Indeed Turkish music reflects the transformations and transitions of its nation's history, especially in the context of a heavily stigmatized genre: arabesque. Often used as a derogatory term, "arabesque" not only stands for the music of the ghetto, but also for "the eastern" aspect of the Turkish psyche.Even if the elite keeps taking it as a threat because of its supposed impurity and fatalistic outlook, the codes of arabesque are both explicitly and implicitly present in almost every corner of urban life. Hearing the music in the streets, minibuses and coffee houses along with the sight of pensive faces full of misery and mutinous expressions against anything pertaining to the urban, it is clear that arabesque both calms and provokes simultaneously.
Arabesque music imagines a lifestyle for the "outsiders" in the city, providing them with role models such as "İbo" and "Müslüm Baba," who define the codes of behavior in the way they dress, speak and live. While the exaggerated characteristics and appearances of these stereotypes, such as wearing white socks, egg-heeled shoes and a moustache, are quite well known, the conditions that created this particular kind of music are often unfortunately ignored.
The social class referred to as "lumpenproletariat" by Karl Marx is generally believed to have created the genre. The beginnings of arabesque date back to the first decade of Turkish Republic, when the nation was undergoing an immense modernization project.
Like most aspects of life at that time, Turkish music had to change to be like its Western counterparts. Thus at that time, along with many other radical societal changes, a strict ban was imposed on radio broadcasting of classical Turkish music between 1934 and 1936. Unable to hear their traditional sounds, people tuned to Egyptian radio stations, easily available thanks to their high broadcasting frequency. The voices of Arab singers like Umm Khultum from Cairo Radio would soothe the ears of a nation longing for their old music.
People began taking an interest in Egyptian movies as well. Between the years 1936 and 1948, some 130 Egyptian films were shown in Turkey, including the musical "The Tears of Love," which was the most popular. Performed by Turkish singer Hafız Burhan Sesyılmaz, the records of the film's soundtrack in Turkish unexpectedly sold out. Alarmed by such a high interest in Arab music and cinema, the government banned both of them in 1948. Thus the genre emerged via translations and imitations of Egyptian songs and movies.
The translations of Egyptian singer Abdulwahhab's tracks dominated the commercial recording market, as well as songs by prominent composer-singers such as Saadettin Kaynak, the first recognized arabesque composer, and Munir Nurettin Selçuk. (The latter also shot a couple of movies adapted from their Egyptian counterparts.) However, despite high popularity and demand, the songs continued to be banned from radio.
Beginning in the 1960s, with the introduction of new migrant groups into urban spaces, the genre acquired a new meaning. While the first wave of migrant groups had been well-off villagers and thus had not had much difficulty adapting to the city, this second one was mostly lower class, with no idea about how to survive in such an alien environment. Consequently the urban culture clash between the poor and the rich sharpened, as squatter towns began emerging and migrants became more stereotyped, pushed to the peripheries of the society.
As ethnomusicology professor Martin Stokes points out, with the emergence of such marginalized spaces, social and moral disintegration merged with the arabesque form. The music became a means to express the sense of dislocation that migrants were experiencing.
Musician and politician Zülfü Livaneli states, "The arabesque trend is not only a form of music; rather, it is the identity problem of a nation placed between East and West, and unable to integrate with either of them." This brings up the question: As a nation, after all we have been through, is arabesque a symbol for our collective identity?
Sociologist Meral Özbek makes the point that listeners of the genre actually range from squatter town dwellers to members of the high and middle classes. This suggests that the arabesque phenomenon extends beyond a phenomenon of the lower classes.
The words, or rather the confession, of Hürriyet Editor-in-Chief Ertuğrul Özkök, published in 1995, illustrates this point: "Oh my God, arabesque. … Everything I should hate as an intellectual takes hold of my mind; I cannot stop myself. I don't know if it is the music, the lyrics, the sound or the rhythm. A feeling of betrayal to my class takes over me, and I make peace with my past, my complexes, intellectual priggeries, stupid obsessions … with everything and everybody."
However, the stigmatization of arabesque did not stop as long as role models such as İbrahim Tatlıses (now suspected of being linked with the Ergenekon gang) continued to awkwardly represent the East in an odd amalgamation of the urban and the rural. This is epitomized in the stereotype of drinking whisky while eating lahmacun.
Taking "İbo" and others like Ferdi Tayfur and Müslüm Gürses as their role models, the audience ignored the fact that these figures were actually enjoying the same life standards as the class that marginalized them -- thanks to the money they earned by singing arabesque songs. In search of an identity, listeners copied not only the physical appearance of the singers but also their mentality and attitudes, thus establishing a predominant quality of masculinity with strong inclinations towards crime.
Arabesque singer Orhan Gencebay is an exception. With his high level of compositional and technical expertise, as well as his outlook, he constitutes a stark contrast with the mainstream singers of the genre. He claims to enrich the music by experimenting with it, creating a fusion that the term "arabesque" inadequately defines. Having sold over 60 million legal copies, Gencebay is a major Turkish artist, and he has a serious mission.
Since the 1960s, Gencebay's music has been the symbol for the rebellious stance against anything bringing down the proletariat. A distinct class awareness pervades his music, thus allowing the traditional themes of arabesque -- grief, loneliness, alienation -- to be experienced within a larger community. As Stokes describes, the listener acquires a language of self-representation, and thus identifies with the outsider figure of arabesque drama.
In this respect one can even claim that arabesque soothes and eases the pain of being the other. As representations of the other appear on the screen and the radio via themes like family separation and migrant labor, the social domain no longer solely belongs to the upper class. Thus the lumpenproletariat emerges with an inclination to transform into the modern.
Most other arabesque music differs greatly from Gencebay's. Singers like İsmail YK and Cankan articulate the stories of migrants as well, though their music does not communicate the transition from rural to urban. Rather their music reflects the labor migration beginning in the 1960s from Turkey to Germany, and the subsequent cultural erosion of Turkish youth in foreign. Though the rhythm and sound is quite different from mainstream arabesque, the lyrics serve the same aim -- caught between East and West, the words seek to forge an identity.
The arabesque genre epitomizes the painful process this nation has endured. Though the bans have been lifted, the implicit conflicts of East vs. West still reside deep in the Turkish psyche. While arabesque now transcends class barriers and is popular in all sectors of society, pretension toward arabesque still exists. The genre recalls the same problem the nation has been dealing with for decades: Does modernization necessarily constitute the denial of one's own culture? Or, as Gencebay puts it, to focus on your heritage is to perpetually recreate it. As long as the question remains to be solved by the so-called modern authorities, it seems that arabesque will never be hushed.
