“We Didn’t Forget to Take Our Shoes Off at the Door Just Because We Were Punks”: The Early Years of Punk in Turkey

Abstract

The proposed contribution focuses on an analysis of the debut of punk in Turkey within a framing that highlights its contexts and peculiarities. Considering punk not only as a musical genre but also as an underground culture with wider socio-political trends and implications, this study aims to assess, more broadly, the characteristics of this phenomenon during the years of its initial stages in the Turkish scene. Punk in Turkey started to appear at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, at first involving young people who had grown up and been socialized in political terms during a decade characterized by the extreme social consequences of the 12th September coup d’état. As a more general phenomenon, through the study of punk in this local form, it is possible to reconsider the strategies and needs of expression of antagonism and social malaise of a specific generation which, as in the case of Turkey, has usually been referred to as uninterested in socio-political dynamics. Although the local punk scene has attracted only limited attention to date, this case study offers a new perspective to rethink deeply the research approaches which consider generational phenomena as a homogeneous perspective, as well as the boundaries that shape and confine the expression of dissent.