The First Pop Song I Remember
Ilker Hepkaner and Sezgin Inceel are co-hosts of Yine Yeni Yeniden 90’lar, a podcast which analyzes 90s Turkish pop music from feminist and queer lenses. Nostalgia for the 1990s is rampant in Turkey, as elsewhere. In the podcast, and in other projects they work together, they want to fill the voids in cultural history by bringing marginalized actors back in the spotlight.
They wrote about the first pop songs they remember, and how it relates to issues of nostalgia and belonging.
Is Sezen Aksu My Homeland?
Sezgin İnceel
The first pop song I remember is Şinanay in 1989. Pop music was not called pop music at that time in Turkey. It was before private radio and television channels came into our lives. And the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation used to call pop music “Light western music with Turkish lyrics”. We would sit and wait in front of our radios until they play us some “light” stuff. Sezen Aksu’s record Sezen Aksu Söylüyor, which included Şinanay was one of them. Sezen Aksu is one of the beloved divas of Turkey. Sezen Aksu Söylüyor can be translated as “Sezen Aksu Sings” or “Sezen Aksu Tells.” Isn’t it nice that the verb ‘söylemek’ can have a dual meaning in Turkish? It reminds me of infants not distinguishing singing and speaking sounds since they both come from the same source. Back then when I was a child, I thought the record was about singing. But now, I can see it is also about telling stories. Stories of history, growing old, pain, dying too young, politics, multiculturalism and love. I can only understand now how deep and heavy this “light” music is.
Just hearing the hit song Şinanay was all it took to cheer me up and make me dance. I knew the song by heart so well that I could tell exactly where Sezen Aksu was taking a breath. Also, the part in the song where she held her nose while singing was the greatest voice-effect prior to Cher’s discovery of auto-tune. Originally Şinanay’s lyrics were from a poem by Melih Cevdet Anday, where he pictured Turkey as a ferry, in which people with different backgrounds (race, religion, ability) travel on the same ferry from the city to the Prince Islands. But the record was not all about Şinanay. Son Bakış [Last View] was a goodbye song to Erdal Eren, who was executed at the age of 17 by the state after a court decision that changed his official age. “Son bakıştaki o gözler kaldı aklımızda” (Eyes in that last glance are left in our minds.) Aynalar (Mirrors) described the inner pain of ageing and transformation. I had no idea about the difficulty and sorrow of getting old when I was six years old. “Haksızlık bu geçen yıllar / Gönlüm çok genç bedenim yaşlı” (It’s unfair the years that passed by / My heart is very young and my body is old). Kış Masalı (Winter's Tale) was very mystical for me, probably because I could not follow Yıldırım Türker’s ( acclaimed poet, writer and translator) lyrics. “Su gibi çırılçıplak ve aydınlık / Saz gibi durdum şiddetin önünde” (Naked and bright like water / I stood in front of the violence, just like a reed).
Gamsız (Carefree) was nothing more than just a fun word for me. I did not know that life was going to make us all “care-free” bit by bit, because otherwise, it was all so painful to take in. “Gamsız yaptı dünya beni / Kadere razıyım ben / Yorgun ve şikayetsiz / Her şeye hazırım ben”. (World has made me carefree / I am bowing out to my fate / Tired and without complaint / I'm ready for everything). Istanbul was my reality. The city I did not appreciate very much. So Istanbul Hatırası (Istanbul Memory) was just a song for me, not my Heimweh. I had not moved to Germany back then. I had not missed Istanbul and my family. The word gurbet was pale and abstract, the word homesick was non-existent, the musical documentary Crossing the Bridge by Fatih Akin was not made. At the end of the documentary Sezen would sing this song and make us cry. Memories were games and my grandmother was alive. “Bir mısra gibi ağzınız / Dillenmemiş, dinlenmemiş bakire aşklarda”. (Your mouth is like a line of the maiden love songs, never sung, never listened)
I recall reading that the homeland of a person is his/her childhood. For someone who has been thinking a lot about his childhood, I find this sentence somewhat difficult, but still interesting and impressive. And I figure that it is impossible not to mention Sezen Aksu when I talk about my childhood. Likewise, it is impossible not to mention my childhood when I talk about Sezen Aksu. It all started with Sezen Aksu: my love and passion for music, my greatest desire to create my music, my deepest yearning for being on stage. She is the reason why I want to sing until the end of my life. Among all the popstars, she was the most special one for me. I didn't even know why. Her energy? Her music? Her poetry? She was not just a singer. She was someone who was talking to my heart, without even knowing me. As if she was the only one person, who knew and could understand what I was going through. I loved her so much that my family would make me angry by teasing me about how she has died or how she became faceless after her face fell off. Of course, like any adolescent, I threw my childhood into the most invisible corner of the room while growing up. At the age of 12, I fell for international popstars like Spice Girls and Madonna. At the age of 14, the tough ones came -because I wanted to look cool- like Marilyn Manson, Metallica and Bon Jovi. During college times, women voices like Norah Jones, Björk, Alanis Morissette and Ella Fitzgerald impressed me. And finally, when I started studying music as a major, I went after the classics like Chopin, Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. Meanwhile, I might have slightly forgotten Sezen. Has she also forgotten me? I don’t think so. She never remained distant from pop music, she always had something new. But, like every young person who creates a gap between themselves and their parents to figure out who they are, I also watched Sezen Aksu sing from afar.
Then, something happened in the summer of 2008. Sezen Aksu asked our choir if we would like to perform with her on stage at one of the biggest open-air concerts of the year in Istanbul. I was beside myself. It was my childhood dream come true. Of course, we said YES. I started listening to my old Sezen cassettes while practising. I instantly realised that I did not forget a single word of her songs. It felt like coming home after a long break. At the Open Air stage, I had the opportunity to sing with her. I became a part of the songs I sang when I was a little confused boy. A boy who felt lonely and different but could not understand why. To be honest, it was surreal. When I was on stage, I poked myself whenever I broke from the fact that the woman singing in front of me was Sezen Aksu. And those old songs started having different meanings for me. I realised that her songs were deep and layered enough to make sense at different ages. It felt like, she passed through all of our ages and experiences to write songs about them. At the backstage, I met her in person. She was humble, loving, fun, positive, sensitive and drunk. She was complex, yet very simple. I think this was the reason why she became Sezen Aksu. She was special, but also one of us – or better - all of us. After those concerts, I felt like I closed another circle in my life. I reunited with the memories of my childhood and a new era in my relationship with Sezen Aksu began. I was connected with Sezen again. We were both older, wiser and different. Yet, like a family, we knew each other.
It feels like Sezen Aksu already passed through all the feelings very intensely and lived them beforehand in order to guide me. Her songs made my childhood, my memories and my today. I am grateful that I found my homeland in music once again.
Flowers and African violets
İlker Hepkaner
The first pop song I remember is Mor Menekşe (Purple African Violet) by Nilüfer. I was three when it was released, and it stayed as my favourite song ever in the whole world, for almost four years. Now that I listen to the song again as a cultural critic, I realize there is a musical reason why I felt that way. Mor Menekşe is the perfect late 1980s song. A strong love and yearning expressed through a metaphor in lyrics. Bir mahsun mor menekşe, ağlıyor mu ne? (A fortified purple African violet is sitting by the window, is it crying or what?) the lyrics go over lots of strings in the music, and a strong woman sings about being captive in a love affair while sounding extremely self-assured. So many contradictions within 3 minutes and 3 seconds. Such an emblematic song for Turkish pop music and its place in my life.
My attraction to the song must have been related to my ability as a three-year-old kid, to visualise the subject matter so vividly. My mother had three pots of African violets, one purple and two pink, sitting together by a window, blooming whimsically whenever they felt like it. I don’t know which came first, the song or the flowers. But whenever the song played, I swung by the African violets. I singled out the purple one, which stood there solemnly with her pink sisters, as I said “Hello!” And sometimes, I found myself by them, chasing a bee inside the house, or running to the balcony to watch the sunset with my sister. Then I would start singing the song to myself. My mother’s African violets were special. She used to call everything else “flowers,”—geraniums, prophet’s swords, hydrangeas, golden pothos— but the African violets were Menekşe. They were not lumped in with other greenery in our house. Whenever we left for my grandmother’s summer house, she would tell my father, who stayed behind for work: “don’t forget to water my flowers.” She would add, “my African violets, too.” Plants belonged to the house, African violets to my mother. I loved that there was a song for my mother’s favourite house plants, and this probably affected my decision to declare Nilüfer’s “Mor Menekşe” my favourite song of all times, or at least for another four years.
***
We live in chaos, a huge number of things happen to us in a haphazard way. At some stops in our lives, out of obligation or pure daydreaming, we look back at the chaos, choose some moments and turn them into dots. Then, we connect them, almost with an imaginary pencil, maybe as a habit or as yearning for our childhood. We make the narrative of our lives on our own, and there is meaning within that narrative if you are a tad bit lucky. Mor Menekşe was the emblematic song of my childhood, before it got disrupted. It was the song before the chaos started, it played when nothing happened and I didn’t need any dots in my life. It is the song that played until my grandmother died.
Don’t get me wrong, I was never one of those people who are deeply connected to their grandmothers. She died too young for that. I remember her smile, but that’s all. It was my sister who had a real connection with her, and I always resented her for their stories at the summer house or family trips. In my connect-the-dots puzzle, my grandmother’s death is number 1. Before her death, it is all about flowers and African violets, chasing bees and watching the sunset, nothing anchoring anything in the lump of life that I call childhood.
It is an easy ride down the connect-the-dots lane after her sudden death. Mother’s depression followed suit. We suffered economically for being dependent on a delicate larger family balance, which was apparently maintained by my late grandmother. There was a constant fight at home—my father vs. my mother about money, or my mother vs. her father over how he can’t remarry. There was a lot of “go to your room.” A room where I didn’t have a stereo, a TV, or anything but my toys from a bygone era. My mother’s flowers died because of her depression and African violets stopped blooming. We moved because my grandfather threw us out of our apartment, which apparently belonged to him. Children in the new neighbourhood bullied me for being fat and fem. I had to toughen up and prove myself on the soccer pitch as a brutal defence player. Once I bought my mother a new pot of African violets with my pocket money, they had already bloomed flowers on them. She responded with a “thank you,” and although it was calmer than her usual screams at me, it made me queasy. Dots appeared out of being subject to other people’s problems—someone’s depression, neighbourhood kids’ bullying, a family member’s selfishness. Although I can’t pinpoint exactly when; I stopped listening to music in this period of my life. Thus, although I no longer cared, Mor Menekşe stayed number one in my personal charts, from the late 1980s into the early 1990s. Probably the longest Nilüfer has held a number one position in any chart.
***
Nilüfer is one of the three divas of Turkish pop music. The other two are Ajda Pekkan, the ideal woman with a European sound and blondness, and Sezen Aksu, the queen of lovelorn lyrics. When I was a kid, I loved Nilüfer for no reason over the others. I later learned that each diva had their place in Turkey’s cultural make-up: although widely listened across socio-economic classes, Pekkan was the sound of the upper-class Turks, and Nilüfer, with her poise, embodied the middle class. Sezen Aksu carried the lower-class taste in her music as a badge of honour while being shunned by elites and intellectuals. When Nilüfer released Mor Menekşe in 1988, Pekkan’s star was shining brighter than the other two, and Aksu was still not the Edith Piaf/Umm Kulthum of Turkey. She went on to claim the throne in the early 1990s, by launching her disciples’ successful careers and producing mega-hits for others. As we moved into the 90s, Nilüfer was still big, but always the last among equals. And even I was abandoning her.
Between the bullying on the street and my mom’s dying African violets, music remained non-existent in my life until my sister started acting like a complete teenager. The dot here is my sister getting her own stereo in her room, which had both a radio and a cassette player. On the new stereo, she listened to Aksu’s 80s classics, her disciples’ new pop albums. Meanwhile, radio was blossoming after the government allowed private channels to open in 1993. Music invaded my life because like every teenager, my sister turned the volume up a little too much while studying. In my room, I did homework or read when I was not plotting revenge from my bullies, but now it was suddenly filled with music—all my sister’s taste. Without knowing, I started to memorize all the Sezen Aksu albums and everything else she listened to.
Nilüfer and Ajda Pekkan were no longer the only pop stars in the country, pop music was blooming. Now there was Aşkın Nur Yengi, Harun Kolçak, Levent Yüksel, Sertab Erener and of course, soon and another name the world was going to hear: Tarkan—all former back vocalists or adopted disciples of Sezen Aksu, each offering something similar and something different. They poured into my room from the next door, and I liked them. With their presence, my family’s worsening economic crisis and my mother’s new health issues following her depression were muted. Now I had a favourite song every other week. I didn’t need flowers or other signifiers inside our home to understand their meanings. Songs filled our house, or at least my sister’s and my rooms, not the other way around. Pop songs were now anchors of life events—or companions to my dots. I remember the end of third grade with Tarkan’s second album, and I relaxed my nerves with Sertab Erener’s third album during my anxiety-ridden summer right before 6thgrade.
Nilüfer still released songs and albums in the 90s, and some became really popular. I still liked her, but I forgot about Mor Menekşe. I forgot that she was my favourite out of the original three, and now that there were so many stars, it was difficult to pick her among so many others.
***
The dots in the chaos and the imaginary pen’s lines serve our efforts to find meaning in our lives. We constantly attempt to understand why we made a choice at some random point in our lives, and what it led to afterwards. We want to understand why people behaved the way they behaved, and how we emerged from these relationships. It is a constant struggle, a never-ending effort. We are chasing the bigger picture, we want to see how our life shapes up, so we find new dots, and we draw on.
My grandmother’s death was followed by a lot of new dots. My mother’s depression passed', but her health issues remained. After almost thirty years, she now has a small garden in her balcony, and her living room—mostly geraniums, some prophet’s swords again, a couple of indoor orchids (sent for mothers’ day because they make good gifts for delivery), but also jasmine, yes a tall fucking jasmine bush in our apartment’s balcony. No African violets, however, none.
Meanwhile, as a cultural critic, every day I work on a bunch of projects related to popular culture, and I find myself talking or writing a lot about the 90s—why it was a special time, and how we should remember it. I want to learn and write more about how queer people lived then, and what it was like to be a woman entertainer in the 90s as pop music literally exploded and could not be contained in one single portion of Turkey’s cultural life. I have a bundle of projects focusing on these issues. On the podcast or in the writing projects, my cohost and I talk about a decade which became alive with music for me, and we connect forgotten, erased, hidden points together in order to understand what really went down in the 90s. Our project is entitled Yine Yeni Yeniden 90’lar, (90s Again, New, Anew), and not surprisingly now that I connected all the dots in my childhood for this essay, the title is from a Nilüfer song.