Sub-Cultures, Music, and the 1960’s
I attended the Akbank Jazz Festival last week at the Hilton, and had the opportunity to watch The Jimmy Smith Quintet live. Naturally, you could consider yourself nothing but lucky to have witnessed such a performance.
Do you know what it’s like to listen to your favorite music through headphones in a crowded place, and how the busy people around you make you feel like you’re in a movie scene or something? In case you don’t, what happens is nothing but that the music goes supplementary to your thoughts, and what your eyes see is defined totally in different and peculiar ways. The center of everything is yourself at that moment in time, but no one else knows that! Of course, this may not be the case for everyone. That is why some people can, and some cannot study while listening to music. If you’re a member of the second group, like me, you wouldn’t actually want to be taken away in the middle of a mid-term exam, would you? You have a life you’ve got to live.
Never mind, that’s exactly how it was during the jazz concert, and I started thinking of two things (aside from asking myself how on earth a person could play drums like that): First, isn’t there an obvious similarity between the rising dominancy of sub-cultures in Turkey and in the United States? Sub-culture representatives are minority groups in a society, who are usually excluded by a part of the majority, which in this case are ‘gecekondu’ residents, and the blacks, respectively. In the 1960's, black people in the U.S. had difficulty even living in the same neighborhood with the whites, and were discriminatively hated; where at the same time in Turkey, urban residents did not welcome and appreciate villagers around their cities, as immigration to metropolitan areas took place. The clash of cultures was at the utmost stage, then, but can we say the “minor” cultures have been assimilated in time?
The answer is no, and this shows itself obviously in music preferences today. The most popular music in the U.S. is R&B, soul, and hip-hop these days, mostly performed by blacks. Similarly in Turkey, the music is very much based on the so-called “arabesque” tendencies, which once used to be called the music for the “dolmuş” drivers. This tells us that times have changed, and sub-cultures do have the potential to dominate the regular ones. Well, İbrahim Tatlıses and P. Daddy are lucky guys in that sense!
The second point I made was, why did I have to think of all these issues during an overwhelming jazz concert? Didn’t I have anything better to do? Actually I did. That is why I didn’t miss a note; “The Jimmy Smith Quintet” played that night, along with making the above assumptions. Music can be an inspirational language, don’t you think?

Efe Peker (POLS/IV)