 Pop Music's Young TurkBy David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
(Istanbul) The avuncular, bushy-browed founder of modern Turkey gazes from every coin and nearly every corner of this exotic and ancient city.
Kemal Ataturk -- literally "father of the Turks" -- is beloved here for booting colonialists out of the country and dragging the frayed remnants of the Ottoman Empire into the 20th century. On the streets of Istanbul, his image is about as hard to avoid as kebabs and strong coffee.
For decades, nobody in this country of 66 million laid claim to such a wide slice of the national psyche. But Ataturk now has some competition: a 29-year-old with day-old stubble who can tummy-flutter like a belly dancer. Turkey is gaga for Tarkan, the country's first international pop star.
This summer Tarkan released his fourth album, "Karma," and it seemed to pour from every car radio and restaurant in the nation, echoing through resort towns along the Mediterranean coast and out of dozens of Istanbul's zooming Fiat taxis. Tarkan's bright green eyes beamed from billboards selling everything from Pepsi to Nokia phones, and he had a lock on the covers of every one of the celebrity glossies. For an American analogy, think Elvis circa 1957, the last time an entire country was besotted with -- or, among tradition-bound parents, outraged by -- a single performer.
"He's got the whole market to himself," says Michael Lang, Tarkan's manager. "There is nobody else here."
Now there's talk of bringing Tarkan to the United States. Ahmet Ertegun, the Turkish-born impresario who was a founder of Atlantic Records and helped guide the careers of Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding and Led Zeppelin, among others, has for years been looking for a backable Turkish artist and will soon begin collaborating with Tarkan on an English-language album. A rough schedule slates the album for release next year, with a U.S. tour in early 2003.
"I saw him perform in Turkey and I thought he was one of the best live performers I've ever seen," Ertegun said in a recent phone interview. "He's a great dancer, he moves beautifully, and he has the magic that all big hit artists share, which is the ability to get an emotion across through a recording."
But the attacks of Sept. 11 may disrupt the plans of Tarkan as well as a few dozen other Muslim performers planning U.S. tours. No other realm of the music business has been as devastated by terrorism as that of Middle East pop, a niche genre that was starting to get some traction in the United States. Advocates were betting that it could do for countries like Egypt what "Buena Vista Social Club," a collection of Havana jazz artists, had done for Cuba.
The week of the attacks, a handful of Middle Eastern performers were getting ready to board planes for a long-scheduled and mostly sold-out 10-city tour of the States, including a stop in Washington. Among the performers: an Egyptian star named Hakim and an Iranian-born singer named Andy. Those shows were immediately canceled and it's unclear if they'll be rescheduled.
"These are bands that play great dance music, but do people want to dance at a concert now, especially an Arab concert?" said Miles Copeland, the veteran manager who helped organize the tour. "A lot of people were excited about this. It's incredibly disappointing."
For the time being, Tarkan will focus on Turkey and the rest of Europe, where his super-emotive dance-pop, sung in Turkish and infused with Middle Eastern drums and guitars, is huge. The 1997 single "Simarik" wound up atop the French charts, and more than a million copies of Tarkan's last album were shipped to Denmark. He's the largest-selling non-Russian pop star in Russia.
 That makes him the first cultural export from Turkey to find a mass audience, which is why many here regard him as more than just a singer. He's considered the country's best shot at shattering a strangely enduring stereotype: Turkey as a land of mustachioed brutes. That caricature was pasted on by Hollywood courtesy of 1977's "Midnight Express," the gripping but brazenly racist account of a young American's escape from a Turkish prison. The film, based on a true story, set back the tourist industry here by about a decade, and the search for a pop-culture force powerful enough to present the modern, human face of this country -- the one tourists have been raving about for years -- has been underway ever since.
Tarkan just might be that force. A few years ago the government even considered officially designating him the nation's "cultural ambassador," though there weren't enough pro-Tarkan votes in Parliament to pass the resolution. Tarkanmania has its limits, even here. The Turkish Elvis, it turns out, knows a thing or two about scandalizing the elderly.
"I'm in a little depressing mood today," Tarkan says in nearly a whisper. "I was just in my bedroom all day, watching movies."
It's early September, a week before the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, and Tarkan is sitting on a sofa set up on the mossy grounds of Rumeli Hisari, a 15th-century fortress poised on the banks of the Bosporus. In an hour, he'll play in the fortress's mid-size amphitheater. Tankers are floating downstream on a waterway that divides the European and Asian sides of Istanbul. The moon rises over the Asian mountains. This must be the most picturesque "backstage" on the planet.
Tarkan turns out to be surprisingly small, about 5 1/2 feet in sneakers, and his teeth are glowingly white, his eyes a contact-lens shade of green. He's one of those remarkably adorable people who seem to flirt just by looking in your eyes and speaking softly. In a few minutes, he'll go through his pre-show routine, which includes a 30-minute massage and some voice exercises.
For the moment, he's reclining on the sofa, sipping espresso and looking pooped. He spent the day in his apartment, in part because walking the streets is out of the question. On a recent visit to the capital city of Ankara, even normally staid bureaucrats mobbed him.
"It gets worse and worse. I love it, but I have no life," he sighs in lightly accented English, smiling wearily and running a hand through his hair. "People grab me and kiss me. I like that, but it can be overwhelming."
For a few weeks this summer, it was worse than overwhelming. In April, Turkish tabloids ran photos of Tarkan, stolen by a furniture mover, in the loving embrace of a man. Tarkan has firmly refused to comment, but the episode provoked gales of is-he-or-isn't-he speculation and an untidy debate in Turkey about the morality of homosexuality. One right-wing politician denounced him as an assault on the nation's morals, and there were predictions that Tarkan's career was over. Fans, however, were unmoved.
"You'll see from my audience tonight, they don't care," said Tarkan. "And I don't care what people think. This is my life. I know who I am. I stood up for my rights and my life. Instead of feeling guilty about anything, I felt mad. I feel better now."
It has all made for irresistible fodder for magazines. One, Hafta Sonu, ran a cover story on Tarkan with the headline "Is Tarkan a Satanist?" The story picked apart the cover of his latest album, with a helpful annotation for anyone looking for clues to the artist's links to the Devil.
"This is ridiculous," says Tarkan, when asked to translate some of the copy. "But maybe it sells magazines."
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