purchase [ choose one ]
In the bi-weekly notice to the SMM team for this theme, I jokingly threatened to include something Turkish. A remark from Seuras about the paucity of posts this time around prompts to me follow through with the challenge - even if it is my second post of the day and it doesn't really make up for my slacking off for two weeks. But hey ... the more the merrier, and this one is kind of merry - in a kind of out-of-the-box way, as someone suggested might be appropriate here.
Not too many Turkish musicians make a dent in the international music scene. Baris Manco did (and I use the anglicized spelling without Turkish characters that would confound your screen - it would be phoneticized as barish mancho). You can Wikipedia him yourself, but the essentials are that (a) he's sadly no longer with us ('43-'99), (b) was a prolific composer primarily of a genre known as Anatolian rock and (c) his songs have been translated into more languages than you can shake a stick at. Oh, yes, and since I have been here most of my life, I have been listening to his music since I started listening to rock (and there aren't many Turkish musicians that I relate to that well.)
There's a folky style to his "rock" that you may not fancy. I assure you that millions of Turks do - to this day. It helps if you have references that help you relate, and that, his songs do. This one in particular incorporates the sing-song (if not pitter-patter) of vendors who ply the streets of Turkey's cities even to this day. Singing the names of their wares as they cruise the neighborhoods slowly in their pickup trucks loaded with fruit and vegetables brought to the street in front of your house, in this case: "tomatoes, peppers, eggplants".The Turkish for eggplant/aubergine being PATlican (the Turkish letter c is pronounced like the J in John).
