Kenan Behzat Sharpe (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Anatolian Rock and Turkey’s 1960s

Kenan Sharpe is a PhD candidate in the Literature Department of the University of California, Santa Cruz where he researches the cultural production of 1960s-1970s social movements.

Anadolu Rock was a genre that came to prominence in the 1960s combining the international current of rock and instruments like the electric guitar with Anatolian folk music traditions. Acts such as Cem Karaca, Barış Manço, and Moğollar were at the forefront of this musical movement. This research project investigates the historical, social, and political factors that shaped the emergence of Anadolu Rock.

Anadolu Rock rose to prominence just as the movements of the radical left were gaining influence. In Turkey the relationship between left-wing politics and rock was more ambiguous, as the fierce acrimony of those years between left and right also divided the cultural sphere, with some artists expressing closeness to ultra-nationalist organizations while others were associated with the socialist movement. Similarly, those who listened to this genre were linked to a variety of political tendencies. This mostly sociological information pushes this research project to a more fundamental question: Exactly what relationship does this genre, which came into being in the midst of the turbulent 1960s, have to the dominant political ideologies of the period? In a certain sense, by combining western instrumentation with Anatolian folk culture Anadolu Rock can be said to have fulfilled the dream of cross-cultural synthesis that was the Republic’s official ideology. At the same time, however, this hybrid genre opened up new space for protest, allowed for different expressions of gender and sexuality, and increased visibility for Alevis and other repressed cultures. In this sense, there is something thoroughly political about Anadolu Rock–and not only when the lyrics specifically refer to political events.

This research project centers on the music of Tülay German, Cem Karaca, and Selda Bağcan in order to unpack both the official and subversive elements of this genre. A comparative method is employed which combines the study of monographs published in Turkish, resources on global psychedelia and rock movements, as well as oral history and archival studies in order to locate Anadolu Rock in relation to other local manifestations of the international rock scene such as the examples of Mexico and Cambodia. This project places Anadolu Rock within the context of both the world and the Turkish 1960s. Another important dimension of the project is interviews with musicians and the study of popular music magazines from the period such as Hey, Ses, and Müzik Ekspres. At the same time, the project also draws on the rich Cultural Studies scholarship on popular music as exemplified by Greil Marcus, Simon Frith, Michael Denning, and others.