injustice was rather more evenly distributed than the newspapers tended to suggest.
This response is not saintly. It is the response of a man who had spent his career writing about people on the wrong side of respectable opinion and had, for four months, lived as one. The continuity between his artistic project and his autobiographical response to the kidnapping is complete. He was the same person in both registers.
Paolo Conte's career proceeded at the pace of a man who did not especially require external validation. He wrote songs for other artists throughout the 1960s and early 1970s before recording his own work, and when he did record, the results were immediately recognisable as coming from a completely specific sensibility: a provincial northern Italian imagination saturated in American jazz of the 1930s and 1940s, in the atmosphere of small-town dance halls and the specific quality of nostalgia for a world that was always more vivid in memory than in reality. His voice is among the most distinctive in European popular music — gravelly, slightly nasal, inflecting the Italian with Piedmontese rhythms that give the lyrics a texture no standard Italian could produce.
Franco Battiato's career is among the strangest in any popular music tradition. He began in the late 1960s making avant-garde electronic music that was genuinely experimental — the kind of work that sits beside Stockhausen and Berio in the conservatory catalogue, not beside any chart. In the early 1970s he became seriously interested in Islamic mysticism, specifically the Sufi tradition, and this encounter — with its emphasis on interior stillness, the dissolution of ego, the use of music as a vehicle for spiritual transformation rather than emotional expression — completely reorganised his approach to composition. He then made a series of albums in the late 1970s and early 1980s that combined this mystical seriousness with Italian pop structures in a way that should have produced uncommercial, esoteric music and instead produced some of the most genuinely popular records in Italian history.
Centro di gravità permanente (Permanent Gravitational Centre) is the single from La voce del padrone (1981), Italy's best-selling album of the decade. The song is about the search for a fixed inner point — a place of stillness that the world's agitations cannot reach. The lyric name-checks a Russian general, various exotic locations, a book of Tibetan wisdom, and the human desire to not be thrown about by events. It is a philosophical statement about equanimity dressed as an Italian pop song. It was number one for months.
The Italian phrase that Battiato places at the centre of his most famous song cannot survive translation without losing its double meaning. Centro di gravità is literally a centre of gravity — the physical point around which mass is balanced. Permanente means permanent, fixed, stable. Together they name what the song is searching for: a point inside the self that does not move when everything else does, that provides the stability that the world does not. "Permanent gravitational centre" is accurate. It sounds like a technical specification. The Italian sounds like a prayer. The Sufi resonance — the mystic spinning always around a still centre — is completely present in the Italian and entirely absent from the English. The song is, among other things, a description of the Sufi dhikr, the remembrance-practice whose purpose is exactly this stability. You would not know this from the English title.
In 1972, Battiato released Fetus, an album of electronic compositions that was as uncompromising as anything produced in Europe that year. It sold almost nothing. He followed it with Pollution, equally experimental, equally ignored. He then spent several years making records that progressively incorporated his developing mystical interests — records that were more accessible than Fetus but still firmly outside commercial music.
When La voce del padrone became a mass phenomenon in 1981, Italian journalists asked him how he felt about the commercial success. He answered, consistently and patiently, that he had not changed his approach: he was still making music about the same things he had always been making music about. The audience had simply, at this particular moment, found the music available to them. He did not express surprise that serious music could reach a large audience. He seemed, if anything, to have expected it.
Pythagoras believed that the cosmos was organised according to mathematical ratios and that music was the audible form of those ratios. The movement of the planets produced sound — the musica universalis, the music of the spheres — that was inaudible to human ears trained only on the contingent and perishable. Music that approximated these ratios was not merely pleasant; it was cosmologically accurate, a tuning of the human to the universal. This is not, from within the Greek philosophical tradition, a metaphor. It is a technical description of what music is for.
Vangelis works in this tradition, consciously and explicitly. His synthesizer is not primarily a texture generator or a substitute for an orchestra, as it is in most Western popular music. It is an instrument for constructing mathematical ratios — sustained tones, harmonic relationships, the movement of frequency against frequency in ways that produce, in the listener, the physical sensation of a very large space. The effect in his best work is not atmospheric in the way that ambient music is atmospheric. It is architectural: you are inside a structure whose proportions correspond to something outside immediate human scale.
Chariots of Fire (1981) changed Vangelis's public identity permanently and, arguably, narrowed the way his work was heard. The film score — specifically the title theme, which became one of the most instantly recognisable pieces of music composed in the second half of the twentieth century — established him as a commercial composer of uplifting instrumental music. This is accurate, but describes only a fraction of what he was doing, and places his work in a tradition — the inspirational film score — that is entirely different from the Pythagorean-cosmological project he had been pursuing since the early 1970s.
The Blade Runner score (1982) is the corrective to this misreading. Composed simultaneously with Chariots of Fire, it creates a Los Angeles of 2019 that is recognisable as science fiction's permanent rain-and-neon imaginary, and does so through the same mathematical construction of space that characterises his earlier work — except that the space here is urban, melancholic, and deeply ambivalent about the human project it is soundtracking. The score was not officially released until 1994, because the studio retained control and disagreed with Vangelis about what should be on it. By that point, the film's reputation as a major work of cinema had been established, and the score was recognised retrospectively as inseparable from what the film was doing visually.
In 1974, when Rick Wakeman left Yes, the band approached Vangelis as a replacement. He was, by this point, already established in Europe as a solo artist following the completion of 666 and his subsequent solo albums Earth (1973) and Heaven and Hell (1975). He declined the offer. His explanation, in various interviews, was consistent: he worked alone, in his own studio, at his own pace, without the constraints of a band's touring and recording schedule. The idea of performing the same music night after night was, he said, a contradiction of everything he understood music to be — which was an act of discovery in the moment of making, not the reproduction of a fixed arrangement.
He never toured. Not once, in a career spanning five decades. This refusal was not shyness — he gave occasional interviews, appeared on television, accepted the Oscar in person. It was a philosophical position about what music is. Music made in a studio is music discovering itself. Music performed on tour is music remembering itself. The second activity was, in his framework, not merely less interesting but actually a different and lesser thing. The British press found this baffling. Greek philosophical tradition found it obvious.
Theodorakis was born in Chios in 1925 and spent his childhood on a series of Greek islands as his father moved between administrative postings. His political formation was complete by his teens: he joined the resistance against the Axis occupation as a schoolboy, was arrested and tortured by the Italian occupiers, and then again by the Germans. After the war, he was imprisoned during the Greek Civil War on the side of the Communist-led resistance. He was exiled to a remote island. He survived by writing music. The biography reads as extraordinary; it was not especially unusual for a Greek man of his generation.
His relationship with Albert Camus began in the mid-1950s when Theodorakis was in Paris, and it shaped his thinking about resistance and the absurd in ways that run through his entire subsequent work. Camus understood — had understood since The Myth of Sisyphus — that the argument for resistance in the face of inevitable defeat was not a logical argument but an existential one: you resist because resistance is the form of life proper to a being who knows it will die, not because resistance will succeed. Theodorakis composed his great oratorio Axion Esti (1964) — based on Odysseas Elytis's prize-winning poem about Greece, war, and survival — from within this framework. It is a work about the persistence of the Greek world against every force that has tried to end it, composed with the specific weight of a man who has already been imprisoned for participating in that persistence.
In April 1967, a military coup established a dictatorship in Greece. Within days, the junta banned Theodorakis's music — all of it, including the recordings already in circulation. This was a recognition of his cultural centrality: his settings of the major Greek poets (Ritsos, Seferis, Elytis), his popular songs, his film scores, had made him the most publicly audible figure in Greek musical culture. To hear his music was to hear something the regime wanted silenced. People found ways to hear it anyway: in private homes, through foreign broadcasts, through the recordings that circulated despite the ban.
Theodorakis was imprisoned in August 1967 at the camp at Oropos, then transferred to a remote mountain village, then to the prison camp at Zatouna, where conditions were deliberately severe. He continued composing, writing on whatever paper was available. International pressure — led by, among others, Camus's colleagues in the French intellectual community, and eventually reaching the level of formal government protest — forced his release in 1970. He left Greece and continued his work in exile. He returned after the fall of the junta in 1974.
Laïká describes the tradition of Greek popular song that descends from rebetika — the music of the dispossessed, the urban poor, the Greek refugees from Asia Minor who arrived in the 1920s bringing the saz and the bouzouki and the specific melancholy of a people who had lost their home. Theodorakis worked within and transformed this tradition: he brought the literary poetry (Ritsos, Elytis) into contact with it, expanded its harmonic and structural possibilities, and turned it into a vehicle for a political and spiritual weight it had not previously carried. "Popular song" misses everything. The English word carries no historical specificity, no class content, no sound of a particular kind of melancholy shaped by specific historical dispossession. Laïká carries all of it.
When Theodorakis was released from detention in 1970, after international pressure that included statements from the Soviet government, Bertrand Russell, and Simone de Beauvoir, he gave a concert in Athens. The audience was reportedly around 200,000 people — a significant fraction of the city's population. The junta was still in power. The concert was held anyway, partly because the regime calculated that preventing it would create more trouble than allowing it, and partly because the popular pressure was too large to contain.
He was carried through the streets afterward. The image that has persisted from that evening — a small man in a suit, visibly exhausted from imprisonment, held above a crowd of tens of thousands in a city still occupied by a dictatorship — is one of the most complete illustrations available of what "the political song as material force" means in practice. The music did not end the junta. It did not pretend to. It kept alive, for the people who heard it, the sense that the arrangement was not permanent. That is not nothing. It may, in fact, be everything.
Gramsci's interregnum — the moment when the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born — is the condition of European popular culture since the late 1970s. The old tradition (Brel, De André, Theodorakis) operated with full confidence inside its own fields of cultural production, answerable to its own standards, making music that required no external validation. The new tradition — Eurodisco, Eurodance, the successive waves of European acts attempting to break the Anglo-American market — is characterised by the desire for that validation, the subordination of local specificity to global accessibility, and the consequent loss of everything that made the old tradition extraordinary.
This is not an argument that European popular music declined in quality after 1975. It produced extraordinary work: Abba is genuinely great, not despite its Swedishness but because of it (the melancholy under the gloss is not an Anglo-American emotion and cannot be disguised as one). The French electronic tradition that emerged through Daft Punk, Air, and their successors is world-class. The Italian independent tradition, though less visible, contains artists of genuine seriousness. The German Neue Deutsche Welle produced records of real power. But all of these operate within — or at minimum in relation to — the Anglo-American hegemony. They are either trying to beat it at its own game (Daft Punk) or deliberately refusing it (the Italian independents). Neither relationship is the relationship that Brel or De André had to it, which was essentially: indifference.
Gramsci described hegemony as working not through force but through the organisation of desire: the dominant culture makes itself the object of aspiration for those it dominates. The European popular music tradition's subordination to the Anglo-American world is a precise instance of this. No military force required French songwriters to write in English or Italian producers to pursue British chart success. They chose to, because the Anglo-American market was larger, because success within it conferred global legitimacy, because the recording industry's infrastructure increasingly favoured English-language product. The logic was economic. The cultural consequence was the erosion of the independent tradition.
What Gramsci also described, however, was the survival of subaltern culture despite hegemony — the ways in which subordinated traditions preserve their knowledge, their forms, their specific ways of understanding the world, in forms the dominant culture cannot fully see or manage. The tradition of Brel and De André and Theodorakis did not disappear. It withdrew. It continued in smaller venues, in reissues, in the education of subsequent generations of musicians who found it, as listeners find things, by accident or by inheritance. The other shore is still there. It simply requires a different crossing to reach it.
Abba require special attention because they complicate the thesis and complicate it productively. They recorded in English, pursued and achieved global commercial success, and became one of the best-selling musical acts in history. By every measure of the argument this series has been making, they should be a symptom of the capitulation — a European act that abandoned its local tradition to compete in the Anglo-American market. And yet they are not quite that.
The Abba albums contain a quality of emotional complexity — a melancholy, a sense of beauty as consolation rather than triumph, a relationship to loss that is specific to a Northern European Protestant culture — that is not present in comparable Anglo-American pop of the period and that the Anglo-American market absorbed without fully recognising. When ABBA writes "The Winner Takes It All," the song's emotional logic is Swedish: the acknowledgment of defeat without the American narrative of resilience and recovery, the precise attention to the physical experience of being the loser in a situation that someone else has framed as natural and inevitable. The song is Gramscian in its bones. It is unlikely that Benny Andersson had read Gramsci. He had lived in Sweden.
Stromae — the Belgian artist born Paul Van Haver in 1985 — matters more than his commercial profile suggests, because he represents evidence that the independent European tradition is not entirely extinct. His music is French-language, sonically contemporary (drawing on house, electronic dance, hip-hop), and lyrically in direct descent from the Brel tradition: concerned with mortality, with social failure, with the specific emotional weight of the French language deployed with full attention to its phonological possibilities. His song Papaoutai (2013) — about the absence of fathers, about the ways in which men transmit their failures to their sons — is a Brel song for the twenty-first century in structure, in commitment, and in its refusal to make the pain comfortable.
The fact that Stromae is exceptional — that he requires mention as a survival rather than as a representative figure of a continuing tradition — is itself the evidence. The tradition did not produce a generation of successors. It produced, here and there, artists who found it, recognised it, and continued it in isolation. The difference between a living tradition and an archived one is whether the next generation finds it through active transmission or retrospective discovery. The tradition in this series is, for the most part, archived. Stromae is one of the few people still making withdrawals.
In Buddhist thought, the other shore is the far side of the river of suffering — the destination of practice, the condition of liberation. In the literal Mediterranean sense, it is the coast you can see from where you are standing: close enough to be visible, requiring a crossing to reach. The phrase contains both meanings, and the tension between them — the spiritual destination and the geographical fact — is precisely the tension this series has been describing. The music in this lectures is not over there. It is here, audible, specific, extraordinary. The crossing required is not across water. It is across the assumption that the music that matters is the music you already know the name for.
In the early 1980s, before the internet made the entire recorded catalogue of human musical production available on a device you could hold in one hand, hearing music from the other shore required physical effort. Import record shops stocked European pressings at substantial mark-ups; music press airfreighted from London arrived late and described records that took weeks to find. The experience of hearing Aphrodite's Child's 666 for the first time under these conditions — tracking it down, waiting for the import, playing it without knowing quite what to expect — is qualitatively different from the experience of encountering it now through an algorithm's recommendation.
This is not nostalgia. It is an observation about what effort does to attention. Music found at cost is heard differently from music served by an algorithm. The tradition in this series was built in the former condition and is now available in the latter. Whether the availability changes the hearing — whether the crossing is easier than it used to be, or whether the ease of the crossing is itself a kind of loss — is the question the series ends on, without resolving it.
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