Papanikolaou, D; (2002) Singing poets: popular music and literature in France and Greece (1945-1975). Doctoral thesis , University of London.

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Abstract

This thesis is based on a comparative examination of popular music in Greece and France between 1945 and 1975. Its central claim is that the concept of the singing poet provided a crucial framing of the field of popular music in both countries and led to a reassessment of the links between literature and popular culture. The term singing poets is coined in order to regroup artists who used poetic texts for their songs or adopted a poetic persona themselves, but also accounts for the reception of a particular style of popular music in the period and the countries under discussion as poetic/intellectual song. Adopting a Cultural Studies approach, this thesis thus outlines the role played by the prestige of literary institutions and an idealized view of oral poetry in the conceptualization of high-popular music. It questions the presentation of certain singersongwriters as 'poets in their own right', as folk poets, auteurs, poet-composers, bards and troubadours. Books, special editions and articles published in France in the 60s are extensively examined in the first part to reveal their traditionalist consensus about the poetic value of the work of certain Auteurs-Compositeurs-Interprétes. Roland Barthes's theorization of reading (and) jouissance provides a vivid counterargument by opening up the possibility of seeing literariness and pop pleasure as symbiotic rather than mutually exclusive. The second part focuses on Greek popular music and reviews how the field of what was termed Entehno Laiko (Art-Popular) has been performatively shaped by the work of Mikis Theodorakis and Manos Hadjidakis. The significant input of literary ideals and the success of Theodorakis's Melopoiemene Poiese (Sung Poetry) project are fundamental to this process. The resulting cultural divide between 'high' and 'low' popular music spheres is reassessed by examining the 'dislocating' performance of singer-songwriter Dionysis Savvopoulos, who appeared in the mid-60s performing a hybrid mimicry of Georges Brassens and Bob Dylan. Through readings of his songs, performances and interviews, popular music emerges both as the space of a reconstructed utopia and as a subversive Other to high cultural forms.

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