Today, Turkish music cassettes occupy a niche position in music history and the music market, even though they constituted a mass media market from the 1970s until around 2000. This niche status is evident not least in the fact that a significant portion of the cassette output is not available online, and the largest music release and music retail database, Discogs, records very little of it—and when it does, it is often only in a marginal form with 0 “have” and 0 “want.”
Why is that? Turkish music on cassette has ended up in a kind of media shadow zone due to various mechanisms of marginalization and exclusion. Dismissed as “Arabesque minibus music” for poorer social classes and migrants—both within Turkey and those who have emigrated—Turkish music on cassette has so far been subject to what can be described as a class-based marginalization and, consequently, exclusion by more educated segments of Turkish society.
This has so far prevented any serious (scholarly) engagement with the medium and the music, even though numerous stars across various musical genres have released cassettes. However, this is also due to the fact that many Western gatekeepers in the media, markets, and public discourse have generally shut out Turkish music—including that released on cassette—regardless of how successful it may have been.
As a result, entire strands of musical development are difficult to document from a musicological perspective because they have been poorly archived and are therefore hard to access. Independent musical developments within the Turkish diaspora—which took place primarily on cassette, such as Disco Folk, Anadolu Synth, Gurbet Şarkıları, and Kurdish music—are difficult to research and rarely heard.
In this presentation, we aim to combine our scholarly and curatorial research approaches and, through a lecture-performance featuring several audio examples, offer insight into that “ocean” (Emir Özer) of recordings that has thus far been largely overlooked by music history and the music market. We are concerned with music that threatens to sink into the abyss of media oblivion—and which we wish to rescue from it.
