Arabesk. Urban Culture Between Tradition and Postmodernism

Ralph J. Poole (Fatih University Istanbul) [BIO]

Email: ralphpoole@fatih.edu.tr

 

ABSTRACT:

Turkish pop music has entered the international charts, having progressed from Oriental sounds to dance-pop. Tarkan, whose music style and performance mixes belly-dance, rap, break-dance, Turkish classical music and Western pop, has just released his first all English album, produced in the U.S. Tarkan is but one example of a booming pop-culture in Turkey, centered in Istanbul's clubbing scene, but present in every household throughout the country. And yet, as unlikely as it may seem when viewed solely from a Western perspective, where Tarkan figures as thoroughly Westernized and highly sexualized Orient-export, his music is actually rooted in the Turkish tradition of Arabesk culture. This culture has emerged on the fringes of Istanbul, where the traditional culture of immigrants blends with urban culture. The epithet Arabesk at first described a hybrid musical genre in the early 1970s and acquired immense popularity among low-income populations in Istanbul. Arabesk then was used as derogatory label; the music was banned from state radio and television for defying the established – and pure – canons of both folk and classical Turkish music by intermixing rhythms and instruments from poplar Western and Arabic, especially Egyptian music. With Arabesk singers like Orhan Gencebay, Ferdi Tayfur, Müslüm Gürses, and Mahsun Kirmizigül soon acquiring cult status, the label has come to denote not only a musical genre, but a film genre as well as the cultural habitus and lifestyle of its fans. Thus, today Arabesk means impurity, hybridity and bricolage, and it even designates a special kind of kitsch. In anthropologist Mary Douglas' terms, this is a polluted and polluting style, and in literary critic Susan Sontag's terminology, its banal, trashy and kitsch style would qualify as camp. Arabesk, therefore, has become a postmodernist phenomenon par excellence with its mixture of high and low styles, its mass-consumption, its transgression of class and race distinctions, and its overriding the division between rural and urban culture. Bemoaned by many as expressing the significant identity problem of contemporary Turkish society, it is hailed by others as symbolizing the Turkish success story of merging East and West.