Listening to Istanbul:

Imagining Place in Turkish Rap Music

THOMAS S OLOMON
RAP MUSIC AND THE POETICS OF PLACE
Ethnomusicologists and popular music scholars have recently begun to explore how
people use music as a vehicle for imagining places and constructing place-based identities.1 This work has shown how mediated popular musics can be a local resource for
identity construction, and how practices of the production and consumption of popular 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 globalization.2 In one significant area of this research, writers have borrowed from contemporary cultural theory and applied to the study of popular music concepts like indigenization,3 localization,4 glocalization,5 reterritorialization,6 and domestication7 to describe
processes by which people engage with, appropriate, and locally re-emplace globally circulating musical products, styles and genres through practices of production and consumption. The term glocal, first used in business to describe strategies for marketing
global products in ways appropriate to local sales territorities, has emerged as a shorthand way of evoking the articulations and interpenetrations of the local and the global
in popular cultural expression.8
Rap music, with its characteristic practice of representing place,9 is a particularly
appropriate genre for investigating the musical imagination of locality and musical relationships between the local and the global. Central to the discourse of rap is the explicit
construction of identity in terms of place, what Krims calls hip-hops urge to locality.10 In his recent book on race, space and place in rap, Forman details the complex
and multiple spatial discourses of rap and hip-hop in the U.S.11 Rap is also now a thorST U D I A M U S I CO L O G I C A N O R VE G I C A
VOL 31 2005 S4667

U NIVERSI TETSF ORL AGE T

ISBN 82-15- 0705-8

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oughly globalized genre, as the essays in Mitchells edited volume Global Noise show.12
Young people from places as diverse as Greenland, Japan, New Zealand and Brazil have
indigenized the genre, re-making it into a vehicle for constructing local identities and
expressing local concerns. Formans monograph and Mitchells collection represent the
significant contributions the concepts and methods of cultural studies can make to understanding how the discourses of rap and hip-hop emplace identity. Largely missing
from both books, however, is a sense of how the poetics of rap the texts and musical
tracks 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 of
rap; these writers have generally focused especially on rhythmic organization and sampling practices, making various arguments about how rap is a vehicle for a particularly
African-American aesthetic.14 Probably the most detailed discussion of formal aspects
of 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 the
ways in which rappers and rap producers construct place-based identities, particularly
in 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 approaches 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 comes
from a song created by Turkish rap musicians in the city of Istanbul. The Istanbul rappers I discuss here understand that the discourse of rap characteristically includes the
practice of representing place, and implement that discourse in their songs using the
musical and textual resources at their disposal.16 I suggest that they use raps practices
of intertextuality to appropriate from Turkish popular culture and re-emplace within
their own music existing ways of representing the city of Istanbul, fusing the resources
of Turkish popular culture with the globalized Afro-American rap idiom to re-imagine
the urban landscape of the city. First, however, I introduce two contexts for Turkish rap
about Istanbul: previous ways of representing the city in song, and the impact of globalization 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. Songs
about the city are a staple of the genre of popular Turkish light classical music known
today as Trk sanat mzii (literally, Turkish art music, henceforth abbreviated
TSM). Sancar notes over 100 songs composed in this genre between the mid-17th century and the present that explicitly mention the city or one of its localities.17 Martin
Stokes has discussed the different forms of nostalgia constructed in contemporary TSM
performance.18 The repertory known as stanbul ark lar (Istanbul songs) within this

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genre is effectively the aural equivalent of old picturesque orientalist postcards of the
cityscape, painting aural portraits that praise the genteel pleasures and enchantment
of the beauty spots of the city, evoking scenic views of minarets, the Bosphorus Strait
and Golden Horn Bay from the citys many hills.19 Perhaps the epitome of TSMs nostalgic representations of the city is composer Mnir Nurettin Seluks (19001981) famous setting of Yahya Kemal Beyatl s (18841958) poem Aziz stanbul (Beloved Istanbul).20
As in TSM, songs about the city, implicitly or explicitly Istanbul, are prominent in
the urban popular musical genre arabesk that has emerged in Turkey since the late
1960s.21 As Stokes suggests, arabesk is a music of and about the city.22 But arabesk
songs about Istanbul reject the nostalgia of TSM and paint instead a much more grim
and pessimistic view of the city in which genteel pleasures are replaced by the pain and
suffering of the urban poor, subject to the merciless (ac mas z) machinations of a city
personified as a femme fatale that fatally seduces the nave migrant from the countryside.23 Arabesk is widely perceived to be music by and for migrants from the rural areas of Turkey to the city.24 While actual musicians and audiences for this music cut
across class lines and the dichotomies of rural vs. urban origin, in both popular and
intellectual discourse arabesk is a music born out of the huge flow of rural migrants
to the city since the 1950s. Due to this internal rural-to-urban migration, Istanbul
has seen an explosive population growth from 1,078,000 in 1945 to 7,309,000 in
1990,25 to 10,018,735 in 2000, according to census figures. Unofficial estimates of the
citys population at the turn of the millennium run up to 15 million souls. The city
struggles to absorb this inflow with resulting overcrowding, low-paying jobs and strain
on its infrastructure, all embodied in popular discourse in the growth of illegal squatter
settlements (gecekondu in Turkish, literally put up at night) of migrants on the outskirts of the city.26
Arabesks 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 discussing the difficulty of city life in general terms a random selection could include
Ferdi Tayfurs Bu ehrin Geceleri (This Citys Nights, 1989) and Bu ehir (This
City, 2000), Mslm Grses Bu ehirde Yaanmaz (This City is Unlivable, 1988)
and Cengiz Kurtolus Bu ehirden Gidiyorum (Im Leaving this City, 1988)
some songs explicitly contrast the difficult life of rural migrants in the city with an idyllic village life, shifting the nostalgia for old Istanbul of TSM songs to a nostalgia for the
countryside. A well-known example of this is Ferdi Tayfurs folk song-like Fadimenin
Dn (Fadimes Wedding, 1994), about a village wedding, with its famous line
Hadi gel, kymze geri dnelim (Come on! Lets go back to our village). The rise
of arabesk music (and, more generally, what has popularly been described as the
arabesk culture of rural migrants) corresponds with a resurgence of urban interest in
traditional Turkish culture.

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This resurgence of interest in Turkish culture provides a dramatic contrast to the cosmopolitan 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, actively
courting global capital.27 The attempts by the city administration and business interests
to globalize Istanbul can be seen in transformations in the urban form of the city since
the 1980s from mixed, multifunctional spaces to rationalized functional zoning, involving major restructuration projects in which the city is being divided up in terms of
functions: some districts to work in, some to shop in, some for living, some for entertainment and recreation.28 This restructuration has included the development of major industrial parks, walled housing estates for the newly emergent middle class, shopping malls and cultural centers,29 all with the requisite accompanying parking lots or
multi-story garages. To facilitate movement between all the new zones, the city government has overseen the construction of major new motorways across the city, including
through historic and densely populated areas.30 While the project of re-making Istanbul into a global city of the same stature as New York, London or Tokyo remains incomplete,31 the transformations begun since the 1980s have irrevocably altered the urban landscape, and the citys global position continues to evolve, often through informal and quasi-legal arrangements that bypass remaining political obstacles.32
This opening up of Istanbul, and Turkey more generally, since the 1980s has meant
not just an opening up to the flow of global capital, but also a (re-)opening of the country up to the flows of global popular culture, including western popular music. Media
deregulation came a little later, in the early 1990s,33 and paved the way for the entrance
of multinational record companies. Some of these gained a foothold in Turkey by establishing partnerships and licensing agreements with local companies, as in the PolyGram-Raks association;34 others directly established local branches under their own
names, such as Sony (beginning in 1993), Universal (from 1998), EMI, and BMG.35
These companies brought with them their international (but mostly American and
English-language) catalogues of pop, rock and rap, which the newly emergent middle
class began to eagerly consume in the expensive CD format, while indigenous genres
such as arabesk and Turkish folk and pop continued to be sold mostly in the cheaper
cassette format. Media deregulation also lead to the introduction of cable television in
1991, 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 the
best efforts of the urban and business elite to rationalize the urban landscape and market Istanbul38 as a cosmopolitan, global city, the continued inflow of rural migrants
has resulted in a reorientalization of the city39 that some writers have characterized as
the return of the repressed,40 or even Istanbuls revenge.41 But, as these writers note,
the simplistic dichotomy of the modern, globalizing city Istanbul versus the alarmist

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image of the countryside occupying the city42 fails to recognize that the processes of
recent rural-to-urban migration and the emergence of hybridized popular culture expressions such as arabesk are themselves the result of global processes of capital flow, urbanization, and the formation of new identities.43
Rural migrants to the city were attracted by new jobs recently created there by new
growth in industries such as textile production, which exploded dramatically in Istanbul in the 1980s due to new liberalization policies by the globalization-friendly, post1980 coup-governments that encouraged exports and the expansion of international
trade.44 But new migrants to the city seek not only jobs in the newly globalized local
economy, but also a new urban lifestyle that, while not abandoning its basis in the rural
culture they grew up with, actively engages with the cosmopolitan culture of the city.
Turkish sociologist Nilfer Gle argues that the contemporary urban culture of Istanbul represents a synthesis in which local textures, colours and traditions are combined
with modern global culture; by means of this synthesis, The alaturka is attempting
to globalise itself in the Istanbul crucible.45
The complex inter-relationships between the two Istanbuls were brought to my notice often while I lived in Istanbul 19992002, and during many return trips there
since. One image that encapsulated the inter-connections between globalization and locality for me was the familiar site of a migrant from rural Anatolia to Istanbul who, unable to find a better-paying job, sold from a small, wheeled cart pirate CDs at a regular
spot in Taksim square in the city center, next to my bank and in the shadow of the towering five-star luxury hotel The Marmara. I made a habit to stop and chat with him and
look through his selection of Turkish and international pop CDs (including everything
from Ferdi Tayfur to Shakira, Bjrk, and Edith Piaf ) every time I went to the bank in
Taksim square. He told me that most of the CDs he sold were actually copied and
packaged in Bulgaria or elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and brought to Turkey for sale by
the 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 efforts
by authorities to enforce anti-piracy laws, at the behest of the newly vigorously anti-pirate M-YAP, the Turkish Phonographic Industry Society, founded in 1988 and from
August 2000 the Turkish affiliate of the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), an organization with international copyright protection and anti-piracy measures high on its agenda. The IFPIs Commercial Piracy Report 2004 proudly
notes that as a result of effective lobbying, the Turkish government has recently adopted a strong anti-piracy bill, including a total ban on street sales of audio-visual products. This is expected to help eradicate the widespread phenomenon of street piracy in
Turkeys main cities and tourist areas.46 My pirate CD-selling friends absence from
public space in Istanbul, just as much as his presence had been, was thus conditioned
by local experiences of global processes.

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In the following section I turn to a detailed discussion of a single song by an Istanbul

rap group, and discuss the musical and textual strategies this group has developed for
imagining the city. I argue that Turkish rap music from Istanbul embodies the tensions
between a cosmopolitan, globalizing Istanbul and the other Istanbul populated by rural migrants and the urban poor. Like Trk sanat mzii and arabesk, Turkish rap music from Istanbul has also developed a characteristic discourse about the city. Istanbul
rappers comment on and critique what globalization has wrought in Istanbul the specific physical changes in the urban landscape deriving from globalization47 by appropriating, indigenizing, and locally re-emplacing the globally circulating musical genre
of rap, creating a unique hybridization of Afro-American rap with local music and popular 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 made
the song discussed here. Dr. Fuchs was born in Regensburg, Germany in 1978, the son
of Turkish migrants. When he was eight years old, his family moved permanently back
to Turkey, and he has lived since then in the western suburb of Bak rky, on the European side of the Bosphorus. Ceza was born in 1977 in skdar, on the Asian side of
the city, and has lived there all his life. Both young men started making rap in the mid
1990s, while they were teenagers. After working solo and with various other rap
groups, they came together and formed Nefret in 1998. After releasing their self-distributed single Vatan in 1998, and having four songs included on a 1999 Turkish rap
compilation album titled Yeralt Operasyonu (Underground Operation), in 2000 they
released their first full album, titled Meclis-i l stanbul (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 placing them within the urban geography of the city.
The song stanbul is the fourth track on the CD. In this song the two rappers paint
a verbal portrait of the city much in contrast with the nostalgic view of the city found
in Trk sanat mzii, as discussed above. But they find and exploit a certain commonality between aspects of East Coast African-American rappers ways of describing the
ghetto and Turkish arabesks ways of representing the city. By inflecting the song with a
vocabulary typical of arabesk, and evoking specific places in the urban geography of Istanbul, they create a dark, pessimistic sonic evocation of the city.

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Figure 1: Front cover of Nefrets first album, Meclis-i l stanbul, showing the groups
two rappers in front of the bridge over the Bosphorus.

The music forming the multi-layered backing track for the rap is also appropriately
dark in tone. Aspects of the musical foundation of the track are represented in Example
1, a schematic of some of the musical features of the song. Not all of these features occur simultaneously throughout the 3:41 track; the different layers enter and drop out at
various times, constantly varying the texture within and between verses and choruses.
Harmonically, the track is built on a continuous alternation between two held-out block
chords, Am and F, played on a synthesizer and an acoustic ba lama (the top two staves in
Example 1). The balama is a long-necked lute common in Turkish folk music, also much
used in arabesk. While the organ-like timbre of the synthesizer is sustained throughout the
measure, the strummed balama chord decays quickly after the first beat of the measure.
The sustained timbre of the synthesizer is varied sometimes by adding additional layers to
the texture a synthesized flute, somewhat similar in timbre to the breathy sound of the

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vertical flute ney used by the Mevlevi order (better known in the West as the Whirling
Dervishes) in their ritual music, and synthesized violins, whose timbre recalls the large
string 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, and
octaves, contributing to the ominous, haunting sound of the track.
Example 1: Schematic of parts of the musical track of Nefrets stanbul.

In the way they use samples, Nefret are an exception from the way many Turkish rap
groups use recognizable melodic samples from Turkish folk and popular music, sometimes called oriental samples.48 Nefret uses such melodic samples from pre-existing
recordings much less than other groups, preferring to compose their own original music from scratch. For the songs on the groups first album, member Dr. Fuchs created
some of the backing tracks by composing short melodies that serve as motifs or ostinatos 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,

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toms, snares, high hats, etc.). Nefret also sometimes records other instruments live in
the studio and adds these sounds to the basic tracks produced on the computer.
The group used the latter technique to add a melodic balama part to the song, transcribed on the sixth stave of Example 1. The distinctive timbre of the balama itself
the instrument par excellence of Anatolian folk music plus the modal quality of the
melodic fragment played on it suggest the sound of modal Turkish folk music, but the
syncopated entry of the melodic fragments and the ostinato-like quality of their repetition 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 various
parts of the recording. The scratching is rhythmically complex, at times imitating the
rhythms of the rapped text, at times developing other rhythmic motifs. The record
used for scratching has what at times sounds like a human voice on it. With the way DJ
Mahmut manipulates the record on the turntable, however, no words are recognizable,
and instead the open vowel sound of the voice comes through intermittently sounding
like 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 is
similar to the breakbeats of American rap, in this case the bass and drums are mixed very
low in the track, and thus do not come across like the speaker-pounding jeep beats of
some rhythmically more aggressive American rap. This is consistent with Nefrets usual
emphasis on melody and harmony as support for the text in their earlier songs, with
rhythmic play other than that in the scratching provided by guest DJ Mahmut on some
tracks 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 their
particular, recognizable rapping style. The two rappers lengthen the last syllables of
many lines, vary the vocal timbre of the held out vowels, and bend the vocal pitch
downward on these syllables in ways that suggest anger and disgust the aural equivalent of the sneers and angry looks on the rappers faces in the video clip they made for
the song. While all the rapping in the track is done by the two male members of the
group, a female voice is also heard in the background during the chorus, melismatically
singing the name of the city stanbul in a flat, expressionless voice (the bottom staff
in Example 1) while the rappers deliver the chorus lyrics.
As in most of their songs, Nefrets two rappers Dr. Fuchs and Ceza share rapping
time roughly equally. In this song, Dr. Fuchs raps the first verse solo, they alternate
lines during the choruses, Ceza raps the second verse solo, and they alternate lines or
rap together during the third verse. But even when one of them is rapping solo, the
other often joins in on certain words or syllables, typically at line endings or on particularly important words, a common practice in African-American rap as well. In the fol-

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THOMAS S OLOMON

lowing transcription and translation of the lyrics of stanbul, I name the solo rapper
above his respective lines, underline the words or syllables in which the other rapper
joins in briefly, and indicate also in the English translation which words the second rapper joined in on by underlining the corresponding English words.

NEFRET STANBUL
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 grd stanbulun ilesini

Come, the ones who came saw Istanbuls

suffering

ek, ek ki stanbullu olasn

Suffer, suffer for being an Istanbulite

Dolan taan sokaklar ve binalar

The streets and buildings are overflowing

Hani nerede o alt n topraklar?

So where is that golden ground?

Yalan, yalan olan tek ey rya

Lie, the only lie is the dream

Ryalarda gelen tek ey ise para

Money is the only thing that comes in

dreams

u stanbulun esiz Boaz nda

On Istanbuls incomparable Bosphorus

Ne kadar gizemli esrarengiz bir hava

Such a mystical and mysterious atmosphere

Gnein bat ndan ta ki douuna

From sunset to sunrise

ster Asya ister Avrupada dola

You can wander either in Asia or in Europe

Buras bizim ite Trk topraklar

This place is ours, this is Turkish land

Bak da gr atalarn n miraslarn

Look and see your ancestors heritage

Ne kadar ac masz olsa da bu ehir

It doesnt matter how merciless this city is

Senelerdir burada katlandk bu olanlara

We have endured for years what goes on

here

stanbul bizimdir bizim kalacak

Istanbul is ours and will stay ours

stanbulu dinliyorum gzlerim kapal

I am listening to Istanbul, my eyes closed

Chorus
[Dr. Fuchs]
Majesteleri ve ekselanslar

Your majesty and your excellency

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[Ceza]
Nefret stanbulun ah, Trke rapin kral Nefret is the shah of Istanbul and the king
of Turkish rap
[Dr. Fuchs]
stanbul bizimdir bizim kalacak
Istanbul is ours and will stay ours
[Ceza]
stanbulu dinliyorum gzlerim kapal
I am listening to Istanbul, my eyes closed
Verse 2
[Ceza solo, Dr. Fuchs joins in on underlined syllables]
Living here is hard, yes really hard
Burada yaamak zor evet ok zor
Saf olan adama kor, evet hem de ok kor It screws up the gullible man, yes it really
screws him up
Baka ehir grmeden stanbulu
I am getting to know Istanbul before seeing
tanyorum
another city
Its comfort and its suffering, Im listening
Rahat ve ilesi stanbulu dinliyorum
to Istanbul
Gzlerim kapal, bazen grmek istemiyor My eyes closed, sometimes they dont want
to see
Two teardrops flowing from my eyes
Gzlerimden szlen iki damla ya
In the mirror remind me of Istanbul crying
Aynada bana alayan stanbulu
hatrlatyor
And Istanbul is crying
Ve stanbul alyor
Mavi Marmaramda o yakadan bu yakaya While crossing [the Bosphorus] from one
geerken
side to the other on my blue Sea of
Marmara
I dont want to hear the sound bang bang!
Buyaka buyaka! ben silah sesi duymak
istemem
of gunshots
The maganda50 has the scream of Istanbul
Magandann elinde stanbulun l
in his hand
The car horn
Arabann kornas
Artk bkt m bunlar duymaktan
I am bored of hearing and seeing all this
grmekten
Mavi denize akan o simsiyah pislikten
Of the pitch-black filth flowing into the
blue sea
Enough is enough! Enough is enough!
Yeter artk yeter! Yeter artk yeter!
Bu pislii yapan, artk sen
You whos making this filth
Now its your turn to die!
Artk sen geber!
Chorus
[short scratch solo by DJ Mahmut]

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Verse 3
[Dr. Fuchs]
skeleden uzaklaan bir gemi
[Ceza]
Hatrlatr bana mazide kalan gnlerimi
[Dr. Fuchs]
Grdm u mavi deniz ufkumu
aydnlatr
[Ceza]
Uup giden bir mart yitirdiklerimi
Bo sokaklar kimisinin dostu oldu
Kimisi de buldu ayn sokaklarda sonunu
[Dr. Fuchs]
Sokak ocuklar kapanmaz yara
[Dr. Fuchs & Ceza]
Her yer beton oldu her yer kara
[Ceza]
Nerede Sultanahmet, Ortaky, Beykoz
skdar, Emirgan, amlca, Hali
Anlatm zaman nda neyi istediimi
Kapal gzleriyle Orhan Veli
[Dr. Fuchs]
Uruna gemiler yrtld karadan
Bouna m yatyor altnda heda
Hatrlamsndr benim kara topram
[Dr. Fuchs & Ceza]
stanbulu dinliyorum gzlerim kapal

A ship pulling away from the dock

Reminds me of the days left in the past
The blue sea that I see brightens my horizon

A seagull flying away [reminds me of ] the

ones that Ive lost
The empty streets are friends for some
But some found their end in these same
streets
Street children are a wound that never heals
Every place has become concrete, everywhere
its black
Where are Sultanahmet, Ortaky, Beykoz
skdar, Emirgan, amlca, Hali?
He explained what I wanted in his time
With his eyes closed, Orhan Veli
For its [Istanbuls] sake the ships were carried
over the land51
Are Turkeys martyrs lying under the Earth
in vain?52
You remember my black earth
I am listening to Istanbul, my eyes closed

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

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sayings, poetry, the lyrics of other folk and popular songs, etc. Much of the song is pervaded by a vocabulary typical of arabesk song texts, including words such as ac mas z
(merciless), ile (suffering), yara (wound), yalan (the lie), zor (difficult),
a lamak (to cry) and ya lar (tears).53 But besides this more general use of arabesklike 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 Istanbul from rural Anatolia, as discussed above. The line Hani nerede o altn topraklar? is derived from the famous expression stanbulun ta topra altn, literally Istanbuls stones and earth are gold, more colloquially The streets of Istanbul are paved
with gold. This expression has often been used since the 1950s to evoke migrants perceptions of what they expected to find by leaving their rural villages behind and moving
to the city.54 By making the expression into a question, So where is that golden
ground? Dr. Fuchs makes the statement ironic, pointing out that most migrants find
that the ground is not golden after all, and that making a life in the city is hard for the
newcomers.
The line which closes verse one and then also becomes the tagline of the chorus,
stanbulu dinliyorum gzlerim kapal (I am listening to Istanbul, my eyes closed)
is a direct quote of the first line of the famous poem stanbulu Dinliyorum by Turkish poet Orhan Veli Kank (19141950).55 The poem is a love song for the city, similar
to the nostalgic texts of songs in the Trk sanat mzi i genre discussed above, describing pleasurable sounds and sensations such as a gentle breeze blowing the leaves off
trees, birds flying up and calling, fishing nets being drawn up, and a pretty girl walking
by. Many composers have set the poem to music, and recordings of different settings
abound, all playing up the poems romanticism in its affection for the city. The first line
of the poem has thoroughly entered Turkish popular culture, appearing especially in
media advertisements, implying that by listening to a particular radio or television station, one is listening to the sound of the city itself. Nefrets rap ironically re-places this
famous line within a very different urban geography from that of the poet Veli, invoking instead the sounds of car horns and gunshots, the stink of raw sewage spewing into
the historic strait, and filthy streets filled with homeless children. The rappers acknowledge their debt to the poet, and the contrast between his imagination of the city and
theirs, in verse three in the lines He explained what I wanted in his time / With his
eyes closed, Orhan Veli.
Trading off lines at the beginning of verse three, the two rappers briefly invoke a nostalgic discourse like that of Orhan Velis poem and Trk sanat mzi is evocation of the
beauty spots of the city, with the depiction of a ship leaving the dock, the blue sea and
a seagull flying up and away. But this brief nostalgic evocation is quickly framed as
ironic and displaced by the return to an arabesk-like depiction of the contemporary reality of the city, describing those who found their ruin, or even their death, in the citys
empty streets, homeless street children, and the concrete that has recently covered over

THOMAS S OLOMON

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so much of the citys former beauty as the city administration has constructed new
roadways and parking lots in its bid to globalize the city, as discussed above. In this
verse the rappers thus explicitly evoke and juxtapose the different ways TSM and
arabesk describe the city.
Besides refering to the city of Istanbul as a whole, the rappers evoke more specific aspects of the geography of the city, mentioning the European and Asian sides, the historic neighborhoods of Sultanahmet, Ortaky, Beykoz, skdar, Emirgan, amlca and
Hali, and evoking the crossing by ferryboat of the mouth of the Bosphorus, where it
empties into the Sea of Marmara. In the chorus of the song, the rappers employ the
typical Were number 1 type of line often found in Turkish (and American) rap, but
phrasing it in a way that again emplaces themselves firmly within the city, referring to
themselves not just as the king of Turkish rap, but also calling themselves the shah of
Istanbul.
Verse three ends with one last intertextual reference, in the line Hat rlam snd r
benim kara topram (You remember my black earth). This refers to the line
Benim sad k yarim kara toprakt r (My real lover is the black earth) from the famous song Kara Toprak (Black Earth) by the much beloved Turkish folk poet/
minstrel Ak Veysel (18941973). The line evokes the original folk songs paean to
a literally earthy rural life, contrasting it by implication to the alienated life of
the modern city, in a way similar to arabesk singer Ferdi Tayfurs famous line
Come on! Lets go back to our village discussed above. Except in Nefrets 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 stanbul, included as a bonus CD-ROM track on the CD release
of Nefrets first album, further develops the themes discussed above. Space limitations
prohibit a shot-by-shot analysis of the clip, but again at least a few points are worth
making here. The video evokes an underground feeling through an intentionally lowtech visual style. The clip is shot mostly in black and white; there are some color sequences in which the color contrast is very low, making them also almost appear to be
in black and white. Some outdoor scenes are shot with brown or gray filters, giving the
sky 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 by
placing a video camera on the floor, tilted up pointing at them, suggesting a do-it-yourself 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 the
triple split screen effect mentioned below. The video incorporates some of the visual
vocabulary of American rap videos, such as running the video images alternately backward and forward with fast direction changes at certain points when scratches are heard
on the soundtrack. This technique is common in rap videos, where the backward and
forward movement of the images on the screen iconically represents the DJs manipula-

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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 thus
manipulated shows Ceza and Dr. Fuchs walking along the historic Galata Bridge over
Golden Horn Bay (Figure 2), a landmark instantly recognizable to those who know Istanbuls geography. This has the effect of taking the visual vocabulary of American rap
videos and reterritorializing it within a specifically Istanbul urban setting. The two rappers are also seen with other famous landmarks of the city in the background, such as
the Galata Tower and the Sultanahmet Mosque (better known to tourists as the Blue
Mosque).
Figure 2: Still from the video clip for Nefrets stanbul, showing Dr. Fuchs and Ceza walking on the Galata Bridge.

In the clip the textual idea of listening to Istanbul, my eyes closed discussed above is
made literal during the final choruses, as rapper Dr. Fuchs is seen wearing a black
blindfold, surrounded by via a split screen effect blurry images of urban scenes including fast-moving traffic and fast camera pans across recognizable historic sites such
as mosques (Figure 3). The effect of this montage is that he, at the center of all the fastmoving images, is being bombarded and overwhelmed by the city, and his eyes are shut
not 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 to
peoples bodies to be found in the city.

THOMAS S OLOMON

61 ]

Figure 3: Still from the video clip for Nefrets stanbul, showing rapper Dr. Fuchs surrounding 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 argued that rap has become around the world a tool for reworking local identity.57 I
have tried in this paper to show how this reworking of local identity is quite explicit
in the case of Turkish rap from Istanbul. In their appropriations of the globalized genre
of rap, the rappers of Nefret have thoroughly reterritorialized and indigenized it, embodying in their rap the sounds and discourses of other, indigenous musical genres and
creating a hybrid musical expression58 that serves as a vehicle for local imaginations of
place.59 This imagination of place is accomplished not just through the discourses surrounding Turkish rap,60 but also through the words and sounds of rap songs themselves. The thick intertextuality of Nefrets raps with the texts of Turkish popular culture, for example, emplaces their rap within a specifically Turkish space. By explicitly
invoking Orhan Velis poem and the characteristic discourses of Trk sanat mzii and
arabesk, the rappers of Nefret also acknowledge the connection their song has to the
long lineage of popular poems and songs about Istanbul. They draw all these sources
together in, and emplace themselves within, their own musical imagination of the urban landscape of the city. Attention to the poetics of their rap can thus provide us with
some insight into how rappers can use the texts and sounds of rap to imagine their localities and emplace themselves within these imagined places.
It is perhaps ironic that Istanbul rappers like Nefret comment on and critique what globalization has wrought in Istanbul by appropriating, indigenizing, and locally re-emplacing the globalized musical genre of rap. The case study discussed here could easily be used

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to construct a narrative about how local rappers appropriate global commercial popular
culture forms to talk back to and resist globalization. I think, however, that the dynamic
here is somewhat more complex than that easy narrative. I would suggest instead that,
rather than simply being resistant in some essentialist way, Nefrets rap, and other Istanbul raps like it, embody and embrace the tensions between the two Istanbuls the city
of 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 Gle argues, despite differences in consumption patterns based on class, ethnicity, and religious orientation, share a common contemporary urban culture based on synthesizing local tradition
with modern global culture.61 Just as both the presence and the absence from downtown
Istanbul of my pirate CD-selling friend were conditioned by global processes, so both the
presence of so much concrete in Istanbul newly poured since the 1980s to make the
motorways and garages that would make the city more globalization friendly and Nefrets familiarity with and use of the rap idiom to critique that concrete and the alienation
it has lead to, are conditioned by the accelerated insertion of Istanbul into the circuits of
global flows of culture and capital. Nefrets very familiarity with the rap idiom was made
possible by the (re-)opening up of the Turkish mass media to American popular culture
begun with media deregulation in the 1990s. Even the influence of Turkish rappers from
Germany, who first introduced Turkish-language rap to audiences in Turkey in the mid1990s, is not a simple, direct Germany-to-Turkey flow. The much-discussed introduction
of German-Turkish rap to Turkey by the group Cartel62 was made possible by and mediated through global processes significantly, the partnership between the local Turkish
record company Raks and the multinational PolyGram, a partnership made possible by
deregulation of the Turkish media and harmonization of Turkish copyright law with that
of Europe and America.63
As the alaturka globalizes itself in the crucible of Istanbul,64 Turkish rappers in the
city explore ways of drawing on and synthesizing the global and the vernacular in order
to re-imagine the urban landscape, and in the process imagine their own local identities
in the globalizing city. I have tried in this paper to explore how both the object of their
scrutiny 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 multiple, complex ways. Listening to Istanbul, they hear the local pulse of the globalizing
city, and in their rap we can hear the complex, interpenetrating counterpoint of the local and the global the poetics of the glocal.

COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Lyrics and musical transcription of the song stanbul by Nefret, and stills from the
songs videoclip 2000 Hammer Mzik. Used by permission.

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[ 63 ]

No tes
1 Bennett 2000; Stokes 1994a; Whiteley, Bennett
and Hawkins 2004.
2 Feld 2000; Lipsitz 1994; Mitchell 1996; Negus
1996, chapter 6; Stokes 2003a, 2004; Taylor
1997.
3 Bilby 1999, cf. Appadurai 1996.
4 Bennett 1999.
5 Mitchell 2001a, 2004; cf. Robertson 1995.
6 Bennett 2000:54, cf. Lull 1995:159164.
7 Barber and Waterman 1995, Slobin 1993:90.
8 Mitchell 2001a:1112, 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 from
longer songs. My point is not that they ignore
song texts, but that they only use portions of
texts anecdotally, rather than looking in detail at
aspects of textual poetics such as rhetorical structure and intertextuality. On the other hand, neither book contains musical transcriptions or detailed discussions of the musical tracks of rap
songs.
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 considering Turkish rap made by rappers living and
working in Turkey; generalizations made here do
not necessarily apply to the larger field of Turkish-language rap, including the large number of
rappers living and rapping in Germany, Holland,
the United States, and other countries. There is a
small but fairly well-developed literature on German-Turkish rap and hip-hop, much of it focusing on the group Cartel ( nar 1999, Diessel
2001, Elflein 1998, Kaya 2001, Robins and
Morley 1996). I discuss some of the relationships
between Turkish rap made-in-Turkey with Turkish 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 Gngr 1990; Stokes 1992, 1994b; Ellingsen

1997; zbek 1997.
25 Snmez 1996b:45.
26 Gngr 1990:8292; Stokes 1992, zbek 1997.
27 Aksoy and Robins 1994; Keyder 1993, 1999:16
17.
28 Aksoy and Robins 1994:58.
29 Ibid.:5960.
30 Ibid.:60.
31 Keyder 1999:2021.
32 Ibid.:2123.
33 Aksoy and Robins 1997; ahin and Aksoy 1993.
34 Stokes 1999, 2003a.
35 BMG eventually closed its Istanbul offices in
2001 and established instead a licensing agreement with local independent DMC (Doan Music Company).
36 K rca 1993:45.
37 Robins and Aksoy 1995.
38 Keyder 1993.
39 Gle 1993:22.
40 Robins and Aksoy 1995.
41 Gle 1993.
42 Duthuit, quoted in Aksoy and Robins 1994:69.
43 Keyder and nc 1994:418.
44 Keyder 1999; Snmez 1996a:102,107.
45 Gle 1993:23.
46 IFPI 2004:15.
47 Keyder and nc 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 clearing
his throat and spitting on the ground, belching
and picking his nose in public, staring obviously
at every pretty girl who walks by, and constantly
fiddling with his tespih (prayer beads). The character is also sometimes associated with a class of
nouveau riche rural migrants from eastern Turkey who have become wealthy, and conspicuously consume commodities that show off their
wealth (wearing gold chains and driving BMWs),
but still otherwise show in their behavior their
uncultured (i.e., rural) world view. For a discussion of the maganda figure in Turkish popular
culture see nc (1999, 2002).
51 This line refers to a historical event during the
Ottoman Turkish conquest of the city from the

[ 64 ]

52
53
54
55
56
57
58

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Byzantines in 1453. The Byzantines had blocked

the Ottoman naval fleet by stretching a chain
across the entrance to Golden Horn Bay, but the
Ottoman sultan Mehmet the Conqueror thwarted this by having his ships carried over a narrow
strip of land into the bay on the other side of
chain, and was thus able to breach the Byzantines defenses.
heda, here translated martyrs, more specifically means people who died while defending
the Turkish state.
Cf. the content analysis of arabesk song texts in
zbek (1991:346350) and Stokes (1992, chapter 5).
Cf. zbek 1997:214.
An English translation of this poem by Larry
Clark, under the title I Listen to Istanbul, can
be found in Silay (1996:465).
Cf. the discussion by Goodwin (1992:63).
Mitchell 2001a:12.
I dont mean to imply here that arabesk and TSM
are in some way essentially pure genres incorporated into a hybrid Turkish rap. The hybrid
nature of arabesk itself has been analyzed by
Stokes (1992) and zbek (1997). Though it may

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be less obvious, I would argue that in many aspects of its contemporary performance practices,
TSM has also become a hybrid genre, as evidenced by the way TSM performance has been
modernized and westernized by performers like
Mnir Nurettin Seluk (Stokes 1999), and the
number of performers who have moved back and
forth between the arabesk and TSM genres, such
as Zeki Mren and Blent Ersoy (Stokes 1992,
1996, 1997, 2003b).
59 I should also note that indigenizing a globally circulating musical genre and using it to imagine locality in Turkey did not begin with rap music.
Martin Stokes (1999:131) notes that one of the
first composers of Turkish tangos during the tango craze that emerged in Turkey in the 1920s,
Necip Celal Andel (19081957), composed
many tangos to Turkish lyrics that celebrated Istanbuls beauty spots. Similar arguments could
also be made about Turkish rock from the 1960s.
60 As discussed in Solomon (2005).
61 Gle 1993:23.
62 See references in note 16 above.
63 Stokes 1999, 2003a.
64 Gle 1993:23.

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Discography
[All items are CD/cassette releases unless otherwise
noted.]
Ersoy, Blent. Aziz stanbul, Alaturka 1995, S
Mzik Yapm (1995)
Grses, Mslm. Bu ehirde Yaanmaz, Mzik
Ziyafeti, Akdeniz Plak (1988, cassette)
Kurtolu, Cengiz. Bu ehirden Gidiyorum, Hain
Geceler, Sindoma Mzik (1998)
Nefret. stanbul, Meclis-i Ala stanbul, Hammer
Mzik/Hipnetic Records HPNCD001 (2000)
__________. Vatan, Self-distributed CD single
(1998)

Seluk, Mnir Nurettin. Aziz stanbul, Aziz

stanbul, Cokun Plak (1988, cassette; re-issue of
recording from 1948 originally released on 78
rpm record)
Tayfur, Ferdi. Bu ehir, Zengim Olsam, Ferdifon
(1999)
__________. Bu ehrin Geceleri, Allah m Sen
Bilirsin, Ferdifon (1989)
__________. Fadimenin Dn, Mor Gller,
Ferdifon (1994)
[Various Artists.] Yeralt Operasyonu, Kod Mzik
KOD 006 (1999)

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Summar y
Turkish rappers in Istanbul have indigenized the
global musical genre of rap and hybridized it with
local genres of Turkish popular music. The Istanbul
rap group Nefret has especially fused with rap the
sounds and discourses of Turkish folk music,
arabesk and Turkish light classical music. In their
song stanbul they also use raps practices of intertextuality to appropriate from Turkish popular culture and re-emplace within their own music exist-

ing ways of representing the city. Istanbul rappers

like Nefret comment on and critique what globalization has wrought in Istanbul by appropriating,
indigenizing, and locally re-emplacing rap. Turkish
rap music in Istanbul thus embodies the tensions
between a cosmopolitan, globalizing Istanbul, and
an other Istanbul populated by rural migrants
and the urban poor.

Key words
Music and place, Turkish rap, Istanbul, Globalization

Biography
Thomas Solomon is Associate Professor in the
Grieg Academy-Institute for Music at the University of Bergen. He has also taught ethnomusicology
at New York University, The University of Minnesota and Istanbul Technical University. He has done

field research in highland Bolivia on music, ecology

and identity; and in Istanbul on Turkish rap music
and hip-hop youth culture. His forthcoming publications also include an article on Turkeys participation in the Eurovision Song Contest.