Arabesque Rap

Arabesque rap is the Turkish hip-hop style built on arabesk, the melancholic popular music of Turkey's urban poor, whose strings, bağlama and modal melodies are folded into boom-bap and trap production. It was pioneered by *Sagopa Kajmer*, founder of the #Kuvvetmira# circle in Istanbul, whose pessimistic, philosophically dense writing over arabesk samples defined the style from "Sagopa Kajmer" (2002) and "Bir Pesimistin Gözyaşları" (2004) onward, alongside *Kolera* and a generation of followers. Its audience crosses generations, since the arabesk records it samples are the music of its listeners' parents.