Gentrification of Arabesk Music in Turkey of the 2000s: Müslüm Gürses Project

in: Güzel Sanatlar Alanında Geleneksel ve Güncel Bakış, Yiğit Emine Filiz,Aslan Elkıran Gülşen, Editor, BİDGE YAYINLARI, İzmir, pp.216-261, 2023

In this paper, I propose that the musical journey of Müslüm

Gürses can be considered as a cultural text echoing the phases of

change in the course of the arabesk and its symbolic connotations in

Turkey. Subjects such as disappearance of the original social

meaning and context of the arabesk music, and the shift in the

audience profile from lower class towards upper classes will be

analyzed in relation to the phases of Müslüm Gürses’ music career.

The paper aims to present the exclusive role which Müslüm Gürses

played in gentrification process of arabesk music by focusing the

changes in his music and his image in the 2000s. It is claimed that

creative specialists from the upper middle class that called as ‘new

cultural intermediaries’ by Bourdieu (1984) has a leading position

on the changes of Müslüm Gürses by counting his icon value in their

projects. As the result of the rating these projects, in which Gürses

was presented to the market in unusual line of him, people from the

middle and upper classes joined his fan base while some in his core

audience from the lower social class left him. Today, it can be said

that the former stereotypical argument which arabesk is a degenerate

kind of music comes to an end. The status that arabesk music holds

today might also reflect Turkish society’s perception of modernity.