Moutsis, folk music and discography

The Municipality of Moutsis he was one of the last of an era, a great personality of popular song that, as an absolutely unique idiom, entered the living rooms from the threshing floor. From “Don’t knock on my door at midnight”, “Charo (pou) came out pagan” and “Holy February” to “You don’t talk” and “It’s all the girls’ fault”, Moutsis was inventive, constantly on the move, looking for new idioms – but without ever ceasing to be popular.

He wasn’t alone. For many years, you want because this music was interested in politics, you want because it was related to or drew from poetry, you want because it was the most extroverted part of the discography, it was the most vibrant artistic trend in Greece. There was even an attempt to upgrade this musical idiom, from popular to artistic (before the current corruption of the term), so as not to overlook the cultural background of the scene, which was kept alive by Hatzidakis and Theodorakis, Xarchakos, Kougioumtzis, Kilaidonis, Markopoulos, Leontis, Mikroutsikos and some others.

Moutsis was one of the most characteristic cases of this trend. His first recorded appearances were purely folk, but along the way he changed the constant with which he addressed the public more than once – he was even one of the first folk composers to set poets to music, in the wonderful “Tetralogia”. In the first years after the dictatorship, it was an experience to listen to the broadcasts offered by Columbia, the company where most of the servants of this current recorded.

In the 1980s, however, this idiom began to decline rapidly, until it disappeared in the 1990s with the rise of singer-track stars, and then into the new century, when the discography was absorbed by the Internet. Artistic freedom was supposed to be a big deal, music would be democratized as it would be distributed free of charge on YouTube – and the song space would finally be freed from the “middlemen”, the companies that drank the blood of singers and songwriters in their sacks stove.

Bad thinking. YouTube and the Internet in general is indeed open to everyone, thanks to the Internet we can listen to any music from all over the world we want, but the popular music that captivated us for about forty years in the twentieth century did not find a place in its immensity. Because the old relationship of the artist with the producers at the record companies was catalyzed. There, in this specific context, with commercial as well as artistic criteria, the songs that would reach the public were produced. The music, the timbres, the musical idioms were worked there, the stars were made there. Who were not “nutty throats” of capitalism, according to the populist fairy tale of the time, but creative entities who, with little guidance and in a specific artistic context, excelled.

I know, times change, and today folk song isn’t what it used to be – today it’s all about heady fun and spending and display of opulence. But the eclipse of organized discography did not democratize the music scene. He let her languish, didn’t renew her and gave her over to the clichés of the dog – be it the dance floor or the brutality of trap. That is why, today, we are burying a unique era, which will never return. And we were lucky to sing it and it is still in us.