As one of the top graduate history programs in the world, UNC attracts a highly selective group of cutting-edge historians. Our graduate students are brilliant, creative, hard-working, and, unsurprisingly, eclectic. Yusuf Sezgin is a doctoral candidate conducting research for an ambitious history comparing liberationist formulations of Islam and Catholicism in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East in the 1960s and 1970s. Yusuf spends much of his time poring over the writings of Muslim and Catholic intellectuals, but I learned that he has another passion as well. I recently sat down with Yusuf to learn more about his love of rock.
First of all, thank you very much for accepting my interview offer. I do know you are very interested and dedicated to rock music, concerts, and festivals. So, I would like to start with this question: Where does your intense interest in rock music come from?
To be frank, I don’t really know. Like everyone else thrown into this world without knowing what’s waiting for us, I had no idea that music would become a very close friend of mine one day. Probably the first rock songs that I came to know were those of Cem Karaca and Barış Manço, who were considered the fathers of Turkish folk rock (namely Anatolian rock) emerging in the 1970s. They were still pretty popular in the early 1990s. My uncle was a fan of Cem Karaca and I can recall him singing Karaca songs to me when I had no idea about who it was. I realized much later that this was ironic because my uncle was a member of an anti-communist nationalist party and Karaca had been prosecuted for his “communist” lyrics, forced into exile, and even stripped of Turkish citizenship in the early 1980s. It struck me that anti-communists can listen to and enjoy songs by communists, or vice versa, as music is most of the time not about pure ideas but something that goes far beyond that and touches the depths of human soul. I don’t have an answer yet as to whether we can separate the art from the artist.
So how did your relationship with music continue, what was the course of this relationship?
I think it was in the early/mid 2000s when I got enthusiastic about rock music. I had a Walkman, had friends sharing CDs with each other, loved watching music video channels, and then as digital music became much more accessible and enjoyable with the internet, I started to create my first playlists on iTunes. I had already been familiar with some legendary bands such as the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Metallica, and Iron Maiden, but there were some other rock bands/singers from that period that I loved from the outset, such as Coldplay, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Oasis, Evanescence, Green Day, Bon Jovi, Nickelback, and Avril Lavigne. (No, I didn’t fall in love with her, unlike most of my friends). But, to be honest, I was more into mainstream pop. I was a big fan of Backstreet Boys; my favorite song was Blue’s “U Make Me Wanna,” and I very much enjoyed the “Latin explosion” because I had so much fun listening to Ricky Martin, JLO, Shakira and Enrique Iglesias. Looking back today, I can see more clearly that almost all of these names and music movements originated in North America/Britain. I also genuinely believe that music is universal, but as someone who was born and raised in Turkey, a country long struggling with an identity crisis due to being stuck between “the West” and “the Middle East,” it seems a bit strange to me that I cannot name a song from any of the neighboring countries from the same period, such as Greece, Armenia, Iran or Syria. It has for sure something to do with the history of modern Turkey, but I suspect that many people from non-Western countries could tell similar stories, so I think it is also about cultural and economic domination. But I of course can, and in fact should, name a few great Turkish rock bands that emerged in the late 1990s/early 2000s and had a huge impact on my generation, such as Mor ve Ötesi, Şebnem Ferah, and Duman.
Have you ever thought about teaching a course on music and world history?
Yes, I have been thinking about it lately. The idea of teaching a global history course on the twentieth century sounds super exciting. Music is probably strongly linked to any issue you might like to discuss in a global history course. So, I’ve been saving for a while now any article or book I come across that is somehow related to music and history, whether it be about protest music in Chile, the underground rock scene in Iran, Pan-Africanist Afrobeat, or the transatlantic impact of British post-punk. I really do hope that those would help me one day to design a fun and nice history course.
Who are you listening to lately? Has anything changed in your interests in music?
What I say will be deeply personal, as what and who we listen to is mostly shaped by our personal histories, taste of music and personal mood. I think I’m now more into alt/indie rock, classic hard rock, and progressive metal. I am a huge fan of Coldplay as I have been listening to them for almost twenty years now. Manchester Orchestra is one of my all-time favorite bands. Their lyricism, cinematic music, concept albums, and live performances are fantastic. There are many classic bands that I love, such as Guns N’ Roses, Queen, Metallica, Led Zeppelin, Bad Company, AC/DC, and Radiohead. There are some other bands, which are relatively younger but also great, such as The Strokes, Shinedown, The Black Keys, and The White Stripes. I would listen to any song Chris Cornell or Layne Staley sings. I sometimes lean more towards progressive/black metal of British/European bands such as Anathema, Leprous, and Opeth. I also follow with great admiration lots of young, rising rock bands such as Greta Van Fleet, Måneskin, The Struts, Cage the Elephant, Dirty Honey, Houndmouth, and Blacktop Mojo.
How can rock music relate to academia, or more precisely to humanities and social sciences?
I usually tend to intellectualize everything I am interested in, and this often becomes exhausting to the point where I can no longer enjoy those things. And I know this is not unique to me. So, what I do is to use my non-academic interests to explore and start new hobbies. I love music, so I started going to concerts. I started using my camera during shows and became more and more passionate about music photography. But I also occasionally read music history books. The last book I finished reading was Blowin’ Hot and Cool by John Gennari, a fantastic work of history about jazz criticism in the US. I’m not into jazz and know almost nothing about its history, but it is really fun to read something without the pressure to know more about and work on it. I’m also trying to bring music into the classroom. I’ve TA’ed for a “World History since 1945” course this semester, and every week before class started, I played a music video that was related to the discussion topic of the day. I played Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” (1963) the week we discussed the nuclear arms race, and showed a short clip of James Brown performing in a music festival in Zaire in 1974, the day we discussed Black Panthers and Black internationalism. And one day I just played a clip of Prince playing the final solo of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” just because it is so beautiful to watch. I have to give credit here to Dr. Max Owre, because he was the inspiration, and there is no doubt that he is much better at incorporating music into his class, and in very creative ways.
I mentioned earlier the difficulty of separating the art from the artist. This is definitely a topic students can relate to. I don’t really know how and what I should feel, if I should feel anything at all, about Michael Jackson, whose song “They Don’t Care About Us” was perhaps one of the first non-Turkish songs I ever listened to. I still love that song. Maybe when a work of art becomes publicly available, it no longer belongs to the artist, but to everyone who connects with it. So maybe we can simultaneously dislike the artist and admire their work. That’s why I sometimes discourage myself from googling an artist whose music I love. But I’m also aware that this issue is almost always about power hierarchies and structural abuse. That’s where it gets complicated, and why it is definitely worth thinking about and discussing.
-Burak Bulkan