Turkish
Psychedelic
Rock
I’m sure you’re probably thinking, what the hell is that?
Actually, it's a term made up by music critics in the West.
Well, not all artists labelled with it rejected it…
some of them embraced it.
Anatolian Rock,
as it is more accurately known,
is a fusion of Western rock music with Turkish folk elements
that arose in the 1960s
merging electric and bass guitar
with the traditional stringed instrument, known the bağlama
(which evolved into the ‘electric bağlama’).
Unfortunately it isn’t very well known amongst the generation born after 1990,
and before the spread online digitalised music,
its rare records and the sound within them were in real danger of being lost forever.
Its story actually begins decades earlier during the birth of the Turkish Republic.
From the early 1930s onwards,
Turkey’s founding father and first President,
pursued deep reforms to develop a national form of music.
Ataturk believed that musicians should work on Turkish melodies
and then make them polyphonic according to the rules of Western harmonic music.
So the Turkish State began to interfere in
and direct the musical life of the nation
through various institutions.
Traditional Ottoman music was banned
and the ears of the new generation were introduced to Anatolian folk music.
Fast forward to 1956
A year after the worldwide success of “Rock Around the Clock”
the gramophones of Istanbul started to play rock’n’roll music
and this new sound was immediately picked up by the youth of the city’s elite.
From 1957 onwards,
many high school and university students
began forming their own bands,
playing covers of rock’n’roll and twist music.
One such student was Barış Manço.
In December 1957,
he was at his school,
the elite French-language Galatasaray High School,
when another young musician and student,
Erkin Koray from the the city's German High School,
fronted an amateur concert there.
This has come to be accepted as Turkey’s first known rockn'roll concert.
By 1962,
Manço’s band,
(Harmoniler)
released its first record: “Twist in USA”
So far, so carboard cutout Elvis.
But as the 60s went on,
something unexpected happened,
their sound started to evolve
into what we now call “Turkish Psychedelic Rock”.
– a mixture of the American psychedelic sound
and the folk music of the Anatolian peninsula.
Then one day in 1963,
Erkin Koray began a new era with his first record “Bir Eylül Akşamı”
or “One September Night".
This song is regarded as the first rock’n’roll record in the Turkish language.
By the mid 60s,
the development of musical trends within Turkey had become deeply political.
In the West,
the 60s saw a wide range of social issues
being brought the the forefront of pubic debate;
race relations,
war,
sexuality,
drugs,
poverty,
the environment
and belief in God.
Rock’n’roll often went hand-in-hand
with these mainly youth-led rebellions.
In Turkey, a NATO country in heart the cold war,
the effects of these movements were starting to be felt,
and the growing disquiet started to rattle conservatives
and others who wanted to maintain the status quo.
But ultimately the conservatives were not in charge.
The Kemalists,
the followers of Ataturk,
dominated industry, the military, the media and the civil service.
To the conservatives, Western music meant foreign music.
But to the Kemalists,
Western music with Turkish lyrics,
or Turkish music played with Western instruments,
was also Turkish music.
Back then the Hürriyet newspaper
had a very explicit Kemalist identity,
and believed very strongly in the Westernisation process
and public detachment from religion.
In 1965,
it began holding a song contest called the Altın Mikrofon,
or golden microphone
which was the perfect platform to get its message across.
The conditions of the contest were:
you had to compose a song in Turkish that blended folk and modern western style
or arrange western style music to a traditional folk tune
and you could only use western instruments.
It aimed to steer the youth away from merely doing covers of Western hits,
their exposure to which was incidentally created by Ataturk’s western music reforms,
And towards creating popular original music with Turkish lyrics.
The contest, which ran until 1968, launched a new era
and was a springboard for many Anatolian Rock musicians
such as Cem Karaca,
Selçuk Alagöz
and Edip Akbayram.
As well as bands like Moğollar, Mavi Işıklar, Silüetler.
The competition very much helped shape the future of popular music in Turkey.
Finalists were awarded with studio time,
an opportunity to record a 45-rpm disc,
and a tour across the country.
As it toured Anatolia,
it caused people outside the big cities to be exposed to pop music,
which led many young musicians to start creating a unique hybrid form of music.
And the more Anatolian folk tunes that they integrated into their music,
the more popular they became.
And the popularity of Anatolian Rock only kept growing
going from a niche musical fringe of Istanbul rich kids
to a truly mainstream genre.
The influence of Aşık culture on Anatolian Rock cannot be overstated.
‘Aşıks’, traditional singer-poets and bards who accompany their songs with a bağlama,
have been staple of Turkish and other Turkic cultures for over a millennium.
Many Anatolian songs were inspired by Folk songs,
with the new era artists visiting these Aşıks for inspiration
and also to learn how to master the bağlama.
"Uzun İnce Bir Yoldayım" is a famous Turkish folk poem written and sang by one of the most legendary poets of Turkish folk literature, Aşık Veysel.
Aşık Veysel Şatıroğlu was an ashik, poet, songwriter, and a bağlama (a smaller bouzouki) virtuoso.
Have a listen to this original recording followed by its excellent psychedelic cover.
Özdemir Erdoğan & The Orchestra gave this wonderful poem
a psychedelic rock spin while keeping its original bağlama loops.
Remember our Turkish Elvis impersonator Barış Manço?
Well he rode the wave and was at the forefront of developing this new sound.
He even released an entire album, trying to bring English lyrics to Anatolian rock,
which, had mixed results…
Ookay, moving on...
The major musicians of this era worked with each other throughout these years.
Barış Manço, was a member of Kurtalan Ekspres, Kaygısızlar, Moğollar, and Harmoniler.
Cem Karaca, was also a member of Moğollar, as well as Apaşlar and Kardaşlar.
Selda Bağcan, was a vocalist for both Moğollar and Kardaşlar.
Ersen was a member of Kardaşlar, Dadaşlar, 3 Hürel and Moğollar.
But as the 1970s went on,
it proved to be an increasingly turbulent decade for Turkey,
with students, communists, socialists, nationalists and fascists
all facing off with one another, in frequent street battles.
On top of that, there was economic recession,
social unrest,
strikes, and a series of paralyzed governments.
Some musicians took a stance to align themselves with the common people.
Once such person was Selda Bagcan.
By taking rock ’n’ roll and infusing it with traditional instruments and time signatures,
Bagcan and others were able to speak directly to the people.
For young Turks especially, popular music became synonymous with
leftist thinking and protests for greater equality,
freedom, and workers’ rights.
Many famous of these musicians were actually
from highly intellectual Istanbul families with artistic backgrounds,
While their fans were ordinary middle and working class Anatolian people.
The left-wing views of these artists did not endear them to the authorities,
And then one day in 1980,
it was all over.
Rock musicians were banned from performing on the stage,
and their music almost completely disappeared from the airwaves.
Many artists fled abroad, some were even imprisoned.
Even if the military didn’t ban them,
it is likely they would have been drowned out anyway,
by the tidal wave that crashed over the 80s airwaves:
Arabesque.
Nowadays ‘Arabesque’ music has a bad reputation,
but in the 1980s it dominated.
To Turks of an urban, white-collar and Western persuasion,
it is regarded as a bastardized form of music
with its oriental and therefore non-Turkish orientations.
But to all kinds of people,
The era of Anatolian Rock had died in 1980.
It would take until the 1990s for Turkish rock to have a rebirth,
and unfortunately the Turkish rock that came out of this period has no connection to its rich history.
The only remnants were in samples used by American artists.
It would take yet another decade for the Anatolian Rock revival to take place.
One of the biggest names on the scene is Gaye Su Akyol.
But by far the band which is doing the best job of keeping the true spirit of Anatolian Rock alive is the band Altın Gün
And last but not least, I have to mention the incredible YouTube channel Anatolian Rock Revival Project.
I will leave the link in the description below.
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