Turkish Rock

I just got Şebnem Ferah's new album, and I'm very impressed. For a long time she was in Özlem Tekin's shadow (as far as I remember, they started out in the same group, Volvox) but when Özlem got married and started doing boring electropop, Şebnem got the attention she deserved (now Özlem's on her own again and back to doing pretty decent rock music - Tek Başıma is well worth a listen). The thing I like about Şebnem's work is that it's very obviously rock, with no attempt to cash in on ethnicity, but at the same time it's still obviously Turkish (apart from the fact that she sings in Turkish, I mean). The single, Ben Şarkımı Söylerken, is a good example - at first listening it sounds like AC/DC's Thunder, but when you listen again, the Turkish modality comes out. (Did I just write "modality"?)

Anyway, this prompted me to dig out all my Turkish rock CDs, and I'm working through them. At the moment, I'm listening to Destan, which is very much folk-rock. There are some very good songs on the album, but the group never went anywhere, partly because of splits in the band, but partly, I suspect, because if half the songs on an album are credited to "anonymous", you get stuck in the folk-rock rut. In a country like Turkey which still has a very strong folk tradition, there isn't a lot of room for folk-rockers (as opposed to folk musicians who play modern instruments). Af (whose album is also lying in the pile on my sofa) were a hard rock group with a small but loyal following who experimented with folk motifs. At the time they said if was a gamble - they'd lose their hardcore fans and weren't sure if the folky elements would get them a new fanbase. As far as I can see, it didn't.

That's not to say you can't combine folk and rock elements (look at Thin Lizzy!) but, especially in a country like Turkey, you have to be very clear abouth whether you're a rock group using the traditional instruments on a few tracks or doing the occasional folk song (e.g. Pentagram) or a folk group with a bit of distorted guitar. A fifty-fifty mix doesn't seem to work.

Browsing through Amazon's Turkish music section, it's nearly all folk and Sufi music - the only popular artists to make it into the first seven pages are Tarkan (unsurprisingly), Ayşegül Aldinç (surprisingly) and Laço Tayfa. No rock at all. But for curious non-Turkish readers living near a music shop with a good international section, I'd recommend the following:

Şebnem Ferah: Kelimeler Yetse ...
Özlem Tekin: Kime Ne or Tek Başıma (definitely not Öz, which is the boring electropop album)
Nazan Öncel: Sokak Kızı
Pentagram: Anatolia (if you don't mind early Metallica ;-))

... and for golden oldies, anything by Erkin Koray, Cem Karaca or Bulutsuzluk Özlemi, though you probably have to speak Turkish to appreciate those. If you're really lucky, you might find some Erdal Kızılçay, though he's not easy to find even in Turkey. The similarity to middle-period David Bowie (Low/Heroes) is not accidental - apparently they worked together.

Autobiography #5

( Out of Eden )

LJ acting up again

For the first time in ages I have both the time and inclination to write in my journal, and LJ is acting like it was Tatu at the Eurovision song contest (confused, out of tune, and resting on their laurels). I'm getting logged out every time I change pages, and every other attempt to post or comment results in a message "The document contains no data." Wrong - it contained plenty of data, you just lost it all. Thank god for the cache.

Like I said before, I'll put up with slow connections and occasional downtime, but this is really starting to irritate me. If I wanted this kind of thing, I'd just use Windows.

OK, let's see if I can send this ...

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No, it got the local time wrong. Now, must remember to re-enter my password because I'm not logged in any more. Here goes .....

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Still no go. Let's try entering a time a few minutes in the future .....

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Damn - forgot to re-enter my password this time. OK, check all systems:
Username - check.
Password - check.
Future time - check.
Roger wilco, we are ready to post.

Update: Silly Solri! Silly Solri! It turned out I'd switched off cookies, so of course I was getting logged out (this doesn't apply to my early post about login problems, though, and certainly not to buggered up server connections).

Holidays are good

I've spent the whole day listening to music and LJ-ing. For someone with a degree in music and ten years' playing in a band, it's comparitively rare for me to actually put a CD in the player, rather than absent-mindedly tuning into VH1 or Mezzo while waiting for some other program to start. But, as I said in a previous post, listening to Şebnem Ferah's new album prompted me to go through a fair part of my Turkish rock collection today (after annoying the neighbours by playing Erdal Kızılçay's "Yallah" three times at high volume, I'm back with Şebnem). It's been a long time since I've got so into an album that I've played it through, played the tracks I liked again, played some other stuff, then went back and played the whole thing again.

I've also nearly caught up with reading my friends list, which got neglected during Grading Hell, and my post-grading excursion into Windows (aargh!) to indulge in some gaming.

Of course, the nagging feeeling that I should be doing something useful crept in from time to time, so I kept it at bay by cleaning the kitchen and bathroom floors and cleaning the balcony. Well, throwing a few buckets of water at it, anyway. I also ran the dishwasher, though I haven't got round to putting the dishes away. I remember when my wife and I were first debating whether to get a dishwasher (my posisiton on washing dishes was that you should let them pile up for a week, then put on some heavy metal and see how fast you could get through the pile). She mentioned that some people buy dishwashers then complain that it's such a chore having to unload them and put all the dishes back in the cupboard. "Come on, " I said, "Even I couldn't be that lazy!" Oh yes I can.

"Trik trak, trik trak, olur mu hiç çalışmamak?"
Olur. Hem de bal gibi olur.

Posting too much today

Delving deep into the backlog of my friends page, I found the following questions in entr00pi's journal and thought I'd have a go at answering them (even if I don't get some HTML code to post in my journal at the end).

1. What do you most want to be remembered for?
Good ideas.

2. What quotation best fits your outlook on life?
"If the cucumber is bitter, spit it out. But do not ask why there are bitter cucumbers in the world."
[To be honest, that's more like the attitude I'd like to have]

3. What single achievement are you most proud of in the past year?
Dunno. Either my course on happiness, or the concordancing program I wrote.

4. What about the past ten years?
Even less certain here. Icky personal stuff aside, maybe that paper I wrote on desire. Maybe surviving two years of hapkido without giving up or being seriously injured.

5. If you were asked to give a child a single piece of advice to guide them through life, what would you say?
"Free your mind."