Repression and Snobbery: the Gentrification of Turkish Rap

A version of this article has originally been published in German by Spex magazine



Hip hop is going through a global golden age, and Turkey is no exception. Turkish Rap, though popular among working class and Kurdish communities since the late 90s, has now finally become mainstream. Taking over the majority of young listeners and becoming one of the most popular music genres in the country alongside Turkish pop. One particular name emerges as the leader of this wave: 27-year-old MC/songwriter/producer hailing from the capital city Ankara: Ezhel. His debut album, Trap-heavy, Müptezhel, has managed to break the traditional boundaries of the Turkish Rap audience and has become fiercely popular among alternative music circles too. Accompanying him, a new wave of Turkish rappers entered the scene. They changed the game by starting to play at venues that were originally crafted for upper-class tastes. These artists changed the game so fast that they’ve been subjected to heavy governmental pressure. Famous names, including Ezhel and another MC from İstanbul, Şam were detained because of the content of their lyrics, and some like Server Uraz and Ceg are sentenced to go to prison (the case is still in the appeal process).

The timing is significant. As said, Turkish rap music was already huge in the poorer parts of the country and was one of the biggest underground cultures the country had seen. Thanks to cheap gear and the good old tradition of sampling, young people were able to create beats that allowed them to spit out their truths without having to comply with the aesthetic limitations defined by dominant tastes. These new artists are Inspired by the hip hop made by Turkish immigrant youth in Germany in the early 90s as a reaction to the discrimination they faced. Turkish Rap for these youth meant self-expression and self-organization. Nevertheless, with the exception of a few names (such as Ceza who was able to collaborate with big pop icons like Sezen Aksu), the emerging rap sound remained largely underground. This has to do with the lyrical content of the music as well as the socioeconomic class it originated from. As with the arabesk tradition of the 80s, Turkish rap is derided by the Turkish upper classes for allegedly being of “poor quality”. Rap’s rageful lyrical discussion of money (or lack thereof), family issues and social misfitting contain swearing and misogynist lyrics. These factors are behind the upper-class contempt towards rap music. This is also a key element in understanding Turkish Rap’s close relation to arabesk and hence the sub-genre arabesk-rap. Not requiring any musical education and technical knowledge, what genre besides hip hop could these outcasts rely on to talk about themselves?

To understand why Turkish Rap was popular in working class and Kurdish communities in urban peripheries as a channel of identity expression, we need to talk about Turkey’s socio-political background. After the First World War on its way to becoming a nation-state, Turkey’s gone through fast and drastic transformations in political, economic and cultural terms. In it’s zeal to Westernise, the ruling Republican Party created a centralized administration that’s vital to nation states. They swept aside ethnic and religious minorities and built the nation’s character around the nascent Turkish identity. From there on the Muslim majority of the country lived under secular pressure for a long time. Having banned headscarves in schools and workplaces, the Turkish Republic imposed secularism not just as a governmental necessity in order to run the country. It also looked down on religious people because they did not fit into the plan for compulsory westernization. This ideological usage of secularism was the ‘’meta discourse’’ of the state. This formulation worked in favour of the upper classes and gave way to identity-based resistance in many ways. No wonder arabesk and Turkish Rap found their most loyal creators within these communities. So what’s changed now? Why and how did Turkish Rap become one of the most popular genres in the country drawing the attention of the government onto itself to the degree of censorship and even persecution?

When Ezhel’s debut album dropped in May 2017, trap had already taken over the world, Travis Scott and Migos was everyone’s favourite. Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Damn’ had just come out and even in non-hip hop circles, as in electronic music, names like Kuedo were relentlessly appropriating trap production tricks. The genre was known and loved in various circles from underground, to popular, to niche electronic music listeners. Ezhel’s debut ‘Müptezhel’ was born into this setting. Already famous within his own city of Ankara and Turkish Rap circles as one of the most talented rappers of his generation, Ezhel’s album was a result of a year’s hard work and consisted of well-crafted songs inspired not just by hip hop and trap but also from other genres like reggae. ‘Müptezhel’ was not a direct blow of political or personal rage like classical Turkish Rap albums were, but dealt with everyday problems of a young man, from falling in love to smoking weed, to getting cosy with his girlfriend in the bathtub. His ability to express common troubles and anxieties of a generation in clever ways was notable. For instance, Ezhel mentions the former mayor of Ankara, Melih Gökçek in his tracks and criticizes his politics in a subtle way. He talks a lot about the city and how he relates to the dirty politics of the capital as well. Ankara is a prominent and recurring theme in his songs, which enables him to relate to other people in the city having similar experiences.

His witty lyrics combined with catchy melodies has enabled Ezhel to open his music to young people from different classes. Upper-middle-class youth who are experimenting with drugs and sexuality found a common place in Ezhel’s music and in the newly blooming Turkish trap scene that followed. Turkish rap’s class-transcending success may be due to the fact that it speaks closely to young communities who are considered second class citizens. These same communities have to deal with the country’s bad education policies and deepening economic crisis. In short, they are expecting a bleak future. One can say, young people from every demographic share at least one problem, though the degree to which they might be affected by it varies depending on their privilege and cultural capital they inherit. The fact that Ezhel was also talking about sex and partying spoke to relatively educated people from city centres and seemed to create an intersectional angle. Adding audiences from new classes to their already huge fanbase these new rappers’ success owes a lot to this politicised everyday understanding of the world, showing that the personal is political indeed.

But in Turkey, with influence and power, comes government intervention. Last summer Ezhel and Khontkar were detained respectively on charges of encouraging drug use. Both were released after a few days following heavy public pressure. Ezhel was sued once more after a few months and was acquitted again on February 2019,  but Khontkar’s case still remains. And back in January another MC called Ceg and his producer, also an MC, Server Uraz were both prosecuted with four years of imprisonment for the same reason. In an era in which censorship marks Erdoğan’s Turkey, the general pressure over artists is also notable. Erdoğan is attacking dissenting artists from various fields while drawing others which he deems appropriate to his side. This is a dangerous governmental strategy; adding up to the social polarisation through dividing the art scene and marginalising. As a country that was founded on secular grounds but with a religious population, Turkey always had a representation problem. Before the election of AKP, state-sponsored media and arts were strictly secular, hence exclusive of religious communities. With AKP taking a hold of the control of state apparatus this discourse has been reversed with an equally polarising outcome. And once again this polarisation is manifested as a culture war. It seems that this generation of rappers are caught in the crossfire of this war. While the political manifestation of the working class culture they originated from accuses them of immorality, the new scene they have recently nestled into hasn’t overcome its arrogance and prejudices.

Khontkar tells us that when he told narcotics who came to search his house that ‘he was a musician’, the police claimed that he was not an artist. He complains that hip hop doesn’t receive the respect it deserves in Turkey: ‘’I saw a TV presenter talk to a hip hop artist saying ‘your music is good but the lyrics are a bit meh’. You would never do that to any person making music from any other genre. People don’t stand behind hip hop here.’’ His trial is still ongoing, he is released pending trial: ‘’I’m trying to prepare myself for the worst. If I'm found guilty, I will leave a family and a job behind. This pressure isn’t just about trap music’’ he says, ‘’It’s about the topics that this music deals with, so it’s about everyone who talks about these topics.’’

Server Uraz who was sentenced to four years in prison because he produced a song by Ceg (who was also sentenced because of his song’s lyrics) mentions that he’d been on trial various times since 2006 but didn’t get any punishment: ‘’This time it’s different’’, he says ‘’It shows that the pressure has intensified and we’re worried about what’s to come’’. He underlines the authority's intention to create a ‘’monotype individual’’: ‘’Not only they’re closing their ears to different voices but they’re also trying to shut down everyone who speaks differently than their own base. Turkey is going toward a fascist direction and the government applies the idea of ‘democracy’ only to its voters’ interests. And since we rappers are beginning to reach more people every day, they’re trying to silence us before things get out of hand.’’

He is right; becoming popular and integrating with people outside their class, the spheres of influence commanded by these artists’ has widened. (Ezhel’s audiences don’t fit into regular venues anymore, he is performing sold-out stadium shows and touring Europe). The entry of hip-hop from peripheries into city centres brings the conflict to the elitist music scene as well; censorship through moralism doesn’t just come from the government, but also from a class of urbanites who held the reigns of power prior to the rise of AKP.

This sneering moralism surfaced through terrible social media comments from the prominent names in the alternative music scene. They argued that the music produced by these artists is ‘’not real hip hop’’, ‘’filled with too much autotune’’, ‘’full of sexism’’. This is a reflection of how society is already polarised in terms of morality. This polarisation exists in ideas of taste and status but most importantly in the tendency of privileged circles to guard “their” scene against newcomers. It can be argued that this is contemporary Turkey in a nutshell. The ruling class who had the upper hand in setting cultural norms is now faced with the risk of losing things it took for granted. The idea that this music isn’t real hip hop, underlines the totalising and determinist tendency of the elitist tradition which sets the bar for good music. This attitude fails to consider that the accumulation of taste comes with various capitals and people who don’t have access to those capitals are bound to be left outside the supposed league of ‘the good ones’. The real anxiety here seems to be the same with the State’s: That these artists are crossing the line; they infiltrate, they render other worlds visible, they mingle, they agitate.

It’s important to note that most of the newly emerging wave of rappers benefit from their ethnic origin (as Turkish) and/or their ideological closeness to the secular elite. Many of them such as Server Uraz, Ceg, Anıl Piyancı, Gazapizm identify as secularist and their social media posts reveal nationalist and Kemalist reflexes. On the other hand, Khontkar and Ezhel are known to be speaking good English, Ezhel has studied at a famous private college in Ankara for a while (though he was on a scholarship). This means there’s still some kind of demographic kinship between these rappers and the new scene they have entered into; ethnical, class or ideological-wise. Unlike them, Kurdish rappers are still mostly overseen. Like in the case of Heijan, a Kurdish MC from a very poor neighbourhood of İstanbul: Bağcılar. Heijan became an internet phenomenon with his track Bonzai Bom in which he raps about a popular street drug known as Bonzai. He was imprisoned for four months with the charge of using and promoting drugs, but there wasn’t a comparable social media outcry defending his right to free speech. This demonstrates the importance of ethnic background in determining who gets to sing about what and benefit from national networks of solidarity.

The multiple polarisation of smaller communities combined with a tendency for selective solidarity creates a productive field for the government to take advantage. Reminiscent of the post-coup era of the 80’s, a time in which musicians like Cem Karaca and Selda Bağcan had to leave the country to avoid getting arrested for their music. It’s worrying if such policing of the arts foreshadows more arrests and more and censorship.