Istanbul sounding like revolution: the role of music in the Gezi Park Occupy movement

Abstract

This article focuses on the role of protest music in the biggest social movement of recent Turkish history. It is the result of three years of fieldwork triangulating musical and cultural analysis with ethnographic methods. Motives of the protest, strategies of the movement, agency of musicians and participatory performances are investigated and contextualised in an analysis of Turkey's cultural changes. The function of music shifted from framing the protest to encouraging political action and fostering a sense of belonging to the collective identity of the Gezi Park movement. Music even became political activism. By underlining different functions played by music in the case of the Gezi Park movement, this article problematises the relevance of music for social movements.

10 Music Videos as Protest Communication: The Gezi Park Protest on YouTube

“…Both Bianchi (2018) and Way (2016) note the importance of the Internet for the distribution of music during the Gezi Park protest. Turkish political music operates within a 'tightly controlled mediascape' dominated by the ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party) ideology (Way 2016: 426).…”

“…On the one hand, research on the relationship between popular music and the Gezi Park protest includes the work by Parkinson (2018) and Way (2016), both looking at Turkish indie rock as a politically oppositional voice in popular culture, coinciding with the Gezi Park movement by resisting rampant consumerism and value conservatism. Bianchi's (2018) research, on the other hand, explores the music performed at the location during the occupation of the park and how the image of making music also features in the visual representation of Gezi Park protest, such as the iconic image of the man with a guitar facing the riot police. The centrality of music making in the protest context is also exemplified by the music videos we have studied.…”

“…Music can permeate protest in many different ways. Bianchi (2018) illustrates the function of music performances in the park and in the streets as part of the protest. Building on these insights, this chapter focuses specifically on Gezi Park protest music videos on YouTube.…”

The symbol of social media in contemporary protest: Twitter and the Gezi Park movement

“…As noted by Aytekin (2017: 191), ‘the predominant form of protest in the [Gezi Park] movement was aesthetic political acts’, and he goes on to argue that ‘artistic practices and cultural symbols employed by protestors’ served to bring diverse groups of people together politically. Reflecting this, an emerging body of work concerns itself with various aspects of creative outputs linked to the protest, including street art and graffiti (Seloni and Sarfati, 2017; Taş, 2017), music (Jenzen et al, 2019; Bianchi, 2018; Parkinson, 2018; Way, 2016) and photography (McGarry et al, 2019), and it is in this strand of Gezi Park research that we situate our work. Approaching social media imaginaries through visual methods, focusing on visual representations of social media that circulate online, offers an approach to understanding activists’ engagement with media technologies that moves away from operative concerns (i.e.…”

COVID-19 and the Ugandan Presidential Election: Contesting Lockdown Authority in Popular Songs

“…There have been an increasing number of studies that focus on how music, digitally circulated music in particular, is involved in the contestation of international-scale media events. Digitally circulated popular music played an important role in generating and (mis)representing the Arab Uprisings of 2011 (McDonald 2019;Tudoroiu 2014), the Occupy movement of that same year (Bianchi 2018), and the Black Lives Matter movement (Orejuela & Shonekan 2018). The use of music to shape an event in the public imagination is not a new phenomenon; historians have explored, for example, the role of music in etching particular images of the French Revolution in European consciousness-from "La Marseillaise" to the symphonies of Beethoven (Boyd 1992).…”