rebetika

Noun

rebetiko (countable and uncountable, plural rebetika)

1. A Greek urban folk song, characterised by lyrics about underworld activity, and played generally on stringed instruments including the bouzouki.
   • I need another player to put a Greek melody over the top, perhaps a rebetiko of some sort.1994, Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin
2. (in plural) This style of music; such music as a genre.
   • At the time, these earliest songs of the rebetika tradition were a symptom and a particular manifestation of a wider climate of violence, criminality and despair, whether real or imagined, that permeated the Greek capital around the turn of the century.2019, Roderick Beaton, Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation, Penguin, published 2020, page 172