Turkish hip-hop

Turkish hip hop refers to hip hop music produced by members of the Turkish minority in Germany, and to a lesser degree by hip hop artists in Turkey. The Turkish minority, called the Turks, first drew inspiration from the discrimination and racism they received while living as migrant workers in Germany in the 1960s. Turkish hip hop uses Arabesk music, a folk style that finds its roots in Turkey during the 1960s, and is influenced by the hip hop music of America and Germany. Album artwork, lyrical content, and the Turkish language are used by hip hop artists to express their uniquely Turkish identity.

The first Turkish hip hop album was recorded by the Nuremberg, Germany group King Size Terror in 1991. Islamic Force (now known as KanAK) is often recognized as the beginning of Turkish hip hop. Turkish hip hop is still used as an outlet for many who feel marginalized as Turks living in German society.

History

Before Turkish hip hop took hold in Turkey, specifically Istanbul and Ankara, it originally grew out of Turkish ethnic enclaves in Germany. Owing its large population to the Turkish migrants that came to Germany in the 1960s as Gastarbeiter (guest-workers), 2/3 of all Turks in Germany are under the age of 35 and half are under 25. Exclusionary practices on behalf of the government, particularly in terms of citizenship status, create systematic discrimination of Turks in Germany that fuels racism against migrant workers. Although born in Germany, the children of these Gastarbeiters are not recognized as citizens by Germany or their parents' country of origin. Often living in dilapidated neighborhoods and marked as outsiders by their "eastern" traditions and poor command of the German language, Turkish urban youth gravitate towards hip hop as means of expressive identity construction. From the first rap vinyl recorded in the Turkish language—‘Bir Yabancının Hayatı’ (The Life of a Foreigner) by King Size Terror—to the creation of an entire subgenre—Oriental hip hop—Turkish youth in Germany have embraced and moved beyond pure imitation of African American hip-hop culture. Localizing hip hop, Turks in Germany have reworked it to “act as a mode of expression for a range of local issues” particularly those related racism and the problem of national identity experienced by younger members of ethnic minority groups.

Turkish hip-hop had risen to prominence in Germany with the success and popularity of the Turkish rap group Cartel in the mid 1995s throughout Turkey. After the success of their first album, the members of Cartel had a fight almost killing some of their members. The group was forbidden to perform together again and the members of Cartel were jailed. Cartel's album was banned from the music market.

In Turkey, Ceza, Dr. Fuchs (formerly "Nefret"), Fuat Ergin and Sagopa Kajmer were spearheads of the genre. Sansar Salvo, Pit10, Şehinşah, Hayki, Saian, Allâme are popular figures of second wave contemporary rap music in Turkey. New generation or 'Drill' include Ezhel, UZI, Ben Fero and LVBEL C5.

Turkish Migration to Germany

After being recruited by the German government to fill the labor shortages in specific industries, Turkish migrants relocated to German cities such as Berlin and Frankfurt under the ‘myth of return’. The first generation of migrants came to Berlin as individual workers and then slowly brought their families over. Gastarbeiters, by nature of the very word (translated as ‘guest worker'), expected to return to their homeland and did not identify with Germany. This mentality combined with government exclusionary practices caused many Turks to feel alienated and displaced; they maintained an outsider position in society. Whereas the German government could recruit temporary guest workers, they could also be controlled and sent away as the interest of capital dictated. Turks in Germany, excluded because of German policies regarding citizenship, rallied around ethnic lines as a political strategy.

Language

The most obvious demarcation of Turkish hip hop in Germany is language. As Bennet writes, “the fact of language itself can also play a crucial role in informing the way in which song lyrics are heard and the forms of significance which are read into them”. First and foremost, Turkish rap distinguishes itself from German and American hip hop by the utilizing the Turkish language rather than German or English. Feridun Zaimoglu, one of Germany’s leading literary figures, describes the Turkish most hip hop artists employ as ‘Kanak Sprak.’ ‘Kanak Sprak’ makes a direct reference to local racism in Germany This creolized Turkish-German spoken by the disenfranchised youth of the hip-hop generation is characterized as sentences without commas, full stops, capital letters, and any kind of punctuation as well as frequent switches between Turkish and German This not only marked hip-hop culture as distinctly Turkish, but simultaneously created a separate public sphere for fans of Turkish hip hop because most Germans did not speak Turkish. The very fact that the language of the album was in Turkish shifted the balance of power from privileged Germans to oppressed Turks. In the liner notes of the cd, “the English words ‘What are they sayin?!’ appear in big bubble letters. Underneath, the caption teasingly reads in German: ‘Didn’t pay attention in Turkish class? Then ask for the translations fast with this card’”. According to Diessel, “The synthesis of Turkish musical idioms and language with hip hop was successful in appealing to a young audience. For Turkish youth in Germany, Oriental hip hop is at once profoundly local and simultaneously global; it imagines, through the evocation of the far reaching ‘Orient’ and the cohesive language of hip hop, multiple possibilities of resistance to the politics of exclusion”

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, 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 German 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 discriminated against because of their race. Turkish youth have adopted hip hop as a form of musical expression, commentary, and protest. 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 a pop – is emblematic of the blending of diasporic Black culture and diasporic Turkish culture."

Diasporic community

In embracing these Turkish traditions, accessible to them from their parents as well as familial ties to Turkey, Turkish youth in Berlin are influenced by a culture not tied one hundred percent to their current geographical location. Through ‘imaginary’ journeys back to the homeland—whether it's reminiscing about vacations to Istanbul or public discourse about Turkey—Turkish-German youth construct their local identities from global places. In addition to the physical transmission of hip-hop cassettes to Germany, globalization enables a transnational movement as well as identity by connecting alienated youth to their ethnic roots. Modern circuitry connects youth not only to the rest of the world, but also to the ‘homeland’. This transcendence of physical borders is exemplified in Turkish hip hop. Azize-A, born in Berlin to a Turkish family, released her first hip-hop album called, Es ist Zeit (It's time) in 1997. Considered the first ‘Turkish hip-hopper lady’ Germany, Azize-A gained popular media attention by addressing issues Turkish women deal with as double-minorities. While her appeal is largely to young girls—Azize-A has often been described as the Turkish Queen Latifah—she also directly addresses issues of national identity. In her song, ‘Bosphorus Bridge,’ this Berlin-Turk rapper attempts to “locate the descendants of Turk migrants in a hybrid space where cultural borders blend, where periphery meets the centre, and where the West merges East (. Ethnoscapes, “allow us to recognize that our notions of space, place and community have become much more complex, indeed a ‘single community’ may now be dispersed across a variety of sites”. Through hip hop Turkish youth in Germany have done precisely that; they have created a community that transcends one specific geographical location. As demonstrated by popular Turkish hip-hop artists, it is only through the global connection to their homeland, that Turkish youth in Berlin find meaning in their local contexts. Turkish hip hop is a “youth culture that enables ethnic minority youths to use both their own ‘authentic’ cultural capital and the global transcultural capital in constructing and articulating their identities”.

Turkish versus German hip hop

Although being most prominent in Germany, Turkish hip hop is placed in opposition to German hip hop. Timothy Brown in ‘Keeping it Real’ in a Different ‘Hood: (African-) Americanization and Hip-Hop in Germany, described Turkish hip hop as the product of a language and source material innovation. According to an article about German hip hop in The Bomb Hip-Hop Magazine, Germany is full of immigrants, and consequently, everyone raps in the language they prefer. Turkish hip hop artists rap in their own Turkish language and sample Turkish folk music as opposed to American or German songs. This musical subgenre is therefore seen as a counter nationalism movement marking the Turkish ethnicity within the German nationalism as a whole. It became a weapon against racial chauvinism and ethnic nationalism in Germany. The notion of the underground is prominent in Turkish hip-hop as it points to the marginalisation and censorship of rap within the music scene in Turkey and also connotes the rappers pursuit for authenticity in their music.

In Europe

thumb|upright|right|[[Kool Savas is a popular Berlin rapper of Turkish descent]]

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, 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 Switzerland 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 Gesundbrunnen 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.