POLITICS OF/AND POPULAR MUSIC

摘要

The subject of this paper is the relationship between politics and popular culture with a particular focus on the relationship between the politics of the New Right and arabesk music in Turkey in the 1980s. This issue is approached from a socio-historical perspective concentrating not only on the process of social transformation that occurred in the 1980s and the 1990s, but also on the history of the emergence and transformation of modern government and the arabesk music genre in Turkey. Arabesk emerged in the 1960s as the music of the popular masses despite various official measures aimed at inhibiting its expansion. In spite of this historical background, today there is a growing suspicion and belief that arabesk lost its protest character either through its articulation with the New Right's hegemonic project or by becoming a part of recently expanded consumption culture in Turkey. It is true that the 1980s was a transitional period led by the New Right and this has had important effects on popular culture in general and on arabesk music in particular. But does it mean that arabesk died? This paper deals with this question and studies new socio-cultural dynamics that emerged in the 1980s and the 1990s within the context of arabesk music in Turkey. It argues that all the changes that occurred in this period are forcing us to think in a new matrix of relations (economic, political and cultural), within which arabesk is multiplied or fragmented into new subgenres and audience groups. We must also articulate more complex questions than those dichotomic ones such as 'if arabesk is dead or alive', if we like to understand new cultural trends underlying our present world and the political potential that they hold for us.