Turkish Hip Hop in Europe
The first Turkish language hip hop record was titled 'Bir Yabancının Hayatı'or 'The Life of Serkan Danyal Munir Raymondo Tatar' produced by King Size Terror, a Turkish-German group from Nuremberg with a dominant Kurdish presenace, in 1991. Stranger in this context refers to how Turkish youth can feel like strangers to the mainstream German culture. Turkish hip hop continues to influence the hip hop scenes in Western Europe, especially in Germany where many top chart rappers such as Kool Savaş (who has collaborated with 50 Cent, RZA, Jadakiss, & Juelz Santana) Summer Cem and Eko Fresh are of Turkish descent. While Nefret was performing Turkish rap in Turkey and Germany from 1999–2002, another Turkish rap network emerged, however this time from the Swiss with makale in 1997 with other groups in Europe followed suit like c-it from France who hand a hit single in turkey titled my name. Many Turks came to Germany and UK as immigrants, or what is there referred to as "guest workers", and created their own enclaves. For example, there are entire neighborhoods in Berlin that are predominantly Turkish, such as Wedding and Kreuzberg, in which the influence of Turkish culture as well as the feeling of alienation or isolation from the rest of the city is present.
It is in these settings that hip hop has become an important tool for the German and Uk-born children of the Turkish guest workers to express themselves. They used this new form of expression, influenced by American hip hop, to explore and deal with the idea of being "strangers" or "foreigners" even when they had been born German. Often the raps were in Turkish and German together, and expressed a lot about the isolated neighborhoods they lived in and the struggles they faced with feeling like immigrants and citizens at the same time.
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