All posts tagged Turkish Pop Culture

  • 6 Turkish Pop Songs to Torture your Friends With!

    When I was an adolescent, my family and I often played a game called Crazy 8 Countdown. To play this game, you dealt eight cards and started to play Crazy 8s. Each time a player ran out of cards he or she was dealt in again, but with one less card than before until that number reached zero.

    One fateful day, my younger brother invented “Very Crazy 8 Countdown.” Instead of playing a normal game of Crazy 8 Countdown, before dealing the first card somebody would choose a song and put it on repeat. We were not allowed to turn it off until the game finished.

    My brother is now head of the Torture Department at a top-secret prison complex at an undisclosed location.

    Unsurprisingly, our fondness for Very Crazy 8 Countdown did not last long, but it did last long enough for me develop a lifelong aversion to Billy Joel, who accompanied us through one particularly torturous and long game of Very Crazy 8 Countdown. I have lived my life in constant fear of hearing the strains of a Billy Joel song on the radio, and so moving to Turkey was something of a relief. The politics are crap, the mayonnaise is suspiciously bright white, it happens to be one of the ISIS capitals of the world, but at least I can live my life in the relative peace of knowing that my existence is now a Billy Joel-free one.

    Unfortunately for me, Turkey has produced its fair share of terrible pop tunes. Unlike terrible American pop ditties of all kinds, the worst Turkish pop songs rarely reach the foreign airwaves. Feeling lucky? Think again, because I am about to provide you with the fodder for seven horrible games of Very Crazy 8 Countdown of your own.

    1. Kendimi Kontrol Edemiyorum

    Gençkan’s Kendimi Kontrol Edemiyorum is notable for it’s electric guitar solos during which Gençkan pretends to play an acoustic guitar, it’s sleek 90s styling and, last but not least, its monotone panache. The chorus translates to I can’t control myself / I’m so so angry / Don’t make jokes my friends / I’m pretty out of sorts today. Gençkan’s attempted subversion of the angry-music genre by singing without the help of tones falls a little flat in more ways than one.

    Fun Fact! Do you know that it is impossible to find any trace of a grown-up Gençkan anywhere online? It’s almost as if he’s embarrassed or something.

    2. Çukulata Kız

    While not as musically horrifying as Kendimi Kontrol Edemiyorum, Çikolata Kız (Chocolate Girl) is notable for seeming to take advantage of tourists to Ephesus without their knowledge, climbing on pillars at historical sites, and being racist. The elderly dancing tourists in the video likely just signed up for a trip to Ephesus and not to be in a music video. (If there is one thing I would like to know, it’s whether those people are even aware that this video of them is even on the internet.) As for the racism, culture critics (aka probably just me) have criticized the fact that the word ‘Chocolate’ is used to denote a black woman and that part where the black girl’s boyfriend shows up and ends up not being angry because Ragga Oktay is dancing. Because black people love to dance! Get it?

    3. Çikita Muz

    Muz means banana in Turkish, and Çikita Muz is what Turkish people call what us North Americans fondly dub ‘the normal banana’ and what scientists and nomenclature lovers have christened “The Cavendish Banana.” (Turkey is also home to the anamur muzu which I think is just the Turkish name for the rare Gros Michel variety that was popular in North America until disease made it impossible to cultivate for commercial purposes.)

    The reasons this video is bad are fairly self-explanatory. There is no need to even translate the lyrics. Enjoy (or don’t). At least you learned something new about bananas.

    If you feel like more, Ajdar Anık also has a song about mint.

    Fun Fact! Ajdar Anık has a degree in Engineering.

    Bir Gün Beni Arzularsan

    Dear Banu Alkan, thank you for putting your boobs in a bowl. We notice that you aren’t particularly flat in the chestal region. The vocal region, however, is quite another story.

    Fun Fact! In 1976, Banu Alkan starred in a film called Taksi Şoförü (Taxi Driver). That same year, Robert De Niro starred in a film called Taxi Driver (Taksi Şoförü). Wild, right?

    4. I Love You I Love You

    Musically speaking, this is far from being the worst Turkish song ever. However, a Turkish man singing to a photograph of a blond foreign-looking woman and imagining her responses is just too reminiscent of the daily sexual harassment many women, and particularly foreign women, and extra particularly blonde women experience in Istanbul.

    Fun Fact! Because of this song, the only thing my mother-in-law knows how to say in English is “I love you.”

    5. Hello Obama

    It was 2008, a simpler, more hopeful time. Mustafa Topaloğlu was swept up in the hopenado sweeping the rest of the world like a house in Kansas. Unfortunately, the superfluity of hope he was probably experiencing extended to his understanding of his abilities in English, and led to the creation of this song which, much like the house in Kansas, could probably kill a wicked witch if it really tried.

    I have so many questions about this video, and here are a few.

    1. Is he wearing one of those tuxedo t-shirts? Or is his tuxedo designed to look like a tuxedo masquerading as a tuxedo t-shirt?
    2. Did he do his own subtitles, or was his subtitler as delusional about his English abilities as his boss?
    3. Who is the rapper and why is he too embarrassed to show his face?

    Fun fact! Mustafa Topaloğlu was on Turkish Survivor in 2012.

    Less Fun Fact! My sister-in-law says that Mustafa Topaloğlu is known for beating his wife. But because my Turkish isn’t good enough to read all the Turkish tabloids, I cannot confirm this.

    6. Foolish Casanova

    When she says “Shut up! Shut up!” I think the Petek Dinçöz might actually be singing to herself.

    If you can make it to the part where she says it, then you are probably drunk or not worthy of being my friend. (Full disclosure: I made it there, but it was for research ok?)

    Fun Fact! This singer has worked with 12(!) music labels. I can understand why a label would drop her, but how she has managed to find new labels is beyond my ken.

  • Dare to Disappoint: Growing up in Turkey – Turkish Literature in English

    Özge Samancı’s bildings-graphicmemoir Dare to Disappoint: Growing up in Turkey chronicles her growing up years in Izmir in the turbulent period following Kenan Evren’s 1980 military coup. Turkey’s 1980s was a time of rapid inflation, a dictatorial government, curfews, and persecution and killings of opposition members. Samancı’s parents were both public-school teachers and, as the currency devalued in the wake of the coup, they became increasingly poor. In order to silence the protests of public servants being paid less and less, the government implicitly suggested its employees begin to take bribes. This allowed for a near-complete absence of recourse for people who didn’t have money and wished for any sort of legal protection.

    Samancı’s father’s response to the treacherousness of life in Turkey is to push his two daughters to do well in school and get well paying jobs. At one point, he tells them, “you have to be good at school. Otherwise, in the future you will be dependent on your husbands or us. Your husband will tell you what to do. You will lose your freedom. In this country, if you are a woman and you don’t have a job, you are ZERO, nothing, NOTHING!” Özge and her sister Pelin respond to this pressure by working very hard and attending weekend school so that they can go to more prestigious high schools and colleges. (This educational pressure was a reality for many Turkish kids of the period, including Adem.)

    The political narrative is a perfect pairing to Özge’s own personal journey to find herself amongst the obstacles of the Turkish education system and her father’s insistence that she be financially successful. Through Özge and her family’s stories, Dare to Disappoint poses questions of what to do in the face of a society that restricts you and its other citizens and forces you to behave in certain very prescribed ways. Do you try to follow your dreams, or is it best to just try to survive?

    This graphic novel also provides a clear window into how the Turkish present mirrors the Turkish past. The modern Turkish “democracy,” the legal system that favours those with money and power, and the intense competition among people who can be trying to raise a family working six days a week for 400 American dollars per month are all foreshadowed in Samancı’s work.

    Samancı also explores the question of whether resisting the status quo is even worth it, both through her own life and in a more political sense. In one scene, her parents watch two protesters protest the government on television and remark that “they’re so brave.” However, the with backdrop of executions and jailings one can’t help but wonder where the line between stupid and brave lies.

    Despite all the serious questions, Samancı is able to demonstrate the turbulence of Turkish society and its effect on her and her family in a way that is gracious rather than angry, humourous rather than jaded. If there is one book I would recommend to people trying to understand modern Turkey, this one is it.

    Other things about Turkish culture you can see in the book include: political graffiti and movements, Kemalism and Kemalist attitudes towards Ataturk, Turkish communism, and the rise of kumpir.

    Kumpir!

  • You Should Know about Bülent Ersoy and Zeki Müren

    bulent-ersoy-22

    I went out one night the first summer I spent in Turkey. It was late evening, and I was quickly walking the length of a wide boulevard in Izmir with an acquaintance. The quickness of my step was due both to the fact that it was nighttime and because the boulevard was lined with prostitutes. As we sped past, cars rolled to a stop all along the stretch and the prostitutes leaned into windows to negotiate. “They’re transsexuals,” my company said. “Transsexual prostitutes.”

    I hadn’t noticed, but learned to identify them as I continued to roam the streets of Izmir at night. I would later learn that prostitution is legal in Turkey, but that only women are permitted to work in brothels. (The current government has enacted a number of measures to make it more difficult for brothels to operate, which means that female prostitutes are increasingly being forced out into the street as well; however, transgender street prostitutes seemed, at least in Izmir, to be the norm.) As transgender people in Turkey already tend to live in the margins of society, many are pushed even further into performing street prostitution because widespread prejudice against them makes it difficult to find work outside the sex trade.

    Turkey is a land of contractions, however, and the story how LGBT people are treated here is less simple than one might think. Although Turkey’s patriarchal bent is undeniable, and although violence against LGBT people is alarmingly frequent (as illustrated by the bizarre ad I’ve attached below from Amnesty International, which implores us all to add #gayturtle to our tweets in order to spread awareness of Turkey’s homophobia problem), certain LGBT individuals have pushed their way to the top of Turkish society to become icons even among the most conservative and homophobic layers of society.

    One of these is Bülent Ersoy, who I first learned about via a conversation I had about feminism and women’s rights with Adem. “Feminists in Turkey often think about feminism too narrowly,” he said. “In conversations about rights for women and LGBT people, few give economics the place they deserve in the discussion. Women, gays, and transgender people are treated really badly here, it’s true, but money can reverse that completely. Just look at Bülent Ersoy. She is rich enough that nobody in Turkey can touch her.”

    “Who’s Bülent Ersoy?” I asked.

    “Bülent Ersoy is a trans woman,” Adem said. “A very popular singer who became popular while she was still a man. Also, believe me when I say that she looked a lot better when she was a man. Anyway, she got surgery to change her gender and a few years later she was even able to have her gender legally changed. She’s still famous, and really very popular.”

    I picked up my phone to google Ersoy. Adem was certainly right about her looking better as a man. Ersoy as a man could have passed as a woman with the help of a bit of eyebrow shaping. Ersoy as a woman – well, nobody would suspect she was born a man, I suppose.

    bulent ersoy man

    Source: YouTube

    Source: Internet Haber

    Source: Internet Haber

    I started mentioning Bülent Ersoy to different Turkish people to gauge their reactions and get a real idea of her fame. Everybody knew who she was, and most reacted the same way. “Ah yes, Bülent Ersoy. Very famous. Great singer. Looked much prettier as a man.” Eventually, this reaction gave me pause. I began to think about how everybody who spoke about Ersoy’s looks, and particularly her beauty, was implying that one of the functions of a ‘woman’ is to look good. And although women who were born women fight back against this societal expectation sometimes and are generally considered entitled to do so, transgender women do not enjoy this same privilege because the concept of beauty is something we use to judge the ‘womanness’ of somebody who was born with a penis.

    That being said, the real reason that Bülent Ersoy has managed to attain and maintain such fame is not the fact that she’s transgender and is not her physical appearance – it’s her music. I’ve included one of her tracks below; the video clocks in at nearly 10 million views, ensuring that nobody can claim Ersoy to be anything but mainstream.

    Here is another track, this time with Tarkan, another one of Turkey’s best known singers.

    Although by now I am used to being surprised by Turkey’s contractions, Bülent Ersoy’s popularity still shocked me. She even seemed a posterchild for Turkey’s contradictions; as I scrolled through internet photographs of her, I stumbled across a photograph of her wearing hijab. After showing the photograph to Adem, he said, “yes, she wears it when she sings religious songs. Oh, I forgot to tell you, when she got a sex change operation in 1981, the tabloids published a picture of her disembodied penis in a jar.” He googled the picture to show me.

    It was a penis all right.

    But here she is in a hijab, which she's accessorized beautifully with a feather wrap.

    I decided not to post the photograph of the penis, but here is Ersoy herself in a hijab, which she’s accessorized beautifully with an opulent feather wrap, straight eyebrows, and lots and lots of lipliner.

    My and Adem’s conversation continued. “There’s another person I have to tell you about,” he said. “Not Bülent Ersoy – before her.” His name was Zeki Müren, and he was like a gay icon in Turkey. He never officially came out as gay, but he dressed very effeminately and wore makeup, and he had a beautiful voice. It doesn’t matter who you are in Turkey – religious, not religious, liberal, conservative, man, woman – Zeki Müren is loved. Universally loved. I think he was one of the best vocalists the world has ever seen. He really sang very beautiful Turkish, and spoke it too for that matter. There are even videos where you can see his incredible diction because he’s just saying tongue-twisters to show it off.

    Zeki Müren has been variously compared to David Bowie and Liberace by people who feel like Western readers need some kind of reference point in order to understand his impact. If a further reference point is needed, Müren bears similarities to Neil Patrick Harris for his dual music and film career; Müren appeared in 18 films, usually as a straight male love interest. However, as as Cara Giaimo writes, “comparing [Müren] to others obscures the very particular role he played, and still plays, in his own country.” Zeki Müren wasn’t the David Bowie or Liberace or Neil Patrick Harris of Turkey, but the Zeki Müren of Turkey. Indeed, when Lady Gaga released her album art for her album “Applause” the internet was quick to point out a similar image of Zeki Müren and accuse her of blatant plagiarism. The fact that the Zeki Müren image was clearly photoshopped and couldn’t possibly have been real didn’t matter. The message was clear: Müren was the real deal, while those creatives who succeeded him are comparative poseurs.

    This is a hoax, but that's not the point.

    This is a hoax, but that’s not the point.

    A few weeks ago, an article appeared in Atlas Obscura about the Zeki Müren hotline. An initiative of Turkish filmmaker Beyza Boyacioglu, the hotline is a repository for Zeki Müren stories, memories, and tributes and ran entirely on word of mouth. As of a month ago, the hotline had received over 700 individual message proving that, even 20 years after his death, Müren is still an icon. His pompadour, makeup, and effeminate clothing mark him as a man who played with gender and sexuality, but his voice and legacy are universalizing.

    This video has 8 million views, even though Müren has been dead for 20 years. Not bad at all.

    On the whole, the Turkish establishment is becoming more conservative than it ever has before. It’s not fair to characterize Bülent Ersoy and Zeki Müren as pockets of resistance per say, but their popularity does serve as a reminder that Turkish society is a whirlwind of contradiction. Turkey is a place where transgender people are forced into the sex trade and are the objects of violence but also attain the heights of Ersoy, where female virginity at marriage is prized even in the most liberal enclaves (and in Izmir, this is coupled with pressure to look really good and dress provocatively), where hospitality is prized but urban residents can be incredibly rude, and where hijabis roam wearing incredible makeup and dresses cut to show off the shape of their body and make out with their boyfriends in secluded corners. I’ve given up trying to understand, but I’ve committed to keep noticing.

  • Public Transport Marketing has Failed Montreal and Istanbul Alike

    A lot of travel writing engages fairly safe themes such as “underneath our different exterior, we’re all basically the same,” “I connected with locals so deeply even though I only met them for a few hours or days,” and “look at this beautiful nature and how cheap the booze is. You too can live such a glamorous life, and set yourself apart from the rest of the sheep in wherever the hell it is that you even live. Yay.”

    None of these themes generally reflect my travel experiences, but today one of them does. “Underneath our different exterior,” I thought to myself as I bashed out this piece “we’re more similar than we realize.”

    “How?” you might ask, perhaps envisioning something slightly orientalist and condescending, a written navel-gazey contemplation on the fact that me and people whose reality of life I will never truly understand share the common experience of having to prepare food (or something).

    Nope. It’s – tada! – about how public transport marketing portrayals can fail to live up to reality across oceans, cultures, and time.

    Have a look at these YouTube videos. The first is 1970s commercial for the subway system in Montreal. The dancers sing “It’s nice in the subway. Everybody’s feeling gay and sunshiney. Our subway is the most beautiful in the world. It’s nice in the subway (and in the subway’s little brother – the bus). Long live the subway!”

    Some Montrealers took issue with this propagandistic picture of the public transit system, and create a parody entitled “Il fait chaud dans le métro” – It’s too hot in the subway – a tribute to the famously high temperatures of the Montreal underground.  The heavily paraphrased lyrics of this song? “It’s too hot in the subway. Everybody’s sweating from head to toes. The price of the monthly pass is as high as the temperature. Our subway’s going to be the hottest in the world for 50 years. It’s even hot in the flipping winter!”

    1970s Montreal marketers tried to present an idealized version of the subway in a bid to solicit more passengers. 40 years later and thousands of kilometers away, the directors of the IETT, the Istanbul public transport system, would do much the same with similar results.

    The IETT commercial is even more laughable than the Montreal one. While riding the Montreal metro is indeed a bit warm, being forced to ride the IETT might actually have inspired a 21st century Dante to write a sequel to the Inferno.*

    Have a look at the real commercial. The key words spoken by the slightly hypnotic voice are “safe, secure, comfortable, fast, good quality etc.” The IETT is not really any of these things (although I’m still thankful that it exists.)

    Then have a look at this parody, a remarkably faithful representation of what it’s really like to ride public transport in Istanbul. The only thing the comedian missed was the experience of being groped and not being able to move or slap the hand away because it’s too packed, that moment when you finally get a seat only to have somebody very elderly enter the bus at the next stop, or the second you suddenly realize that your hand is on a 55 year old man’s crotch, and has been there for three minutes (true story.) Oh, and what it feels like to miss your stop because it’s even more packed than in the parody and you can’t push through the people to get off.

    The takeaway of all this? If you visit either Montreal or Istanbul, slap on a few extra layers of deodorant and if in Istanbul, pay attention to the placement of your hands.

    *Just imagine, The Divine Quadrilogy Part II: Constantinople

  • Gollum and Erdogan. Erdogan and Gollum.

    If you follow Turkish politics at all, you may have heard that a rather fantastical case is going through the Turkish courts right now. This is the trial of a Turkish doctor, one Bilgin Çiftçi, who is being tried on the charges of “insulting the president” for posting these absolutely heinous photographs on facebook.

    Sourced this blown-up version from news.com.au, who sourced it from twitter. All the versions I could find in Turkish newspapers were very small.

    Sourced this blown-up version from news.com.au, who sourced it from twitter. The non-blown up photo is also available in many Turkish newspapers.

    As you can see, these photographs compare his eminence, Turkish President Erdogan, to the power-hungry, corrupted, swamp-dwelling, broken English-speaking Lord of the Rings character, Gollum.

    There is no resemblance. Like, at all. We all know Erdogan doesn’t live in a swamp, but in a glorious palace that cost loads of money, all of which he definitely deserved.

    ANKARA, TURKEY - OCTOBER 28 2014: A general view of Turkey's new Presidential Palace. (Photo by Volkan Furuncu/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) Source: Huffington Post

    ANKARA, TURKEY – OCTOBER 28 2014: A general view of Turkey’s new Presidential Palace. (Photo by Volkan Furuncu/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) Source: Huffington Post

    Ah well. Dr. Çiftçi has already been fired, and rightly so. Now the only thing left for the court to determine is whether his, frankly scandalous, conduct should land him in jail for two years.

    Of course, if Turkish courts are about anything, they’re about due procedure and making sure that everybody gets a fair trial, so instead of jumping the gun and just throwing that low-life Facebook-sharer in prison, the judge admitted that he hadn’t seen the Lord of the Rings movies and ordered a panel of, erm, Gollum experts in order to determine whether Gollum is a good guy or a bad guy.

    Seriously. Why spend tax-payer dollars on this? Just throw that guy in prison already!

    The panel will apparently be composed of “two academics, two behavioural scientists or psychologists and an expert on cinema and television productions.”

    This may actually derail the case against this doctor, as fortunately for him Tolkien tended to write characters with actual psychological depth. Gollum is one of these, and although he has already been corrupted by his desire for the ring throughout the books, many of the other “good” (and formerly good) characters including Bilbo, Frodo, and Saruman fall into the same trap. It is also Gollum, ultimately, who is responsible for destroying the ring as Frodo balks at the last second. Alright, he didn’t mean to. But can you really say that he was worse than Frodo, at the end?

    Anyway, we shall see what this ‘panel of experts’ will say. You can read more about this here, including some interesting details about freedom of the press in Turkey.

    Also, I don’t want this post to be in any way miscontrued. I would never insult Erdogan. President Erdogan definitely only closes newspapers and blocks webpages that tell lies about him. His quest for truth is truly a true service to society. All hail Tayyip. You’re the greatest. The end.

  • Turkish Culture II: Ankara is SO BORING

    Ankara is the capital city of Turkey, and if I had one lira for every time a Turkish person has told me that it is a boring hellhole, I could buy a plane ticket from Ankara back to Istanbul. For a long time it was a mystery to me how nearly all Turkish people could feel such unbridled hatred for their capital city, so I decided to go there to learn what none of the fuss was about.

    To be honest, Ankara is a fairly inoffensive city with some nice trees and one huge mausoleum (on which more some other time). But okay. My Turkish friends were right. After admiring the trees and the mausoleum, there’s nothing in particular to do.

    IMG_2665

    In Ankara, there are some trees.

    A friend of mine and I have a pact to send each other postcards from the worst most uninspiring areas of the world that we can find, so as soon as I discovered how right everybody was about Ankara’s things-to-do scene, I went on the postcard hunt. Finding myself in a huge underground bookstore, I soon realized that, not only do Turkish people hate Ankara, they do not even consider it exciting enough to make postcards about.

    That’s bad. Even Ottawa has postcards.

    As luck would have it, I spied a teetering pile of dusty secondhand paperbacks and wondered if I could find some funny covers to rip off and use instead.

    IMG_2693

    On the left, ‘fiery nights.’ On the right, ‘what women want.’

    I was not disappointed. The paperbacks turned out to be Turkish-language Harlequins from the 1990s. Not only did they do their duty as postcards, they confirmed that people in Ankara get up to the same thing as people in boring cities everywhere.

    Suddenly overcome, I wiped a single tear from my eye. From Margaree, Nova Scotia (which, believe it or not, is more boring than Ankara) to Ankara Turkey, one thing transcends the manifold cultures of humankind: where there is nothing to do there is always at least one thing to do.

    But seriously, if you’re planning a trip to Turkey, don’t go to Ankara. I’m not sure if the faint possibility of a fiery night is worth the trouble.

  • Turkish Culture I: Biscolata Boys

    In Canada, when I tell people about my trips to Turkey, I’m frequently bombarded by comments like these:

    “Oh, the boys must be so good-looking there! Like in Spain!”

    “Oh my gosh, I went to Turkey, and the men there – mmmpf. It was hard to come back.”

    “Go on lots of dates. You can’t have too many Mediterranean men in the world!”

    “Sooo….? How was it….?”

    It typically comes as a surprise to Canadian women to learn that, at least in my experience, Turkish women do not gaze at Turkish men in the same lecherous way that we are wont to do. Indeed, the ones I know profess rather disparaging opinions towards the looks of the men around them. In the Turkish female mind, the main marks against Turkish men seem to be that they are short, bald, and jealous. (For the record, this disparaging attitude appears to go both ways, but that is a whole nother post.)

    As near as I can tell, this attitude is unique to Turkish women. Canadian women don’t think like this, and I have it on good authority that Iranian women (who likely have more real exposure to Turkish men than us Canadians) also think the men here are pretty hot stuff. As for me, I can only say that there is a great deal of variance, like anywhere.

    Still, I had to laugh when a friend showed me these commercials for a type of cookie called Biscolata.



    As you can see, the videos is basically a series of hot men from Mediterranean countries outside of Turkey promoting biscolata cookies. The commercials were hugely popular in Turkey, and many a Biscolata cookie has been sold using this the-grass-is-more-delicious-and-chocolatey-when-it-speaks-a-romance-language technique.

    If you don’t believe me already, YouTube has also produced a “Turkish biskolata” parody video, in which a short, balding Turkish man preens himself in a tree. And since parodies are usually funny because they reflect a cultural expectation, I fear it is the unfortunate lot of Turkish men to work extra hard to, uh, sell their cookies on the domestic market.