Politics of lyrics in the UK and Türkiye: A comparison of early punk music in the United Kingdom and Türkiye

This article compares two early punk cases from the UK and Türkiye, drawing on lyric-based textual analyses of selected songs by the Sex Pistols and Çığrışım/Tünay Akdeniz, and analyzing six songs produced between 1975 and 1978. We conducted a comparative thematic analysis of six song lyrics to understand how cultural and political pressures shaped the bands’ music, as reflected in their lyrics. Results showed that the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the U.K., Satellite, and I Wanna Be Me present punk as a form of public antagonism and resistance to the UK’s national consensus, achieved through a mediated identity. In the case of Çığrışım and Tünay Akdeniz, in Salak, Dişi Denen Canlı, and Mesela Mesele, punk appears less as resistance to the nation’s established profile of identities and more as resistance to Turkish honor dynamics stemming from their families and immediate social environments. This paper demonstrates that punk’s resistant rhetoric is shaped by its cultural and political targets, underscoring the organic relationship between punk groups and the cultural and market conditions of their environments. In this sense, it can be concluded that in both cases the target of antagonism shifts to fit broader cultural and political conditions, while punk’s resistant nature remains regardless of geographic origin. Although the sample size of the current study is small, practical implications include examining cases beyond early recordings, such as media coverage, distribution, and potential profits, to understand the punk movement’s many faces across geographies.