Holger Lund Part 2 - Music, migration and cultural revolution
This is Part 2 which was published on June 13th 2022 in The Prisma multicultural newspaper. The full article can be accessed here with all the images: https://theprisma.co.uk/2022/06/13/music-migration-and-cultural-revolution/
Turkish music producers brought crowd funding to Europe unnoticed, and combined with technological change it restored Turkish music to the immigrant community. It made possible what was not allowed in Turkey for religious and political dissidents.Turkish Hip-Hop broke through the cultural barrier to German society.
Making and listening to music was an important part of Turkish migrant life in Germany, as a means of connecting with their country and family. And through the innovative DIY spirit of the community and their refusal to be exploited, it not only changed the lives of the migrants but also kept alive musical traditions that were suppressed in Turkey. By the late 1980s their musical innovations, namely in Hip-Hop, broke out into German cultural life,which had previously excluded them. Music was also an important source of social solidarity and protest. An early scene in Kaya's film shows two men singing to each other on the platform of a railway station, and one popular Turkish singer tells the camera: "We aren't going to sing happy songs".
By the 1980s the Turkish music business was well-established and lucrative in Germany, where a wedding with 1,000 guests could net the musicians 10,000 OM, and performers clothes were stuffed with banknotes by people in the audience.
The story is one of repeated innovation, and as Professor Holger Lund tells us, it was Turkish Hip-Hop music in the 1990s that finally broke the boundaries between Turkish and German communities.
Other work by Holger and his wife Cornelia who is interested in African fashion can be found on their website: www.fluctuatingimages.de, for example:
and our interviews are cited here: fluctuating images — Turkish migrant life in Germany: Access denied & Music, migration and cultural revolution