Turkish Hip Hop - Common Themes

Common Themes

The first rap vinyl to be recorded in the Turkish language was 'Bir Yabancının Hayatı' ('The Life of the Stranger'), by the Nuremberg, Germany crew King Size Terror. As the title of this track suggests, immigration of Turks around the world, especially Germany, was difficult to cope with. This was due to the almost 2 million Turks in Germany, half of whom were between the ages of 25 and 45. As a result of the fall of the Berlin Wall in the early 1990s a refreshed form of nationalism paved the way for a new youth culture- hip hop. Since Turks felt very marginalized by German society, they turned to hip hop in order to express their concerns. This oriental hip hop allowed Turkish youngsters to discuss what it meant to them to be a German foreigner and how they still identified as being Turkish. As a result of this following, groups such as Karakon, an offspring of King Size Terror, reached super stardom as a result of the release of Cartel in Germany in 1995. Cartel was targeted directly to German Turkish youth to be used as a musical lobby for thousands of kids who needed a voice through which they could express the discrimination they have faced in German society. This voice is that of Oriental Hip Hop.

Oriental hip hop is a way for disenfranchised youth to mark their place in German society. They live in Germany, but may feel like outcasts because they do not fit perfectly into the cookie-cutter mold of being only German or only Turkish. Turkish hip-hop has allowed the youth to embrace their identity and let others know that although some may see them as exiles in Germany, the youth take pride in themselves, their community, and their heritage. In fact, it even incorporates an element of "rebellion" towards the discrimination Turks face in German society, and hip-hop is united with other cultural expressions in this regard. For instance, popular German author Feridun Zaimoglu adopts a hip-hop friendly hybridization of German and Turkish in his book Kanak Sprak, that allows German Turks to reclaim a pejorative term. This disenfranchised group, defined by one scholar as "hyphenated German citizens," is drawn to hip-hop as a form of expression because its members have been denied representation and recognition by the majority. In "The Vinyl Ain't Final* Hip Hop and the Globalization of Black Popular Culture", ed . by Dipannita Basu and Sidney J. Lemelle, they quote "Advanced chemistry thus represents not a rejection of the idea of 'Germanness', but a vision of multicultural type of 'Germanness'. Hip hop is important not just because it is art, but because it is a weapon against racial chauvinism and ethnic nationalism. But nationalism is not absent from the German rap scene; on the contrary, there is an implicit (and sometimes explicit) conflict over national identity that finds expression, on the one hand, in charges that the attempt to form a 'German' rap culture is inherently exclusionary, and on the other, in the growth of a counter-nationalism in the form of ethnic-Turkish or so-called 'Oriental hip hop'" (142) In "From Krauts with attitudes to Turks with attitudes: some aspects oh hip hop history in Germany", written by Dietmar Eleflein, "Yet at the same time, the title Krauts with Attitude also played with a kind of non-dissident identification of a part of the West German hip-hop scene with its role models. Here the structural signs of competition could be coded nationally in terms of an integration in an international framework* what started as 'Bronx against Queens' or 'East Coast against West Coast' gradually turned into 'FRG against USA'. Further, it has to be noted that Niggaz with Attitude themselves, together with performers like Ice Cube and Dre Dre initiated the 'gangsta hip-hop', a subgenre which was especially popular in those parts of the Western Gernamn scene in which identification with this youth culture bordered on glorification" (258)

Oriental hip hop was the product of two innovations, having to do with the Turkish language and the choice of material which started with King Size Terror’s ‘The Life of the Stranger. This art created a new and more useful identity for the Turkish population in Germany. Oriental hip hop represented the second and third generation Turks that rebelled against the policy in Germany; Turkish individuals were discrimated against because of their race. Turkish youth have adopted hip-hop as a form of musical expression, commentary, and protest.

A distinctive trait of Turkish rap is the fact that languages other than English and German are used. Rapping in Turkish tongue has had its benefits and its costs. On a positive note, making music with Turkish lyrics helped rappers make their music more personal. It also allowed these artists to localize what was considered to be a foreign U.S. musical commodity into an artistic form that represented their people, situations, and causes. On the negative side of this, some felt that rapping in a language other than English or German further isolated these artists in the German music scene and placed labels on them. As one member of the Turkish rap group Cartel notes, “Rapping consistently in Turkish was not necessarily a choice but rather the result of being defined by mainstream culture as different, more precisely defined within the framework of Orientalist discourse as the exoticized other and marketed as such." However, Turkish hip-hop can be seen as truly ground-breaking due to the music its artists elect to sample in songs. Instead of simply using clips from American rap songs in their music, Turkish rappers decided to further localize the music and put culturally relevant Turkish samples in songs. As Brown writes, “The central musical innovation in ‘Oriental hip-hop’ – the rejection of African American samples in favor of samples drawn from Turkish Arabesk an pop – is emblematic of the blending of diasporic Black culture and diasporic Turkish culture." Making rap music with Turkish lyrics and sampling from traditional Arabesk (or Arabesque) music are two important features of Turkish hip-hop that help it stand out from German hip-hop and from other hip-hop scenes in the world.