Anatolian pop and cultural modernization in Turkey in the case of Mogollar band

Turkey was able to start an organized process of ?modernization? in the nineteen-twenties, after the declaration of the republic. There were two main goals of this process: ?Westernization? in order to catch the age, and ?Turkification? in order to create a national identity. Reforms that would directly affect social life, such as banning sectarian dress, changing the educational system and the alphabeth were undertaken. In a somewhat jacobin manner, the people were called upon to abandon their traditional lifestyle and adopt a modern one instead. To establish nationalism which is a pre-requisite for modernization, the Anatolian landscape which had been home to many cultures throughout history was ?Turkified?. The existence of groups that did not consider themselves Turkish were not recognized. And Anatolia which had a complex cultural background was portrayed and taught in schools to be a land inhabited by a single nation of people with singular roots.In the sixties interest Westerners became more interested in Eastern culture and music than they ever did before. The folk music of countries other than Britain and the U.S. mingled into the mainstream of pop music and found their place in the realm of popular music.In Turkey, the group ?Mogollar? who set out with a similar goal, decided to use local material and utilized the folk music of Anatolia, to which they were taught that they belong. As a result they pioneered an hybrid music genre that is called ?Anatolian Pop?.While Anatolian Pop declined in popularity in the eighties, it was popularized once again in the nineties by other musicians, taking on new meaning with the assimilation of the rural population which moved to big cities. The same decade witnessed the comeback of groups from the seventies, such as Mogollar. Mogollar, in the nineties, produced with a different approach than the one they had in the seventies.This paper will explore the effect of Turkey?s modernization process on the emergence of ?Anatolian Pop? as well as comparing the two eras of Anatolian Pop in historical perspective.