The Little Sparrow affect: Sezen Aksu’s memorial time-space and anarcho-feminism in Turkish popular music

This article employs affect as a conceptual category to address the question of why Turkey’s pop music icon Sezen Aksu—also known as the Little Sparrow—resonates across a wide audience, including non- local or irrelevant listeners who do not understand the vernacular language. In music studies, affect can be theoretically contextualized and methodologically studied in myriad ways. In the case focused here, I argue that what I define as the Little Sparrow affect manifests itself through three interrelated dimensions: a bodily representation that distorts the time–space configurations of personal and societal memory; a paradoxical political stance blending anarcho-feminism with moralism; and a raspy vocal texture that penetrates the subconscious through paralinguistic timbres. Methodologically, this argument draws on Theodor Adorno’s notion of “negative dialectics” understood here as a heuristic mode of investigation primarily employed within critical theory and cultural studies-oriented approaches. To render such an analysis tangible, I first draw attention to Aksu’s timeless contradictory feminist public persona, intertwined with a bygone Mediterranean spatio-temporality—a theme that frequently reoccurs in her song lyrics, interviews, music videos, and overall album concepts, as will be demonstrated below. Secondly, by drawing attention to the anarcho-humanist themed existential inquiries that particularly stand out in her recent lyrics, I will demonstrate how the feminist representation again transcending both time and space generates affect. Lastly, I examine her vocal technique and characteristics as a physiologically changing bodily component, arguing that it penetrates the subconscious through the paralinguistic qualifiers authentically produced thanks to her raspy nature of voice.