Sezen Aksu: Git and a Legacy of Turkish Pop

Every Sunday, milk crate revisits an iconic piece of music history—artist, album, or otherwise—as a part of our weekly crate digging series.

Design by Diego Gonzalez

By Lauren Williams

I first heard Sezen Aksu in the back of my mom’s minivan. Her song, “Değer Mi,” would play each time someone turned on the CD player, a glittery, synth-heavy pop song with a repeated hook: “Değer mi hiç, Değer mi hiç, Değer mi hiç,” which asks “is it worth it, is it worth it, is it worth it?” As a child, I sang along as best I phonetically could, without knowing how to speak Turkish. I sounded something like “dare me,” an Americanized take on Aksu’s lyricism. It wasn’t until I revisited the album in my junior year of high school that I began to uncover the true meaning of Aksu’s lyrics and see her music as more than just an old song still stuck in my head a decade later. 

Sezen Aksu, I learned, was who many call the “Queen of Turkish Pop.” Born in Sarayköy, Denizli, Turkey, Sezen Aksu became a singer because she knew she had a gift. Her parents wanted her to be a doctor or engineer, but she refused. When they opposed her singing, she would secretly sing out on her balcony, watching crowds amass beneath her. Aksu rose to fame after her 1976 single “Olmaz Olsun” reached number one on Turkish music charts, her first self-written song at a time when women weren’t allowed to write and perform their own work. Aksu began to make her own music, long lyrical ballads and pop anthems about unrequited love, womanhood, child marriage, or even her own skepticism about religion. “Say hi to those ignorant/ Eve and Adam,” she sang in her song “Sahane bir şey yaşamak.” Aksu speaks about these issues with a bit of a veil, not usually referencing the topic outright, but making her opinion clear through evocative storytelling. On her 1986 album Git, she tells the story of a young girl named “Unzile,” a girl who “before she was eight/ she became an adult,” and who “is afraid, she doesn’t go/ To the last hedge of the village/ She believes that/ World ends in that border.” Aksu aimed to admonish the oppressive cultural practice of child marriage through the medium of storytelling in her music.  By her construction of the fictional Unzile and her story as a girl who grew up too soon and didn’t get to see the world, Aksu’s storytelling aims for the jugular by way of the heart. 

After “Değer mi,” the next Sezen Aksu song that I became unfathomably entranced by was the title track of Git. The song itself is dramatic and a little haunting — a chorus of strings and synths fading in and out of the track, setting the scene of two lovers meeting for what they think will be the last time. The lyrics capture the push and pull between trying to accept someone leaving you with a steely sense of detachment, but at the same time desperately wanting them to stay. On “Git,” which in English translates to “go” or “leave,” the pre-chorus is rid of instruments, save for Aksu singing the word “git” over and over with a wavering lilt before adding the suffix “-me,” thus transforming the word “leave” into “stay.” She plays with her vocals, stringing long phrases about loving and longing together in one single breath, ending on choked gasps. Aksu finds strength in her signature rasp and that dissonance between the imperfection of her voice and her ballad instrumentals, which are usually blends of traditional Turkish styles of music and Western pop. 

Aksu grew to be one of the most prolific Turkish pop singers, certainly of her generation, and, I would venture to say, of all time. In the ’80s, she laid a framework for the prosperity and global success of Turkish pop. Aksu’s style, a blend of Anatolian, Turkish, and Greek styles, shaped the sound of Turkish pop that became common in the ‘90s.  She created this sound with the consecutive run of albums such as Sen Aglama (1984), Git (1986), and Sezen Aksu Söylüyor (1989).  

In the lineup of albums, Git doesn’t stand out as an experimental jump like Aksu’s other albums. 

As she continued to musically mature, Aksu started to produce more, both for herself and others — including Aşkın Nur Yengi and Sertab Erener, Turkish pop singers who started off working as background vocalists for Aksu. As Aksu crafted their successes, she branched out along a more experimental path in her own music, releasing perhaps her most sonically impressive album, Isik Dogudan Yukselir / Ex Oriente Lux in 1995, which dove even deeper into influences of Turkish folk music and made them larger with complete orchestrations. Git, on the other hand, has the unmistakable crunchiness of an older pop album, especially of the Turkish and wider Mediterranean pop genre that emerged from the early ’90s to early 2000s. The instrumentals sound a bit off-kilter, maybe a little canned, but in a nostalgic way. The addition of artifice to traditional instruments like the oud creates a clash that’s made satisfying with Aksu’s signature vibrato and vocals that earned her the title “Little Sparrow.” The patterns Aksu made with her voice up and down Git remain imprinted in my memory, as familiar as the lines on my palms. On the album, Aksu created a mystical world far away from mine in the minivan. In this fantasy world, I imagined people danced all night to the addictive melody of “Deger Mi” and made tearful confessions against the backdrop of “Git”. 

To me, Aksu’s most impressive accolade is her existence as an icon in popular culture. No artist is just their music, and the same is true for Sezen Aksu. Her story, her lyrics, her unique vocal techniques, and her music all play a part in her role as Sezen Aksu, the “Queen of Turkish Pop.” Young pop poets everywhere can find an idol in Sezen Aksu and the world of pop she created.