During and immediately after the 2013 anti-government protests in Turkey, while there was almost complete state control over mainstream media, anti-government pop videos posted on YouTube became a symbolic rallying point for protest movements and attracted vast amounts of posted comments. These were widely shared and became sung in public places and during clashes with the police. These videos and the comments posted below them can be examined in the light of scholarly debates about the role of social media in public debate and protest movements. For critical discourse analysis, this provides the challenge to analyse the discourses realised in both the video and in the comments themselves. In popular music studies, it has been suggested that pop songs have been unsuccessful at communicating more than populist political sentiments. From a discursive point of view, the paper shows that this is indeed the case for one Turkish iconic protest video. It also finds that comments do not deal with the actual events represented in the video but seek to frame these in terms of wider forms of allegiances to, and betrayal of, a true Turkish people and in the light of homogenised and reduced forms of history.

Political discourses are found not only in speeches and newspapers, but also in cultural artefacts such as architecture, art and music. Turkey’s June 2013 protests saw an explosion of music videos distributed on the internet. This paper uses these videos as a case study to examine the limits and potential of popular music’s articulation of popular and populist politics. Though both terms encompass what is “widely favoured”, populism includes discourses which construct “the people” pitted against “an elite”. Past research has shown how popular music can articulate subversive politics, though these do not detail what that subversion means and how it is articulated. This paper uses specific examples to demonstrate how musical sounds, lyrics and images articulate populist and popular politics. From a corpus of over 100 videos, a typical example is analysed employing social semiotics. It is found that popular music has the potential to contribute to the public sphere, though its limits are also exposed.

Social media content is diverse, ranging from political and social commentary to more mundane, every day, 'soft' content. Here we argue that all of this content, at core, is ideological and political. Communication about everyday events, actions, issues and people articulates dominant (and sometimes alternative) ideological discourses about the nature of our society. Arguably, even the most banal comments are infused with norms and values, with scripts about what should be done, what is important and what is not, based on discourses about how we should run our societies. It is in these banal and everyday instances of communication that deeper senses of who we are, and values and judgements about the social order, reside. Using a range of examples from Weibo, such as anti-Trump posts, women fitness influencers, and posts about gender inequalities in the workplace, we argue for the importance and value of looking for politics in all kinds of social media comments and platforms, not so much in terms of formal politics, but a more banal and everyday kind. This means looking deeper at all individual instances, even if at first glance they appear to represent a counter point or marginalised voices.

For many of us, social media is our preferred option when we want to be informed and entertained. Though memes, mash ups and other forms of digital popular culture are dismissed by some as "just a bit of fun", scholars have shown how these can be political (Denisova 2019;Wiggins 2019;Way 2021). It is precisely through popular culture where we most experience politics "as fun, as style, and simply as part of the taken for granted everyday world … [though this is] infused by and shaped by, power relations and ideologies" (Machin 2013). This has never been more evident than now as we scroll through a constant flow of entertaining offerings at the swipe of a finger. Leaning on Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies, this paper analyses written and spoken lexica, images and musical sounds to reveal how a musical mash up distributed on social media recontextualises the UK government's withdrawal from the European Union (Brexit). Here, logically structured political arguments are side-lined in favour of entertaining, affective and populist discourses. It is through such a close reading that we consider the role(s) such digital popular culture plays in our understanding of politics during users' search to be entertained online.

Political communication is expressed in politicians’ speeches, campaign advertisements and government statements. Politics are also articulated in music, in both traditional political contexts such as anthems and party political broadcasts as well as less traditional contexts including songs, promotional videos and live performances. There is a wide spectrum of opinions as to exactly what are relations between music and politics, though most scholars acknowledge it can communicate meanings, though again, what these are remains contentious. One way to better understand relations between music and politics and meanings expressed in music is to closely examine these issues through the prism of discourses analysis. Through such an examination, not only what is being communicated becomes clear, but also how this is done, contributing to the fields of political communication, musicology and discourse studies.