ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the development of Kurdish music production and circulation in Turkey, and on how the musical scene shaped and was shaped by the Kurdish Left. The group Kardes Turkuler, founded within the folklore club of Istanbul's Bogazici University, became well known when they composed the soundtrack for a box-office hit film, Vizontele. The chapter also focuses on music worked in different ways to construct a political community, and, vice versa, the political community put its mark on musical performance in multifarious ways. It traces the entanglement of Kurdish music and Kurdish politics from the more explicitly movement-affiliated scenes of the 1970s, 1980s 119and 1990s, to the more diverse and dispersed 2000s. Two main themes that constitutes the ideological precedence for the Kurdish left-wing movement: First, the (self-)recognition of Kurds as a separate people, in need of a separate nation; second, the resistance against the exploitation of the common people by the ruling class of aghas and sheikhs.
