The tradition of Rebetika song is at the root of all that is most vibrant and subversive in the popular music of modern Greece. It is, originally, the music of the poor, the dispossessed, the refugees and the migrants who came to Greece from Asia Minor before and after the First World War. Written as a broad-brush introduction to Rebetika song, this concise and well-argued book details the everyday life of the Rebetes - where they came from, how they dressed, their weapons and styles of fighting, their sexual preferences, their culture of hashish and of prison life, all of which form the substance of their songs. Petropoulos flies in the face of traditional Greek academia with his painstaking explanation of how this apparently most Greek of musical cultures has thoroughly cosmopolitan roots - Turkish, Albanian, gypsy and Jewish. By tracing the figure of the Rebetis back to the Ottoman empire, he shows how the language and music of Rebetika song was imbued with Turkish influences, and how its ethos was one of free love and a challenge to established social norms. Songs of the Greek Underworld features breakdowns of the rhythms and metric patterns of the different tunes and their associated dances; it also includes the text of songs from the tradition. It is a salutary reminder of the shared cultural roots of Turkey and Greece.