Musicians and Their Role in the Gezi Park Protest

Music and Gezi Park Protests
When the mayor declared the destruction of the historic park in the heart of Istanbul to build a shopping mall, local people began camping there in order to prevent heavy equipment vehicles from entering. Following the attack of the police, protests spread throughout Turkey, specifically in Ankara and Izmir (Aknur). Although such events have become the routine in recent years, the Gezi Park Protests were not the usual kind. It was the first time that a huge amount of people experienced police violence in a big city. And for the first time people from various ethnic backgrounds, different religious beliefs, and different political views were united as one group in “capuling”—a reference to Prime Minister Erdogan’s belittling characterization of the protestors as “marauders,” a term the protestors happily embraced, just as anti-Clinton crowd in America embraced their characterization as “deplorables” during the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign. In Turkey, the capuling crowd agreed on one thing: they had to defend their streets to protect their rights. The crowds drew significant support from across the country and the world, as musicians big and small came to support the cause (with MTV even documenting the event). This paper will analyze how music was involved and used during the Gezi Resistance. First, it will summarize the events that led to the protests. Then, it will discuss how musicians like Duman, Bosphorus Jazz Choir, Beduk and other artists both local and international showed their support and responded to the government crackdown. Lastly, it will discuss how the local people used music in their very own “cacerolazo” demonstrations—by using pots and pans to bang out their support of the protest.
The protests in Gezi Park were a long time coming. For years, the people of Turkey had been subjected to the ruling party of Prime Minister Erdogan—the Justice and Development Party, or AKP for short (Aknur). Erdogan did not see the protests as an organic movement by the Turkish people in Istanbul: “The ruling elite perceived these protests as a pre-planned uprising targeting Prime Minister Erdogan that was part of global conspiracy to overthrow his government” (Aknur 296). The government dismissed them with belittling words, the police were sent in to disperse the crowds, using water cannons and tear gas—yet the people continued to show defiance. They were tired of AKP and its rulers and did not want their local park turned into a shopping mall. These protestors were “all supported by dense informal networks such as neighborhood platforms, cultural centers and support groups” (Aknur 298). Social media was used to help spread the resistance (Odag, Ulug, Solak) and all over the country, “formal groups such as associations, unions, confederations and political parties also started to participate” (Aknur 298). The protestors adopted the identifying tag applied them by Erdogan and “a music video titled ‘Every I’m Capulling’ was promptly created” sampling LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” (Varol 556). The music video went viral and helped draw international attention to Gezi Park. Gil Kaufman writing for MTV News in 2015 would go on to state: “There was a time before the Internet when governments could crack down on dissent without the rest of the world finding out. But thanks to smartphones, Twitter and the power of hip-hop it’s almost impossible to secretly keep a population down behind closed doors.” Indeed, local hip hop artists, rappers, and musicians of various genres showed their support for the protestors at Gezi Park, illustrating the close ties between music, culture, the people, social media platforms and the protest.
The Turkish rock group Duman, for example, composed a song entitled “Eyvallha” in support of the Gezi Park protests and uploaded it to YouTube, further showing in the 21st century, ruling parties not only must contend with the people in their own locales but also with the watching eyes of all those around the world who have access to social media sites like the video-sharing platform YouTube. The video quickly obtained over 3 million views, thus drawing a great deal of attention to the movement and inspiring other artists and musicians to get involved. The group would go on to describe in a later song the scene of Gezi as it spread around the country, igniting a movement of protests aimed at the AKP in multiple cities and squares throughout Turkey.
The local group Bosphorus Jazz Choir joined directly in the protests and one its members was even injured by a tear gas canister which struck him directly in the head. ?afak Küçüksezer of the choir had to be rushed to the hospital after the incident (“Member of the Bosphorus Jazz Choir Injured”). His injuries were just one of many suffered by protestors during the riots that ensued as police clashed with protestors. The Turkish electropop musician Beduk took up the mantle next, and set to work composing and recording a song entitled “It’s a Riot,” which told the story of the protests and the need for Turkey’s people to fight for their freedom in the country. Beduk made a music video for the song and released it that same summer using footage recorded by people on the streets as the protests inspired by Gezi unfolded everywhere in the country (“Beduk ten Gezi Klibi”). The Turkish rapper Ozbi followed that up with his own song entitled “Asi,” which means Rebel. The Turkish rock band The Ringo Jets wrote a song which they entitled “Spring of War,” and the band Massive Attack performed a concert later in Istanbul at which they read off the names of those victims who died protesting the AKP that year (Ulkar).
Even the front man of Pink Floyd Roger Waters, a known activist who has often criticized Israel’s human rights violations, performed a concert in Istanbul in August of 2013 and showed support for the Gezi protests in Turkey. During his performance, he used the stage to project images of those injured and killed during the protests. His music taken from the Pink Floyd album The Wall played overtop the images to communicate a connection between social injustice, culture, art, music, people, protests and activism. Waters expressed his solidarity with the Gezi Park victims by making the Gezi Park protests the central theme of his performance:
A gigantic wall was built on stage during the set, and many human rights activists and victims of terror and wars were projected to the stage during the concert. Names and photographs of Gezi Park protesters, Ethem Sar?sülük, Ali ?smail Korkmaz, Abdullah Cömert, Mehmet Ayval?ta?, and police officer Mustafa Sar?, who lost their lives in Turkey rallies earlier this summer were projected to the stage.  Waters stated “for people who lost their lives because of state terror” in a speech he gave in Turkish (“Roger Waters Shows Solidarity”).
Waters’ performance echoed the sentiment of the people in Turkey, who, while not as artistically gifted as Waters, nonetheless used their own talents and tools to make noise during the Gezi Park protests and show their unity through the “cacerolazo”—the use of homemade items to produce a ruckus in the streets: “In the center of the city, even very posh neighborhoods were the scene of ‘cacerolazos’ protests, where people bang pots and pans, and marches” (“Assault on Gezi Park Sparks Furious Protests”). In this manner, the people of Istanbul, Turkey and sympathetic parts of the world responded in the same manner to the AKP’s assault on the Gezi Park protestors: they responded by raising their voices and uniting their talents, however so humble, towards the expression of music, of din, of commotion—with the aim being to draw attention to the resistance that they were effectively putting up against the ruling party of Turkey. As Ankur states, “although the protestors had different backgrounds and ideologies, during the protests they established a collective identity from a shared reaction to the government’s policies” (298). That collective identity also found a common form of communication and expression thanks to the use of social media, where music videos and songs could be uploaded and shared among the people of the world supporting the Gezi Park protestors.
In conclusion, when Prime Minister Erdogan made his belittling remark about the protestors in Gezi Park, he unleashed a wave of emotion among the Turkish people who objected to the use of force by police on those in Istanbul who wanted to keep their park from being destroyed for the sake of a shopping mall. The people adopted the name given them by Erdogan and used it as a badge of honor, just like the “deplorables” did in the West to stand in defiance of the candidate Clinton. In Turkey, musicians, hip hop artists and rappers got together to articulate their response to the AKP and their support of the protests in musical form. Even the international community showed to give their voice to the protests. Roger Waters of Pink Floyd performed in Istanbul that summer to show his assistance and to commemorate the lives of those who died during the Gezi Park protests. All in all, the protests and the musicians (and even the local people who banged on pots and pans in their own musical cries to be heard) showed that creative spirit was running among the people in Turkey and that music was a link shared by a diverse set of people of various backgrounds, ethnicities, affiliations, classes, creeds, and nationalities.


Works Cited
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https://socialistworker.org/2013/06/17/assault-on-gezi-sparks-protests
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https://web.archive.org/web/20131010151934/http://video.sozcu.com.tr/2013/video/magazin/bedukten-gezi-klibi.html
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