Melancholic militancy: arabesk sampling, cultural hybridity, and sonic resistance in contemporary Turkish rap

This article examines how the contemporary fusion of Arabesk and Turkish rap functions as a mode of sonic resistance under conditions of neoliberal authoritarianism. Drawing on a corpus of forty commercially released tracks (2005–2024), six copyright lawsuits, and six months of digital ethnography within Telegram and Discord producer communities, I combine close listening, waveform analysis, and legal document review. I argue that Arabesk samples – fragments saturated with hüzün (melancholy) and kader (fate) – are strategically looped, pitch-bent, and time-stretched to produce what I term melancholic militancy: an affective stance that transforms inherited sorrow into rhythmic dissent. This hybrid aesthetic operates along three interwoven axes. First, it reactivates working-class memory by threading microtonal makam motifs through trap grids. Second, it renders artists vulnerable to selective copyright enforcement, exemplified by Poll Production v. Ben Fero (2019) and subsequent cases in which viral success retroactively triggers monetization. Third, it exploits algorithmic loopholes – micro-sampling, pitch-shifting – to circumvent platform gatekeeping while expanding Arabesk’s digital reach. By mapping the legal, technical, and emotional circuits that bind Arabesk to rap, the article positions Turkish hip hop not as derivative, but as a site where global forms are provincialized and redeployed in local struggles over memory, power, and voice.