Turk rockers shout ’Long live arabesque!’
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by Çetin Cem Yılmaz
Oluşturulma Tarihi: Mart 04, 2009 00:00
ISTANBUL - Istanbul rock band Fairuz Derinbulut is releasing an album of cover versions of arabesque classics. It may be a combination of genres that has become less surprising over the years, but a couple of listens to ’Arabesk’ proves that it works very well
Turkish rock band Fairuz Derinbulut remembers the days when fans of one music genre were fierce rivals of those of another. Today, there is more room for crossover.
Bass player Taha Rıza Özmen recalls playing the H2000 open-air music festival in Istanbul in 2002, before the band had even released its first record, "Kundante." "When guitarist Demir Kerem Atay shouted, ’Long live arabesque!’ from the stage, the rocker kids totally froze," Özmen told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review. "The only ones cheering for us were the guys on duty, cleaning the area. They went crazy!"
That incident seven years ago says a lot about the traditional societal roles of arabesque and rock fans. While arabesque music usually voiced the problems of the lower classes, rock fans in Turkey generally came from wealthier and more educated backgrounds. An introverted genre while rock was extroverted, arabesque’s melancholy mood stood in stark contrast to rock’s higher and more energetic notes.
Outsider music
Between the genre’s emergence in the early 1970s and the late 1990s, arabesque was always an outsider in mainstream music. Though it was the genre that sold the most records, the one that produced top Turkish stars Orhan Gencebay and Müslüm Gürses, arabesque was always forced underground. Arabesque artists were banned on state television network TRT and their musical style was thought to have a low artistic standing.
Those days, though, are long gone now. Arabesque pioneer Gürses performed at the Rockistanbul festival, a successor to H2000, in 2004. In front of a different kind of audience for perhaps the first time in his career, Gürses played to a few thousand kids wearing jeans and Converse shoes and standing in the rain to listen to his songs.
Two years later, no one was shocked to see Gürses release a record, titled "Aşk Tesadüfleri Sever," on which he reinterpreted songs by Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Garbage, Björk and Rainbow with Turkish lyrics.
So it’s not that surprising now, in 2009, to see a rock band playing arabesque songs Ğ especially not a group whose oriental leanings have been well documented.
On the aptly titled album "Arabesk," Fairuz Derinbulut delivers classic songs by Ali Tekintüre, who wrote the lyrics to most of the defining songs from the genre’s golden age.
The band admits that Tekintüre was amazed by their knowledge of arabesque music, but they Ğ especially guitarist Atay Ğ were always huge fans of his.
’This is not first time’
"We always wanted to do a project like this," Atay said. "But since we are on the same record label as Ali Tekintüre, it happened more easily and quickly than we first thought. The label, Doublemoon, came up with the proposal and the next thing we knew, we were trying to pick ten songs from Tekintüre’s archive of hundreds of songs."
Of course, this is not the first time that a rock band has played arabesque songs. What distinguishes Fairuz Derinbulut’s renditions is that the group does not try to make arabesque sound more like rock music Ğ quite the contrary. Despite the heavily distorted guitars and modern rhythms, ranging from reggae to rock, on "Arabesk," all you hear is arabesque. Not in its purest form, of course, but the melancholy, sadness-drenched and utterly realist core of it anyway.
Bass player Taha Rıza Özmen recalls playing the H2000 open-air music festival in Istanbul in 2002, before the band had even released its first record, "Kundante." "When guitarist Demir Kerem Atay shouted, ’Long live arabesque!’ from the stage, the rocker kids totally froze," Özmen told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review. "The only ones cheering for us were the guys on duty, cleaning the area. They went crazy!"
That incident seven years ago says a lot about the traditional societal roles of arabesque and rock fans. While arabesque music usually voiced the problems of the lower classes, rock fans in Turkey generally came from wealthier and more educated backgrounds. An introverted genre while rock was extroverted, arabesque’s melancholy mood stood in stark contrast to rock’s higher and more energetic notes.
Outsider music
Between the genre’s emergence in the early 1970s and the late 1990s, arabesque was always an outsider in mainstream music. Though it was the genre that sold the most records, the one that produced top Turkish stars Orhan Gencebay and Müslüm Gürses, arabesque was always forced underground. Arabesque artists were banned on state television network TRT and their musical style was thought to have a low artistic standing.
Those days, though, are long gone now. Arabesque pioneer Gürses performed at the Rockistanbul festival, a successor to H2000, in 2004. In front of a different kind of audience for perhaps the first time in his career, Gürses played to a few thousand kids wearing jeans and Converse shoes and standing in the rain to listen to his songs.
Two years later, no one was shocked to see Gürses release a record, titled "Aşk Tesadüfleri Sever," on which he reinterpreted songs by Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Garbage, Björk and Rainbow with Turkish lyrics.
So it’s not that surprising now, in 2009, to see a rock band playing arabesque songs Ğ especially not a group whose oriental leanings have been well documented.
On the aptly titled album "Arabesk," Fairuz Derinbulut delivers classic songs by Ali Tekintüre, who wrote the lyrics to most of the defining songs from the genre’s golden age.
The band admits that Tekintüre was amazed by their knowledge of arabesque music, but they Ğ especially guitarist Atay Ğ were always huge fans of his.
’This is not first time’
"We always wanted to do a project like this," Atay said. "But since we are on the same record label as Ali Tekintüre, it happened more easily and quickly than we first thought. The label, Doublemoon, came up with the proposal and the next thing we knew, we were trying to pick ten songs from Tekintüre’s archive of hundreds of songs."
Of course, this is not the first time that a rock band has played arabesque songs. What distinguishes Fairuz Derinbulut’s renditions is that the group does not try to make arabesque sound more like rock music Ğ quite the contrary. Despite the heavily distorted guitars and modern rhythms, ranging from reggae to rock, on "Arabesk," all you hear is arabesque. Not in its purest form, of course, but the melancholy, sadness-drenched and utterly realist core of it anyway.