March 22-26, 2025

Music meets mass protest in the streets of Istanbul.

Featuring the music of Meat The Beatles, Tolga Akyıldız, Direc-T, Smokey Signal, and Batu Mutlugil at Agac Ev.

President Erdogan jails his main political rival Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul. The city erupts. I hit the club.

Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix

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Hump Nights

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Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix 〰️ Hump Nights 〰️

Hump Nights

Apr 19

A rock n roll fourstack at Jamaica Plain’s favorite dive.

Apr 26

Slo-Anne returns! or debuts! at Jamaica Plain’s favorite dive.

May 20

A tribute to David Lynch.

May 24

Neighborhood Shit | The Promised End | Fracture Type | Knock Over City at Midway Cafe.

May 31

Maine backwards at Jamaica Plain’s favorite dive. Don’t miss this!

Hump Nights

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Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix

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Hump Nights 〰️ Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix 〰️

Musical Excursion and More

Five nights in Istanbul, five nights catching music at the Agac Ev (roughly translates to ‘tree house’) club in the Kadikoy neighborhood on the eastern bank of the Bosphorus Strait. That was the plan, and that agenda, along with trotting about the tourist attractions during the day, is a full plate all by itself.

But the full plate got fuller when the president of Turkey, Erdogan, arrested, and then jailed, the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, the day before my plane landed.

*Demonstrators hold a vigil outside the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality*

The mayor is widely-viewed as the most credible opposition candidate to potentially face Erdogan in the upcoming presidential election. In fact, Imamoglu’s party nominated him as their candidate for the election even as he sat in jail awaiting whatever fate his political rival might dream up.

Erdogan. A real sweetheart with an iron grip on the lever’s of political power in Turkey for the last twenty years. As the authoritarian tyrant at the top of the heap, Erdogan will enjoy a keen homefield advantage against any opposition candidate. But apparently it’s not enough of an advantage, because he felt the need to strike out at Imamoglu in at least three ways.

First, a charge of corruption.

Second, an accusation that the mayor was aiding terrorists.

Third – and this is a real laugher – the president pressured Imamoglu’s alma mater to invalidate his diploma. A university diploma is a requirement for running for president, so…

The people of Istanbul, and the people across Turkey, recognized the power grab for what it was. And they responded with mass protests, the likes of which haven’t been seen for at least a decade. If it was Erdogan’s intention to disappear the mayor’s campaign, it hasn’t worked yet. The mayor’s party, CHP, is currently polling ahead of the president’s party, AKP.

What’s a city roiled by mass protests like? With riot cops patrolling the streets, nearly two thousand jailed or detained within a week, the acrid smell of tear gas wafting in the breeze?

Surprisingly, it feels like business as usual. The tourist sections are still soft little puppies that foreign visitors can scratch behind the ears as they please. And the mass demonstrations in other parts of town crop up at night and vanish by morning. Istanbul is a city of sixteen million, and it’s seen countless tyrants come and go in the thousands of years of history. The locals still figure out how to keep the coffee brewing, the trams running, and the live music playing.

Agac Ev was my nighttime home away from home, and throughout the entire visit (3/22-26), the bands never missed a beat. I only noticed a single hiccup in the schedule: a band seemed to delay their start time to give a wide, respectful berth to a demonstration that was taking place right outside the window.

Meat The Beetles

Meat The Beetles is a happy-go-lucky five-piece that favored the early hits by the Lads from Liverpool. The teeny-bopper pop classics. You know, before the English band switched from pep pills to grass. The latest song I heard might have been “Hey Jude.”

The club was packed. A good Saturday night crowd, and it looked like Meat The Beetles had good draw. During the long chorus of “Hey Jude,” a bevy of handheld signs with “Na” written on them materialized in the audience from nowhere. And you can guess when they held up those signs high: “Na na na…”

The band put in two sets, with an extended smoke break in between.

At the break the contents of the club spilled out onto the street like an upturned ashtray. The weather was optimal for cafe culture. Clear night skies, a cool spring breeze wound its way through the streets and side streets, but you never felt cold or underdressed. Great for hanging.

After about two-and-a-half cigarettes, the crowd reconstituted itself inside the club for the second helping. No encore. Maybe Istanbul isn’t “encore culture.” Or maybe Meat The Beetles was just keeping respectfully on the clock in view of the tight three-band bill.

WATCH MEAT THE BEETLES ↓

Tolga Akyıldız

Tolga Akyıldız was scheduled for the late slot of a Sunday night bill. Like most cities and towns, the nightlife picks up on Friday, Saturday, and starts to dwindle by the end of the weekend. But if you’re headed out to the club on a Sunday night - either because you don’t have work in the morning, or you just don’t give a fuck - then you’re fully committed to what the evening will bring.

The Sunday crowd at Agac Ev was smaller than the rest of the weekend, but there was about the same amount of electricity in the air. Maybe more. There were a few heads in the pit that looked like they hadn’t stopped partying since 5PM Friday.

Tolga Akyıldız was one of those acts that used cover songs to showcase their musical range, aiming at expression rather than imitation. There were a lot of covers played on the stage of Agac Ev, though I wouldn’t tag any of the bands I saw there as “pure” cover bands, except for Meat The Beetles. I mean “pure” in the sense that recreating the experience of listening to the original is an important metric for success. These types of bands don’t stray too far from the original arrangements, if they can help it.

Conversely, an “impure” cover band, if it’s even worth using the term, would be a band that takes some liberties. These types of bands go after the spirit, rather than substance, of the musical script – and they don’t hesitate to rephrase the original in their own vernacular. Tolga Akyıldız played a little U2, the Police, and a cover of Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine.” Pop/rock with swagger and swoon.

WATCH Tolga Akyıldız ↓

Direc-T

The original mission of the trip to Istanbul was to write up a survey of the live music scene. Capture a piquant snapshot of life at the venues where you can have a good night out with cheap covers, plentiful beers, and loud PAs. I didn’t need to hit every club, but for the sake of a credible survey, I needed enough to colorfully render the length, breadth, and width of the scene.

I’d undertaken similar missions in big cities all around the world – London, Paris, Berlin, and, more recently, San Francisco and New Orleans. In many cases I not only located a good number of clubs, I also made inroads with bands and management, getting listed for shows or grabbing an interview here and there. I was prepared for roughly the same portfolio of success and failure in Istanbul.

Monday night was the first night that I considered the possibility that I might not have much success finding live music outside of the ever reliable Agac Ev. At least two factors were obviously working against me.

First, the meaty middle of my trip landed on the Monday through Wednesday stretch, which is never an ideal stretch for nightlife. Some of the most promising destinations on my little Google “club map” simply didn’t have shows scheduled.

Second, the city was in the middle of a wave of intense political repression. While the mayor of Istanbul sat in jail, the people demonstrated. A chunk of the population that might have been playing or promoting live music was otherwise occupied at the protests. And whatever shows were still happening, were more difficult to advertise during a period in which the authoritarian president of the country was shutting down sectors of the country’s internet, including popular social media platforms, to stifle organization among his political rivals, real and perceived.

Agac Ev was always online and on point though. The weekly calendar was always pinned to the top of their Instagram. It provided the trail of breadcrumbs that I needed as a non-Turkish speaker.

On tap Monday night was a four-piece called Direc-T. It was billed as a Nirvana cover band in various spots online. But the band that showed up arrived with a more diverse body of work, albeit focused on the alt 90s. They warmed up with hits by Stone Temple Pilots, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Pearl Jam before starting a Nirvana “rock block.” Threw in a little Queen for good measure too.

Somewhere around the middle of Direc-T’s set, working my way through a 50cL bottle of Carlsberg, I resolved to double down on Agac Ev for the rest of the trip. That would make it impossible to produce any kind of credible survey of the music scene as such. But time was running out, and I decided there was value to depth as well as breadth.

At Agac Ev there was music every night. I knew where to find and how to read the calendar. I knew how to pay the cover at the door. I knew how to order a beer.

I knew a lot of things. Why not just keep putting that knowledge to work?

WATCH DIREC-T ↓

Smokey Signal

There’s a deep agnosticism at play in these Turkish cover bands’ warm regard for Anglo-American pop music. An affection unsullied by tribal loyalties to this or that genre.

You could read it on the walls of Agac Ev, festooned with hazy likenesses of music celebrities. Worthy individuals, to be sure, but seeming pulled out of the Encyclopedia of Popular Music (if such a thing – of course it does!) at random. Ray Charles, Koko Taylor, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and the Blues Brothers too for some reason. Artists loved by everyone and no one. This was a temple dedicated to “Rock and Roll,” broadly construed, and while each cover band might have their favorite god or goddess in the pantheon, they respected and revered the divinity of all.

Thus, it was no surprise that Wednesday night showcased a genre like hair metal with a band like Smokey Signal, holding down the late slot at Agac Ev.

Let your mind drift back to the heady days of the 80s when heavy metal borrowed style cues from glam rock to produce a hybrid variant of rock that featured pretty boys slugging out lambent, blues-based guitar riffery in time with the thrash and bob of enormous lion manes full of Aquanet. The ballads were big, the babes were busty.

In general, an embarrassing time for music. In an age when infinite cloud storage redeems and revives almost every bygone art form, hair metal has largely remained on the shelf in America. Upward critical reappraisals of individual hair metal bands tend to take the form of genealogical disputations that try to sever the link between the band in question and the worst excesses of the subgenre.

On the other hand, no apologies are required in Turkey. The lead singer of Smokey Signal wore a Western hat, cowboy boots, and several layers of leopard-print clothing. He was ready to rock, along with a five-stringed bassist, a lead guitar god, and a dynamo behind the drum kit. The hair could have been bigger, all around, but the attitude was undeniable.

Will there come a time that America welcomes hair metal back into the fold? The subgenre is caught up in an oppositional narrative with Grunge, according to a certain critical commonplace. So the story goes, the underground energy of Grunge beat back the tide of corporate excess represented by Hair Metal. It’s a bunk narrative. All the grunge kiddos listened to hair metal growing up. But as long as we find the account plausible enough, hair metal only has two paths to redemption: either beat back grunge to reclaim its throne, or rejigger the narrative altogether so grunge and hair metal are no longer in opposition.

More likely, though, both genres fall into a sufficient level of obscurity that they become brothers-in-arms at the House of Irrelevance as chemically-enhanced Chihuahuas mewling into echo chambers – or whatever may be the popular music of the present and future – crowds them both out.

WATCH SMOKEY SIGNAL ↓

Batu Mutlugil

If there’s a more universal music language than rock, it’s blues. Batu Mutlugil’s “Messin’ With The Blues” blues review was a perfect finish to my run of five nights at Agac Ev. And it’s a set that I almost thought wasn’t going to happen.

Prior to the show a large group of Imamoglu supporters were gathering outside the club. A huge three-story banner of the mayor was suspended above the street between the buildings. Men and women of all ages held placards, illuminated candles, and noisemakers. When a camera crew materialized to interview what looked to be official-type talking heads, I knew this was more than a casual demonstration. It appeared to be a rally organized by the mayor’s opposition party, CHP.

A block away – I knew this because I had mistakenly stumbled through the entire lot of them while searching for a bar I half-remembered that offered good WIFI – five buses worth of riot cops were suiting up and shooting the breeze while they waited.

Waited for what? I wasn’t sure if there was going to be a violent confrontation between the demonstrators and the police or not. But the situation was par for the course in Erdogan’s repressive regime: deploying disproportionate police force to put a chill into any person, people, or place that might accumulate some anti-authoritarian momentum.

At Agac Ev the blues band warmed up while the rally picked up steam on the street. Not speaking the language, I couldn’t say what the precise reaction was inside the club to the rally outside. Looking at the clock, though, I noted that the band delayed their starting time to accommodate the conclusion of the rally, which eventually transitioned into a steady march around the neighborhood of Kadikoy. Or at least that’s how I interpreted the timing.

WATCH BATU MUTLUGIL ↓

Five nights and still I can’t do justice to Agac Ev or to the bands that I saw on its stage. My usual critical apparatus is partly disarmed by the overwhelming experience that it is to visit a city of sixteen million people on the other side of the world for the first time. I was ripped out of the familiar contexts in which I usually weigh, sort, and measure out opinions about art, and I was cropped into a city of wonders. A city of a little bit of beautiful chaos too. It’s enough, I think, to draw up some observations and soft pedal the conclusions.

I’d like to return to Istanbul some day.