“listening to istanbul”: imagining place in turkish rap music

STUDIA MUSICOLOGICA NORVEGICA © UNIVERSITETSFORLAGET

VOL 31 2005 S46–67 ISBN 82-15-0705-8

“Listening to Istanbul”: Imagining Place in Turkish Rap Music

THOMAS SOLOMON

RAP MUSIC AND THE POETICS OF PLACE

Ethnomusicologists and popular music scholars have recently begun to explore howpeople use music as a vehicle for imagining places and constructing place-based identi-ties.1 This work has shown how mediated popular musics can be a local resource foridentity construction, and how practices of the production and consumption of popu-lar music are simultaneously expressive practices for imagining and performing place.Closely related to this focus on music and place is an interest in musical aspects of glo-balization.2 In one significant area of this research, writers have borrowed from contem-porary cultural theory and applied to the study of popular music concepts like indigeni-zation,3 localization,4 glocalization,5 reterritorialization,6 and domestication7 to describeprocesses by which people engage with, appropriate, and locally re-emplace globally cir-culating musical products, styles and genres through practices of production and con-sumption. The term glocal, first used in business to describe strategies for marketingglobal products in ways appropriate to local sales territorities, has emerged as a short-hand way of evoking the articulations and interpenetrations of the local and the globalin popular cultural expression.8

Rap music, with its characteristic practice of “representing” place,9 is a particularlyappropriate genre for investigating the musical imagination of locality and musical rela-tionships between the local and the global. Central to the discourse of rap is the explicitconstruction of identity in terms of place, what Krims calls “hip-hop’s urge to locali-ty.”10 In his recent book on race, space and place in rap, Forman details the complexand multiple spatial discourses of rap and hip-hop in the U.S.11 Rap is also now a thor-

THOMAS SOLOMON [ 47 ]

oughly globalized genre, as the essays in Mitchell’s edited volume Global Noise show.12

Young people from places as diverse as Greenland, Japan, New Zealand and Brazil haveindigenized the genre, re-making it into a vehicle for constructing local identities andexpressing local concerns. Forman’s monograph and Mitchell’s collection represent thesignificant contributions the concepts and methods of cultural studies can make to un-derstanding how the discourses of rap and hip-hop emplace identity. Largely missingfrom both books, however, is a sense of how the poetics of rap – the texts and musicaltracks of rap songs themselves – are vehicles for these imaginings of place.13

A few researchers have discussed some aspects of the musical and textual poetics ofrap; these writers have generally focused especially on rhythmic organization and sam-pling practices, making various arguments about how rap is a vehicle for a particularlyAfrican-American aesthetic.14 Probably the most detailed discussion of formal aspectsof rap is Krims’ work on rap and the poetics of identity.15 Krims, a music theorist,demonstrates through extremely detailed transcriptions of rap texts and textures theways in which rappers and rap producers construct place-based identities, particularlyin his analysis of southern U.S. rappers’ imaginations of a distinct “rap geography.”

In this paper I attempt a synthesis of the cultural studies and poetics-oriented ap-proaches to rap music, examining in some detail how rappers use aspects of song texts,musical style, and visual imagery as vehicles for imagining place. My example comesfrom a song created by Turkish rap musicians in the city of Istanbul. The Istanbul rap-pers I discuss here understand that the discourse of rap characteristically includes thepractice of representing place, and implement that discourse in their songs using themusical and textual resources at their disposal.16 I suggest that they use rap’s practicesof intertextuality to appropriate from Turkish popular culture and re-emplace withintheir own music existing ways of representing the city of Istanbul, fusing the resourcesof Turkish popular culture with the globalized Afro-American rap idiom to re-imaginethe urban landscape of the city. First, however, I introduce two contexts for Turkish rapabout Istanbul: previous ways of representing the city in song, and the impact of glo-balization on the city.

“ISTANBUL SONGS” AND ARABESK – MUSICAL IMAGINATIONS OF THE GLOBALIZING CITY

There is a long Turkish tradition of representing the city of Istanbul in song. Songsabout the city are a staple of the genre of popular Turkish light classical music knowntoday as Türk sanat müziği (literally, “Turkish art music,” henceforth abbreviatedTSM). Sancar notes over 100 songs composed in this genre between the mid-17th cen-tury and the present that explicitly mention the city or one of its localities.17 MartinStokes has discussed the different forms of nostalgia constructed in contemporary TSMperformance.18 The repertory known as İstanbul Şarkıları (“Istanbul songs”) within this

[ 48 ] “LISTENING TO ISTANBUL”: IMAGINING PLACE IN TURKISH RAP MUSIC

genre is effectively the aural equivalent of old picturesque orientalist postcards of thecityscape, painting aural portraits that praise the “genteel pleasures” and enchantmentof the beauty spots of the city, evoking scenic views of minarets, the Bosphorus Straitand Golden Horn Bay from the city’s many hills.19 Perhaps the epitome of TSM’s nos-talgic representations of the city is composer Münir Nurettin Selçuk’s (1900–1981) fa-mous setting of Yahya Kemal Beyatlı’s (1884–1958) poem “Aziz İstanbul” (“Beloved Is-tanbul”).20

As in TSM, songs about the city, implicitly or explicitly Istanbul, are prominent inthe urban popular musical genre arabesk that has emerged in Turkey since the late1960s.21 As Stokes suggests, arabesk is “a music of and about the city.”22 But arabesksongs about Istanbul reject the nostalgia of TSM and paint instead a much more grimand pessimistic view of the city in which genteel pleasures are replaced by the pain andsuffering of the urban poor, subject to the merciless (acımasız) machinations of a citypersonified as a femme fatale that fatally seduces the naïve migrant from the country-side.23 Arabesk is widely perceived to be music by and for migrants from the rural ar-eas of Turkey to the city.24 While actual musicians and audiences for this music cutacross class lines and the dichotomies of rural vs. urban origin, in both popular andintellectual discourse arabesk is a music born out of the huge flow of rural migrantsto the city since the 1950s. Due to this internal rural-to-urban migration, Istanbulhas seen an explosive population growth from 1,078,000 in 1945 to 7,309,000 in1990,25 to 10,018,735 in 2000, according to census figures. Unofficial estimates of thecity’s population at the turn of the millennium run up to 15 million souls. The citystruggles to absorb this inflow with resulting overcrowding, low-paying jobs and strainon its infrastructure, all embodied in popular discourse in the growth of illegal squattersettlements (gecekondu in Turkish, literally “put up at night”) of migrants on the out-skirts of the city.26

Arabesk’s portrayals of the city are very different from the nostalgic fantasies of TSM,but arabesk does have its own brand of nostalgia as well. Besides the many songs dis-cussing the difficulty of city life in general terms – a random selection could includeFerdi Tayfur’s “Bu Şehrin Geceleri” (“This City’s Nights,” 1989) and “Bu Şehir” (“ThisCity,” 2000), Müslüm Gürses’ “Bu Şehirde Yaşanmaz” (“This City is Unlivable,” 1988)and Cengiz Kurtoğlu’s “Bu Şehirden Gidiyorum” (“I’m Leaving this City,” 1988) –some songs explicitly contrast the difficult life of rural migrants in the city with an idyl-lic village life, shifting the nostalgia for old Istanbul of TSM songs to a nostalgia for thecountryside. A well-known example of this is Ferdi Tayfur’s folk song-like “Fadime’ninDüğünü” (“Fadime’s Wedding,” 1994), about a village wedding, with its famous line“Hadi gel, köyümüze geri dönelim” (“Come on! Let’s go back to our village”). The riseof arabesk music (and, more generally, what has popularly been described as the“arabesk culture” of rural migrants) corresponds with a resurgence of urban interest intraditional Turkish culture.


This resurgence of interest in Turkish culture provides a dramatic contrast to the cos-mopolitan fantasies of the governing urban elite who have embraced globalization and,since the 1980s, embarked on a project to remake Istanbul as a “global city,” activelycourting global capital.27 The attempts by the city administration and business intereststo globalize Istanbul can be seen in transformations in the urban form of the city sincethe 1980s from mixed, multifunctional spaces to rationalized functional zoning, in-volving major restructuration projects in which “the city is being divided up in terms offunctions: some districts to work in, some to shop in, some for living, some for enter-tainment and recreation.”28 This restructuration has included the development of ma-jor industrial parks, walled housing estates for the newly emergent middle class, shop-ping malls and cultural centers,29 all with the requisite accompanying parking lots ormulti-story garages. To facilitate movement between all the new zones, the city govern-ment has overseen the construction of major new motorways across the city, includingthrough historic and densely populated areas.30 While the project of re-making Istan-bul into a global city of the same stature as New York, London or Tokyo remains in-complete,31 the transformations begun since the 1980s have irrevocably altered the ur-ban landscape, and the city’s global position continues to evolve, often through infor-mal and quasi-legal arrangements that bypass remaining political obstacles.32

This opening up of Istanbul, and Turkey more generally, since the 1980s has meantnot just an opening up to the flow of global capital, but also a (re-)opening of the coun-try up to the flows of global popular culture, including western popular music. Mediaderegulation came a little later, in the early 1990s,33 and paved the way for the entranceof multinational record companies. Some of these gained a foothold in Turkey by es-tablishing partnerships and licensing agreements with local companies, as in the Poly-Gram-Raks association;34 others directly established local branches under their ownnames, such as Sony (beginning in 1993), Universal (from 1998), EMI, and BMG.35

These companies brought with them their international (but mostly American andEnglish-language) catalogues of pop, rock and rap, which the newly emergent middleclass began to eagerly consume in the expensive CD format, while indigenous genressuch as arabesk and Turkish folk and pop continued to be sold mostly in the cheapercassette format. Media deregulation also lead to the introduction of cable television in1991, bringing MTV (including, significantly for my argument here, the program Yo!MTV Raps) to Turkish audiences for the first time.36

The tensions between the city of rural migrants and the city of the cosmopolitan,globalizing urban elite has led some writers to speak of “two Istanbuls.”37 Despite thebest efforts of the urban and business elite to rationalize the urban landscape and “mar-ket Istanbul”38 as a cosmopolitan, global city, the continued inflow of rural migrantshas resulted in a “reorientalization of the city”39 that some writers have characterized as“the return of the repressed,”40 or even “Istanbul’s revenge.”41 But, as these writers note,the simplistic dichotomy of the modern, globalizing city Istanbul versus the alarmist


image of the “countryside occupying the city”42 fails to recognize that the processes ofrecent rural-to-urban migration and the emergence of hybridized popular culture ex-pressions such as arabesk are themselves the result of global processes of capital flow, ur-banization, and the formation of new identities.43

Rural migrants to the city were attracted by new jobs recently created there by newgrowth in industries such as textile production, which exploded dramatically in Istan-bul in the 1980s due to new liberalization policies by the globalization-friendly, post-1980 coup-governments that encouraged exports and the expansion of internationaltrade.44 But new migrants to the city seek not only jobs in the newly globalized localeconomy, but also a new urban lifestyle that, while not abandoning its basis in the ruralculture they grew up with, actively engages with the cosmopolitan culture of the city.Turkish sociologist Nilüfer Göle argues that the contemporary urban culture of Istan-bul represents “a synthesis in which local textures, colours and traditions are combinedwith modern global culture”; by means of this synthesis, “The ‘alaturka’ is attemptingto globalise itself in the Istanbul crucible.”45

The complex inter-relationships between the “two Istanbuls” were brought to my no-tice often while I lived in Istanbul 1999–2002, and during many return trips theresince. One image that encapsulated the inter-connections between globalization and lo-cality for me was the familiar site of a migrant from rural Anatolia to Istanbul who, un-able to find a better-paying job, sold from a small, wheeled cart pirate CDs at a regularspot in Taksim square in the city center, next to my bank and in the shadow of the tow-ering five-star luxury hotel The Marmara. I made a habit to stop and chat with him andlook through his selection of Turkish and international pop CDs (including everythingfrom Ferdi Tayfur to Shakira, Björk, and Edith Piaf ) every time I went to the bank inTaksim square. He told me that most of the CDs he sold were actually copied andpackaged in Bulgaria or elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and brought to Turkey for sale bythe middlemen who supplied him. Along with the other pirate CD sellers in the area,he stopped coming to Taksim in late 2001, apparently the result of stepped-up effortsby authorities to enforce anti-piracy laws, at the behest of the newly vigorously anti-pi-rate MÜ-YAP, the Turkish Phonographic Industry Society, founded in 1988 and fromAugust 2000 the Turkish affiliate of the IFPI (International Federation of the Phono-graphic Industry), an organization with international copyright protection and anti-pi-racy measures high on its agenda. The IFPI’s Commercial Piracy Report 2004 proudlynotes that as a result of effective lobbying, the Turkish government “has recently adopt-ed a strong anti-piracy bill, including a total ban on street sales of audio-visual prod-ucts. This is expected to help eradicate the widespread phenomenon of street piracy inTurkey’s main cities and tourist areas.”46 My pirate CD-selling friend’s absence frompublic space in Istanbul, just as much as his presence had been, was thus conditionedby local experiences of global processes.


In the following section I turn to a detailed discussion of a single song by an Istanbulrap group, and discuss the musical and textual strategies this group has developed forimagining the city. I argue that Turkish rap music from Istanbul embodies the tensionsbetween a cosmopolitan, globalizing Istanbul and the “other” Istanbul populated by ru-ral migrants and the urban poor. Like Türk sanat müziği and arabesk, Turkish rap mu-sic from Istanbul has also developed a characteristic discourse about the city. Istanbulrappers comment on and critique what globalization has wrought in Istanbul – the spe-cific physical changes in the urban landscape deriving from globalization47 – by appro-priating, indigenizing, and locally re-emplacing the globally circulating musical genreof rap, creating a unique hybridization of Afro-American rap with local music and pop-ular culture.

RE-IMAGINING THE CITY THROUGH RAP MUSIC

The Istanbul rap group Nefret, whose name means “Hate,” consists of two rappers,Ceza (“Punishment”) and Dr. Fuchs, both in their early twenties at the time they madethe song discussed here. Dr. Fuchs was born in Regensburg, Germany in 1978, the sonof Turkish migrants. When he was eight years old, his family moved permanently backto Turkey, and he has lived since then in the western suburb of Bakırköy, on the Euro-pean side of the Bosphorus. Ceza was born in 1977 in Üsküdar, on the Asian side ofthe city, and has lived there all his life. Both young men started making rap in the mid1990s, while they were teenagers. After working solo and with various other rapgroups, they came together and formed Nefret in 1998. After releasing their self-dis-tributed single “Vatan” in 1998, and having four songs included on a 1999 Turkish rapcompilation album titled Yeralt ı Operasyonu (“Underground Operation”), in 2000 theyreleased their first full album, titled Meclis-i Âlâ – İstanbul (“High Council – Istanbul”).The cover photo of the CD (Figure 1) shows the two rappers beside the Bosphorus,with one of the two bridges spanning the strait in the background, unmistakably plac-ing them within the urban geography of the city.

The song “İstanbul” is the fourth track on the CD. In this song the two rappers painta verbal portrait of the city much in contrast with the nostalgic view of the city foundin Türk sanat müziği, as discussed above. But they find and exploit a certain common-ality between aspects of East Coast African-American rappers’ ways of describing theghetto and Turkish arabesk’s ways of representing the city. By inflecting the song with avocabulary typical of arabesk, and evoking specific places in the urban geography of Is-tanbul, they create a dark, pessimistic sonic evocation of the city.


Figure 1: Front cover of Nefret’s first album, Meclis-i Âlâ – İstanbul, showing the group’stwo rappers in front of the bridge over the Bosphorus.

The music forming the multi-layered backing track for the rap is also appropriatelydark in tone. Aspects of the musical foundation of the track are represented in Example1, a schematic of some of the musical features of the song. Not all of these features oc-cur simultaneously throughout the 3:41 track; the different layers enter and drop out atvarious times, constantly varying the texture within and between verses and choruses.

Harmonically, the track is built on a continuous alternation between two held-out blockchords, Am and F, played on a synthesizer and an acoustic bağlama (the top two staves inExample 1). The bağlama is a long-necked lute common in Turkish folk music, also muchused in arabesk. While the organ-like timbre of the synthesizer is sustained throughout themeasure, the strummed bağlama chord decays quickly after the first beat of the measure.The sustained timbre of the synthesizer is varied sometimes by adding additional layers tothe texture – a synthesized flute, somewhat similar in timbre to the breathy sound of the


vertical flute ney used by the Mevlevi order (better known in the West as the “WhirlingDervishes”) in their ritual music, and synthesized violins, whose timbre recalls the largestring groups pervasively used in arabesk, as well as sometimes in arrangements of TSM(staves 3 and 4 in Example 1). The serious minor key sound of the two alternating chords– i and VI in A minor – is accentuated by the voicing, with its parallel 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, andoctaves, contributing to the ominous, haunting sound of the track.

Example 1: Schematic of parts of the musical track of Nefret’s “İstanbul.”

In the way they use samples, Nefret are an exception from the way many Turkish rapgroups use recognizable melodic samples from Turkish folk and popular music, some-times called “oriental samples.”48 Nefret uses such melodic samples from pre-existingrecordings much less than other groups, preferring to compose their own original mu-sic from scratch. For the songs on the group’s first album, member Dr. Fuchs createdsome of the backing tracks by composing short melodies that serve as motifs or ostina-tos for songs, and realizing them on his home PC using the software Fast Tracker 2.49

He also added rhythm tracks, using samples of various percussion sounds (kick drums,


toms, snares, high hats, etc.). Nefret also sometimes records other instruments “live” inthe studio and adds these sounds to the basic tracks produced on the computer.

The group used the latter technique to add a melodic bağlama part to the song, tran-scribed on the sixth stave of Example 1. The distinctive timbre of the bağlama itself –the instrument par excellence of Anatolian folk music – plus the modal quality of themelodic fragment played on it suggest the sound of modal Turkish folk music, but thesyncopated entry of the melodic fragments and the ostinato-like quality of their repeti-tion are more akin to African-American rhythmic practices.

Mixed high up in the recording and thus prominent in the overall sound of the song,but not transcribed in Example 1, are the scratches, provided by guest DJ Mahmut,that fill out the texture of the song as a whole and take over as scratch solos at variousparts of the recording. The scratching is rhythmically complex, at times imitating therhythms of the rapped text, at times developing other rhythmic motifs. The recordused for scratching has what at times sounds like a human voice on it. With the way DJMahmut manipulates the record on the turntable, however, no words are recognizable,and instead the open vowel sound of the voice comes through intermittently soundinglike a howl of fright or pain, also adding to the moody atmosphere created on the track.

The song is given further rhythmic support by synthesized bass and percussion parts,the latter using kick drum and dampened snare sounds. While this “rhythm section” issimilar to the breakbeats of American rap, in this case the bass and drums are mixed verylow in the track, and thus do not come across like the speaker-pounding “jeep beats” ofsome rhythmically more aggressive American rap. This is consistent with Nefret’s usualemphasis on melody and harmony as support for the text in their earlier songs, withrhythmic play – other than that in the scratching provided by guest DJ Mahmut on sometracks – developed more in the vocal parts, particularly those delivered by the rapper Ceza.

Turning to the vocals and the lyrics of the song, Nefret cultivate in this track theirparticular, recognizable rapping style. The two rappers lengthen the last syllables ofmany lines, vary the vocal timbre of the held out vowels, and bend the vocal pitchdownward on these syllables in ways that suggest anger and disgust – the aural equiva-lent of the sneers and angry looks on the rappers’ faces in the video clip they made forthe song. While all the rapping in the track is done by the two male members of thegroup, a female voice is also heard in the background during the chorus, melismaticallysinging the name of the city “İstanbul” in a flat, expressionless voice (the bottom staffin Example 1) while the rappers deliver the chorus’ lyrics.

As in most of their songs, Nefret’s two rappers Dr. Fuchs and Ceza share rappingtime roughly equally. In this song, Dr. Fuchs raps the first verse solo, they alternatelines during the choruses, Ceza raps the second verse solo, and they alternate lines orrap together during the third verse. But even when one of them is rapping solo, theother often joins in on certain words or syllables, typically at line endings or on partic-ularly important words, a common practice in African-American rap as well. In the fol-


lowing transcription and translation of the lyrics of “İstanbul,” I name the solo rapperabove his respective lines, underline the words or syllables in which the other rapperjoins in briefly, and indicate also in the English translation which words the second rap-per joined in on by underlining the corresponding English words.

NEFRET – “İSTANBUL”Lyrics: Nefret (Ceza & Dr. Fuchs); Music: Nefret & Ziya Cezzar.[Introduction; scratch solo by DJ Mahmut]

Verse 1

[Dr. Fuchs solo, Ceza joins in on underlined syllables]

Gel, gelen gördü İstanbul’un çilesini Come, the ones who came saw Istanbul’ssuffering

Çek, çek ki İstanbullu olasın Suffer, suffer for being an Istanbulite

Dolan taşan sokaklar ve binalar The streets and buildings are overflowing

Hani nerede o altın topraklar? So where is that golden ground?

Yalan, yalan olan tek şey rüya Lie, the only lie is the dream

Rüyalarda gelen tek şey ise para Money is the only thing that comes indreams

Şu İstanbul’un eşsiz Boğazında On Istanbul’s incomparable Bosphorus

Ne kadar gizemli esrarengiz bir hava Such a mystical and mysterious atmosphere

Güneşin batışından ta ki doğuşuna From sunset to sunrise

İster Asya ister Avrupa’da dolaş You can wander either in Asia or in Europe

Burası bizim işte Türk toprakları This place is ours, this is Turkish land

Bak da gör atalarının miraslarını Look and see your ancestors’ heritage

Ne kadar acımasız olsa da bu şehir It doesn’t matter how merciless this city is

Senelerdir burada katlandık bu olanlara We have endured for years what goes onhere

İstanbul bizimdir bizim kalacak Istanbul is ours and will stay ours

İstanbul’u dinliyorum gözlerim kapalı I am listening to Istanbul, my eyes closed

Chorus[Dr. Fuchs] Majesteleri ve ekselansları Your majesty and your excellency


Chorus

[short scratch solo by DJ Mahmut]

[Ceza]Nefret İstanbul’un şahı, Türkçe rapin kralı Nefret is the shah of Istanbul and the king

of Turkish rap[Dr. Fuchs]İstanbul bizimdir bizim kalacak Istanbul is ours and will stay ours[Ceza]İstanbul’u dinliyorum gözlerim kapalı I am listening to Istanbul, my eyes closed

Verse 2[Ceza solo, Dr. Fuchs joins in on underlined syllables]Burada yaşamak zor evet çok zor Living here is hard, yes really hardSaf olan adama kor, evet hem de çok kor It screws up the gullible man, yes it really

screws him upBaşka şehir görmeden İstanbul’u

tanıyorumI am getting to know Istanbul before seeing another city

Rahatı ve çilesi İstanbul’u dinliyorum Its comfort and its suffering, I’m listeningto Istanbul

Gözlerim kapalı, bazen görmek istemiyor My eyes closed, sometimes they don’t want to see

Gözlerimden süzülen iki damla yaş Two teardrops flowing from my eyesAynada bana ağlayan İstanbul’u

hatırlatıyorIn the mirror remind me of Istanbul crying

Ve İstanbul ağlıyor And Istanbul is cryingMavi Marmaramda o yakadan bu yakaya

geçerkenWhile crossing [the Bosphorus] from one side to the other on my blue Sea of Marmara

Buyaka buyaka! ben silah sesi duymak istemem

I don’t want to hear the sound bang bang! of gunshots

Magandanın elinde İstanbul’un çığlığı The maganda50 has the scream of Istanbulin his hand

Arabanın kornası The car hornArtık bıktım bunları duymaktan

görmektenI am bored of hearing and seeing all this

Mavi denize akan o simsiyah pislikten Of the pitch-black filth flowing into theblue sea

Yeter artık yeter! Yeter artık yeter! Enough is enough! Enough is enough!Bu pisliği yapan, artık sen You who’s making this filthArtık sen geber! Now it’s your turn to die!


Chorus

While a line-by-line analysis of this song would be illuminating, space limitations pre-vent me from discussing the song in that much detail. A few points deserve mention,however, and will illustrate one of the salient characteristics of Nefret’s rapping – adense intertextuality, with references to other texts such as Turkish proverbs, popular

Verse 3[Dr. Fuchs]İskeleden uzaklaşan bir gemi A ship pulling away from the dock[Ceza]Hatırlatır bana mazide kalan günlerimi Reminds me of the days left in the past [Dr. Fuchs]Gördüğüm şu mavi deniz ufkumu

aydınlatırThe blue sea that I see brightens my horizon

[Ceza]Uçup giden bir martı yitirdiklerimi A seagull flying away [reminds me of ] the

ones that I’ve lostBoş sokaklar kimisinin dostu oldu The empty streets are friends for someKimisi de buldu aynı sokaklarda sonunu But some found their end in these same

streets[Dr. Fuchs]Sokak çocukları kapanmaz yara Street children are a wound that never heals[Dr. Fuchs & Ceza]Her yer beton oldu her yer kara Every place has become concrete, everywhere

it’s black[Ceza]Nerede Sultanahmet, Ortaköy, Beykoz Where are Sultanahmet, Ortaköy, BeykozÜsküdar, Emirgan, Çamlıca, Haliç Üsküdar, Emirgan, Çamlıca, Haliç?Anlatmış zamanında neyi istediğimi He explained what I wanted in his timeKapalı gözleriyle Orhan Veli With his eyes closed, Orhan Veli[Dr. Fuchs]Uğruna gemiler yürütüldü karadan For its [Istanbul’s] sake the ships were carried

over the land51

Boşuna mı yatıyor altında şüheda Are Turkey’s martyrs lying under the Earthin vain?52

Hatırlamışsındır benim kara toprağımı You remember my black earth[Dr. Fuchs & Ceza]İstanbul’u dinliyorum gözlerim kapalı I am listening to Istanbul, my eyes closed


sayings, poetry, the lyrics of other folk and popular songs, etc. Much of the song is per-vaded by a vocabulary typical of arabesk song texts, including words such as acımasız(“merciless”), çile (“suffering”), yara (“wound”), yalan (“the lie”), zor (“difficult”),ağlamak (“to cry”) and yaşlar (“tears”).53 But besides this more general use of arabesk-like vocabulary, the song is also filled with very specific intertextual references.

Verse one of the song opens by evoking the flood of migrants who have come to Is-tanbul from rural Anatolia, as discussed above. The line “Hani nerede o altın toprak-lar?” is derived from the famous expression “İstanbul’un taşı toprağı altın,” literally “Is-tanbul’s stones and earth are gold,” more colloquially “The streets of Istanbul are pavedwith gold.” This expression has often been used since the 1950s to evoke migrants’ per-ceptions of what they expected to find by leaving their rural villages behind and movingto the city.54 By making the expression into a question, “So where is that goldenground?” Dr. Fuchs makes the statement ironic, pointing out that most migrants findthat the ground is not golden after all, and that making a life in the city is hard for thenewcomers.

The line which closes verse one and then also becomes the tagline of the chorus,“İstanbul’u dinliyorum gözlerim kapalı” (“I am listening to Istanbul, my eyes closed”)is a direct quote of the first line of the famous poem “İstanbul’u Dinliyorum” by Turk-ish poet Orhan Veli Kanık (1914–1950).55 The poem is a love song for the city, similarto the nostalgic texts of songs in the Türk sanat müziği genre discussed above, describ-ing pleasurable sounds and sensations such as a gentle breeze blowing the leaves offtrees, birds flying up and calling, fishing nets being drawn up, and a pretty girl walkingby. Many composers have set the poem to music, and recordings of different settingsabound, all playing up the poem’s romanticism in its affection for the city. The first lineof the poem has thoroughly entered Turkish popular culture, appearing especially inmedia advertisements, implying that by listening to a particular radio or television sta-tion, one is listening to the sound of the city itself. Nefret’s rap ironically re-places thisfamous line within a very different urban geography from that of the poet Veli, invok-ing instead the sounds of car horns and gunshots, the stink of raw sewage spewing intothe historic strait, and filthy streets filled with homeless children. The rappers acknowl-edge their debt to the poet, and the contrast between his imagination of the city andtheirs, in verse three in the lines “He explained what I wanted in his time / With hiseyes closed, Orhan Veli.”

Trading off lines at the beginning of verse three, the two rappers briefly invoke a nos-talgic discourse like that of Orhan Veli’s poem and Türk sanat müziği ’s evocation of thebeauty spots of the city, with the depiction of a ship leaving the dock, the blue sea anda seagull flying up and away. But this brief nostalgic evocation is quickly framed asironic and displaced by the return to an arabesk-like depiction of the contemporary re-ality of the city, describing those who found their ruin, or even their death, in the city’sempty streets, homeless street children, and the concrete that has recently covered over


so much of the city’s former beauty as the city administration has constructed newroadways and parking lots in its bid to globalize the city, as discussed above. In thisverse the rappers thus explicitly evoke and juxtapose the different ways TSM andarabesk describe the city.

Besides refering to the city of Istanbul as a whole, the rappers evoke more specific as-pects of the geography of the city, mentioning the European and Asian sides, the histor-ic neighborhoods of Sultanahmet, Ortaköy, Beykoz, Üsküdar, Emirgan, Çamlıca andHaliç, and evoking the crossing by ferryboat of the mouth of the Bosphorus, where itempties into the Sea of Marmara. In the chorus of the song, the rappers employ thetypical “We’re number 1” type of line often found in Turkish (and American) rap, butphrasing it in a way that again emplaces themselves firmly within the city, referring tothemselves not just as the “king of Turkish rap,” but also calling themselves the “shah ofIstanbul.”

Verse three ends with one last intertextual reference, in the line “Hatırlamışsındırbenim kara toprağım” (“You remember my black earth”). This refers to the line“Benim sadık yarim kara topraktır” (“My real lover is the black earth”) from the fa-mous song “Kara Toprak” (“Black Earth”) by the much beloved Turkish folk poet/minstrel Aşık Veysel (1894–1973). The line evokes the original folk song’s paean toa literally “earthy” rural life, contrasting it by implication to the alienated life ofthe modern city, in a way similar to arabesk singer Ferdi Tayfur’s famous line“Come on! Let’s go back to our village” discussed above. Except in Nefret’s vision,the life on the “black earth” is lost in the past, recoverable only through nostalgia –there is no return to it for those in the city.

The video clip for “İstanbul,” included as a bonus CD-ROM track on the CD releaseof Nefret’s first album, further develops the themes discussed above. Space limitationsprohibit a shot-by-shot analysis of the clip, but again at least a few points are worthmaking here. The video evokes an underground feeling through an intentionally low-tech visual style. The clip is shot mostly in black and white; there are some color se-quences in which the color contrast is very low, making them also almost appear to bein black and white. Some outdoor scenes are shot with brown or gray filters, giving thesky and landscape a dingy monochromatic look suggesting the effects of pollution.Some of the sequences of Dr. Fuchs and Ceza rapping look like they were filmed byplacing a video camera on the floor, tilted up pointing at them, suggesting a do-it-your-self approach to video making in which even having a cameraman is not necessary.Other sequences in the video, however, show a more sophisticated technology, as in thetriple split screen effect mentioned below. The video incorporates some of the visualvocabulary of American rap videos, such as running the video images alternately back-ward and forward with fast direction changes at certain points when scratches are heardon the soundtrack. This technique is common in rap videos, where the backward andforward movement of the images on the screen iconically represents the DJ’s manipula-


tion of the record backward and forward on the turntable to produce the scratches.56

The technique is not just used for its own sake, however, in this video. One scene thusmanipulated shows Ceza and Dr. Fuchs walking along the historic Galata Bridge overGolden Horn Bay (Figure 2), a landmark instantly recognizable to those who know Is-tanbul’s geography. This has the effect of taking the visual vocabulary of American rapvideos and reterritorializing it within a specifically Istanbul urban setting. The two rap-pers are also seen with other famous landmarks of the city in the background, such asthe Galata Tower and the Sultanahmet Mosque (better known to tourists as the “BlueMosque”).

Figure 2: Still from the video clip for Nefret’s “İstanbul,” showing Dr. Fuchs and Ceza walk-ing on the Galata Bridge.

In the clip the textual idea of “listening to Istanbul, my eyes closed” discussed above ismade literal during the final choruses, as rapper Dr. Fuchs is seen wearing a blackblindfold, surrounded by – via a split screen effect – blurry images of urban scenes in-cluding fast-moving traffic and fast camera pans across recognizable historic sites suchas mosques (Figure 3). The effect of this montage is that he, at the center of all the fast-moving images, is being bombarded and overwhelmed by the city, and his eyes are shutnot because he wants them to be so he can listen to the city and contemplate its beauty,but because he has been blindfolded by some unseen hand, hinting at the violence topeople’s bodies to be found in the city.


Figure 3: Still from the video clip for Nefret’s “İstanbul,” showing rapper Dr. Fuchs sur-rounding by Istanbul cityscapes.

CONCLUSION – THE POETICS OF THE GLOCAL

In his discussion of rap and hip-hop outside the U.S., Tony Mitchell has recently ar-gued that rap has become around the world a “tool for reworking local identity.”57 Ihave tried in this paper to show how this “reworking” of local identity is quite explicitin the case of Turkish rap from Istanbul. In their appropriations of the globalized genreof rap, the rappers of Nefret have thoroughly reterritorialized and indigenized it, em-bodying in their rap the sounds and discourses of other, indigenous musical genres andcreating a hybrid musical expression58 that serves as a vehicle for local imaginations ofplace.59 This imagination of place is accomplished not just through the discourses sur-rounding Turkish rap,60 but also through the words and sounds of rap songs them-selves. The thick intertextuality of Nefret’s raps with the texts of Turkish popular cul-ture, for example, emplaces their rap within a specifically Turkish space. By explicitlyinvoking Orhan Veli’s poem and the characteristic discourses of Türk sanat müziği andarabesk, the rappers of Nefret also acknowledge the connection their song has to thelong lineage of popular poems and songs about Istanbul. They draw all these sourcestogether in, and emplace themselves within, their own musical imagination of the ur-ban landscape of the city. Attention to the poetics of their rap can thus provide us withsome insight into how rappers can use the texts and sounds of rap to imagine their lo-calities and emplace themselves within these imagined places.

It is perhaps ironic that Istanbul rappers like Nefret comment on and critique what glo-balization has wrought in Istanbul by appropriating, indigenizing, and locally re-emplac-ing the globalized musical genre of rap. The case study discussed here could easily be used


to construct a narrative about how local rappers appropriate global commercial popularculture forms to talk back to and resist globalization. I think, however, that the dynamichere is somewhat more complex than that easy narrative. I would suggest instead that,rather than simply being “resistant” in some essentialist way, Nefret’s rap, and other Istan-bul raps like it, embody and embrace the tensions between the “two Istanbuls” – the cityof the globalized cosmopolitan and the city of the rural migrant and working urban poor.Both of the “two Istanbuls” result from processes of globalization, and, as Göle argues, de-spite differences in consumption patterns based on class, ethnicity, and religious orienta-tion, share a common contemporary urban culture based on synthesizing local traditionwith modern global culture.61 Just as both the presence and the absence from downtownIstanbul of my pirate CD-selling friend were conditioned by global processes, so both thepresence of so much concrete in Istanbul – newly poured since the 1980s to make themotorways and garages that would make the city more “globalization friendly” – and Ne-fret’s familiarity with and use of the rap idiom to critique that concrete and the alienationit has lead to, are conditioned by the accelerated insertion of Istanbul into the circuits ofglobal flows of culture and capital. Nefret’s very familiarity with the rap idiom was madepossible by the (re-)opening up of the Turkish mass media to American popular culturebegun with media deregulation in the 1990s. Even the influence of Turkish rappers fromGermany, who first introduced Turkish-language rap to audiences in Turkey in the mid-1990s, is not a simple, direct Germany-to-Turkey flow. The much-discussed introductionof German-Turkish rap to Turkey by the group Cartel62 was made possible by and medi-ated through global processes – significantly, the partnership between the local Turkishrecord company Raks and the multinational PolyGram, a partnership made possible byderegulation of the Turkish media and harmonization of Turkish copyright law with thatof Europe and America.63

As the alaturka globalizes itself in the crucible of Istanbul,64 Turkish rappers in thecity explore ways of drawing on and synthesizing the global and the vernacular in orderto re-imagine the urban landscape, and in the process imagine their own local identitiesin the globalizing city. I have tried in this paper to explore how both the object of theirscrutiny – the landscape of their home city – and the vehicle for their expression –Turkish-language rap music – are implicated in both local and global processes in mul-tiple, complex ways. Listening to Istanbul, they hear the local pulse of the globalizingcity, and in their rap we can hear the complex, interpenetrating counterpoint of the lo-cal and the global – the poetics of the glocal.

COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Lyrics and musical transcription of the song “İstanbul” by Nefret, and stills from thesong’s videoclip © 2000 Hammer Müzik. Used by permission.


No t e s1 Bennett 2000; Stokes 1994a; Whiteley, Bennett

and Hawkins 2004.2 Feld 2000; Lipsitz 1994; Mitchell 1996; Negus

1996, chapter 6; Stokes 2003a, 2004; Taylor1997.

3 Bilby 1999, cf. Appadurai 1996.4 Bennett 1999.5 Mitchell 2001a, 2004; cf. Robertson 1995.6 Bennett 2000:54, cf. Lull 1995:159–164.7 Barber and Waterman 1995, Slobin 1993:90.8 Mitchell 2001a:11–12, 2004:108,110.9 Forman 2000.10 Krims 2002:191.11 Forman 2002.12 Mitchell 2001b.13 Both of these books contain examples of rap song

texts, though mostly only short excerpts fromlonger songs. My point is not that they ignoresong texts, but that they only use portions oftexts anecdotally, rather than looking in detail ataspects of textual poetics such as rhetorical struc-ture and intertextuality. On the other hand, nei-ther book contains musical transcriptions or de-tailed discussions of the musical tracks of rapsongs.

14 Baker 1998; Gaunt 1995; Keyes 1996, 2002,chapter 5; Rose 1994; Walser 1995.

15 Krims 2000.16 I should note that in this paper I am only consid-

ering Turkish rap made by rappers living andworking in Turkey; generalizations made here donot necessarily apply to the larger field of Turk-ish-language rap, including the large number ofrappers living and rapping in Germany, Holland,the United States, and other countries. There is asmall but fairly well-developed literature on Ger-man-Turkish rap and hip-hop, much of it focus-ing on the group Cartel (Çınar 1999, Diessel2001, Elflein 1998, Kaya 2001, Robins andMorley 1996). I discuss some of the relationshipsbetween Turkish rap made-in-Turkey with Turk-ish rap from other countries in Solomon (2005).

17 Sancar 2003.18 Stokes 1996, 1997.19 Stokes 1996.20 Discussed by Stokes (1997, 2000).21 Stokes 1992.22 Stokes 1994b:31.23 Stokes 1999:135.

24 Güngör 1990; Stokes 1992, 1994b; Ellingsen1997; Özbek 1997.

25 Sönmez 1996b:45.26 Güngör 1990:82–92; Stokes 1992, Özbek 1997.27 Aksoy and Robins 1994; Keyder 1993, 1999:16–

17.28 Aksoy and Robins 1994:58.29 Ibid.:59–60.30 Ibid.:60.31 Keyder 1999:20–21.32 Ibid.:21–23.33 Aksoy and Robins 1997; Şahin and Aksoy 1993.34 Stokes 1999, 2003a.35 BMG eventually closed its Istanbul offices in

2001 and established instead a licensing agree-ment with local independent DMC (Doğan Mu-sic Company).

36 Kırca 1993:45.37 Robins and Aksoy 1995.38 Keyder 1993.39 Göle 1993:22.40 Robins and Aksoy 1995.41 Göle 1993.42 Duthuit, quoted in Aksoy and Robins 1994:69.43 Keyder and Öncü 1994:418.44 Keyder 1999; Sönmez 1996a:102,107.45 Göle 1993:23.46 IFPI 2004:15.47 Keyder and Öncü 1994:412.48 Cf. Diessel 2001.49 Dr. Fuchs, personal communication 25 May

2001.50 The maganda is a stereotyped offensive male who

is uncouth in every possible way: loudly clearinghis throat and spitting on the ground, belchingand picking his nose in public, staring obviouslyat every pretty girl who walks by, and constantlyfiddling with his tespih (prayer beads). The char-acter is also sometimes associated with a class ofnouveau riche – rural migrants from eastern Tur-key who have become wealthy, and conspicuous-ly consume commodities that show off theirwealth (wearing gold chains and driving BMWs),but still otherwise show in their behavior their“uncultured” (i.e., rural) world view. For a dis-cussion of the maganda figure in Turkish popularculture see Öncü (1999, 2002).

51 This line refers to a historical event during theOttoman Turkish conquest of the city from the


Byzantines in 1453. The Byzantines had blockedthe Ottoman naval fleet by stretching a chainacross the entrance to Golden Horn Bay, but theOttoman sultan Mehmet the Conqueror thwart-ed this by having his ships carried over a narrowstrip of land into the bay on the other side ofchain, and was thus able to breach the Byzan-tines’ defenses.

52 Şüheda, here translated “martyrs,” more specifi-cally means “people who died while defendingthe Turkish state.”

53 Cf. the content analysis of arabesk song texts inÖzbek (1991:346–350) and Stokes (1992, chap-ter 5).

54 Cf. Özbek 1997:214.55 An English translation of this poem by Larry

Clark, under the title “I Listen to Istanbul,” canbe found in Silay (1996:465).

56 Cf. the discussion by Goodwin (1992:63).57 Mitchell 2001a:1–2.58 I don’t mean to imply here that arabesk and TSM

are in some way essentially “pure” genres incor-porated into a hybrid Turkish rap. The hybridnature of arabesk itself has been analyzed byStokes (1992) and Özbek (1997). Though it may

be less obvious, I would argue that in many as-pects of its contemporary performance practices,TSM has also become a hybrid genre, as evi-denced by the way TSM performance has beenmodernized and westernized by performers likeMünir Nurettin Selçuk (Stokes 1999), and thenumber of performers who have moved back andforth between the arabesk and TSM genres, suchas Zeki Müren and Bülent Ersoy (Stokes 1992,1996, 1997, 2003b).

59 I should also note that indigenizing a globally cir-culating musical genre and using it to imagine lo-cality in Turkey did not begin with rap music.Martin Stokes (1999:131) notes that one of thefirst composers of Turkish tangos during the tan-go craze that emerged in Turkey in the 1920s,Necip Celal Andel (1908–1957), composedmany tangos to Turkish lyrics that celebrated Is-tanbul’s beauty spots. Similar arguments couldalso be made about Turkish rock from the 1960s.

60 As discussed in Solomon (2005).61 Göle 1993:23.62 See references in note 16 above.63 Stokes 1999, 2003a.64 Göle 1993:23.

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D i s c o g r a p h y[All items are CD/cassette releases unless otherwise

noted.]Ersoy, Bülent. “Aziz İstanbul,” Alaturka 1995, S

Müzik Yapm (1995)Gürses, Müslüm. “Bu Şehirde Yaşanmaz,” Müzik

Ziyafeti, Akdeniz Plak (1988, cassette)Kurtoğlu, Cengiz. “Bu Şehirden Gidiyorum,” Hain

Geceler, Sindoma Müzik (1998)Nefret. “İstanbul,” Meclis-i Ala – İstanbul, Hammer

Müzik/Hipnetic Records HPNCD001 (2000)__________. “Vatan,” Self-distributed CD single

(1998)

Selçuk, Münir Nurettin. “Aziz İstanbul,” Azizİstanbul, Cokun Plak (1988, cassette; re-issue ofrecording from 1948 originally released on 78rpm record)

Tayfur, Ferdi. “Bu Şehir,” Zengim Olsam, Ferdifon(1999)

__________. “Bu Şehrin Geceleri,” Allahım SenBilirsin, Ferdifon (1989)

__________. “Fadime’nin Düğünü,” Mor Güller,Ferdifon (1994)

[Various Artists.] Yeraltı Operasyonu, Kod MüzikKOD 006 (1999)


S u m m a r yTurkish rappers in Istanbul have indigenized theglobal musical genre of rap and hybridized it withlocal genres of Turkish popular music. The Istanbulrap group Nefret has especially fused with rap thesounds and discourses of Turkish folk music,arabesk and Turkish light classical music. In theirsong “İstanbul” they also use rap’s practices of inter-textuality to appropriate from Turkish popular cul-ture and re-emplace within their own music exist-

ing ways of representing the city. Istanbul rapperslike Nefret comment on and critique what globali-zation has wrought in Istanbul by appropriating,indigenizing, and locally re-emplacing rap. Turkishrap music in Istanbul thus embodies the tensionsbetween a cosmopolitan, globalizing Istanbul, andan “other” Istanbul populated by rural migrantsand the urban poor.

K e y w o r d s Music and place, Turkish rap, Istanbul, Globalization

B i o g r a p h yThomas Solomon is Associate Professor in theGrieg Academy-Institute for Music at the Universi-ty of Bergen. He has also taught ethnomusicologyat New York University, The University of Minne-sota and Istanbul Technical University. He has done

field research in highland Bolivia on music, ecologyand identity; and in Istanbul on Turkish rap musicand hip-hop youth culture. His forthcoming publi-cations also include an article on Turkey’s participa-tion in the Eurovision Song Contest.

“listening to istanbul”: imagining place in turkish rap music

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