Tarkan's 'Karma' Turns 20
A retrospective of the megastar's stunning fourth record
It takes fifty-two seconds for us to hear Tarkan’s vocals in his fourth album Karma, turning twenty years old today. Instead, an underwater percussion opens the record, a twelve-string guitar cutting through after that. It’s as though we’re transported into a desert. For so many years, my face hasn’t smiled, his vocals, here airy, begin. The sun doesn’t rise here, I’m always autumn. Soon, the centerpiece of the whole record is summarized in an entire lyric: I couldn’t do it without love. A plea to the listener, or to the person he addresses: the emotion that guides through this song makes one of Tarkan’s most stunning performances ever. The opener in question is called Ask, or love. Love has always guided Tarkan: sexual desire, romantic love, confident declarations of both. Previous songs all shade Tarkan’s desire and love as something all-encompassing, as devouring as a fire that he is in control of. Yet something’s different here with Aşk. No grand declarations, no sensual vocal performance, no hissing. It’s a clear-eyed Tarkan that we hear and see in Karma. And yet, the ebru (a technique of paper marbling) on the cover suggests something more is going on.
A mirror image of this sound and view is a Tarkan that stood in front of journalists prior to this album’s release, hands in his pockets and sporting a new style, that said: “I’m responsible of my own life, and the only one holds me accountable is [God]” when pictures got leaked to the media of him sharing an intimate moment with a male friend, both naked. And before that, in a move that Tarkan would later allude to as “people pulling [him] down,” the Turkish government asked Tarkan, back then promoting for Şımarık (better known elsewhere as Kiss Kiss) worldwide, to return to Turkey in order to serve for the military. Though initially uninterested in serving, at the turn of the millennium and under the force of having taken his citizenship away, Tarkan served twenty-eight days in Malatya (with his “rival” Mustafa Sandal) and learned of buddhism, as well as the concept of karma and zen. “It’s helped me find myself,” he said to Milliyet at the time.
This is something that was totally lost on me at the time. I was too young to even get the nuances of the record, itself a pirated, burned copy from someone else. All I did was loop the album over and over again in our silver CD player, convinced I had done something wrong because Ay suddenly had a child laughing like the playground outside my home. But the pain and love pervading the record I still heard. And there’s still nothing like Kuzu Kuzu, the first single of this record, in Tarkan’s discography. Abandoning the gel of the 90s in favor of longer, wavy hair, Kuzu Kuzu was leaps and bounds ahead of the quick, snappy hits of Hepsi Senin Mi (aka Şıkıdım) and Şımarık, “something with a message,” as he told Şafak Ongan for Frekans. It’s a pop song alright, but takes time to build up, opening with strings that sound like a cat’s wagging tail before Tarkan opens with: Bak. And look, you do: in the video, Tarkan walks in a desert-like setting, kicking up sand and stones, only to halt and dance lusciously with bells. The song recalls a hodgepodge of inspirations from all over the world: Spanish guitars, Turkish strings, percussions from American pop music. Unlike Hepsi Senin Mi, where Tarkan sounds defiant and angry, or Şımarık, where Tarkan playfully sends kisses to the lover, in Kuzu Kuzu Tarkan pleads. Listen to the way he goes in on the sh in işte kuzu kuzu geldim (here I come, meek as a sheep), later doubling down on the “is” as in “isssster at, ister öp beni” (Throw me away, or kiss me if you like). This is the same Tarkan that relished in the fire that took him over in Ölürüm Sana, detailing a world where physical pain and killing pride are both okay so as long as he may get his lover back. He’s still sexual, though no longer as aggressive about it as in Kır Zincirlerini. Both here and in second single Hüp (coupled with a video banned due to viewership complaints, only for the song to get selected the official advertisement song for Turkey not much later), we get the sense that this is a Tarkan has been in love before, and he will chase what he’s lost no matter what.
Entirely produced by Tarkan and frequent collaborator Ozan Çolakoğlu across 4 different studios on 3 continents, Karma suggests that the effort put into this love trumps everything else, no matter the end result. Ay (My!) details Tarkan writing his lover’s name on the stars, piercing mountains and crossing seas and deserts, but simultaneously it leaves him helpless and wilted, leading him to lament his wasted years on the flamenco bridge. Gitti Gideli (Since She’s Gone) has him unsuccessfully try to forget his lover but in the end, he cries out, “didn’t come back and forgot me.” Her Nerdeysen (Wherever You Are) details the postcards he’s sent, never responded, at peace with having his heart broken and waiting forever to hear back from her. He’ll become a stone (Taş) in his lover’s path if it saves him from being hurt in the Nazan Öncel-penned hit. And on Yandım (I Burned), penned by MFÖ’s Mazhar Alanson, Tarkan sings in an airy vocal: “My drunk state still hasn’t passed / This love is still in me.” The conquest to the lover seems the most true on Hüp (Slurp), where Tarkan mentions the heart’s castle belonging to the lover’s, and “if there’s a way between two hearts / that’s no doubt love”. On techno offering Uzak (Away), he wants to be kept away from people that “tell their good deeds out loud”, “freeze in their doubt” and are “friendly with their enemy”. Yet Tarkan suggests he’s thought about giving up: on Sen Başkasın (You’re Different) he laments how many autumns he’s lived, how often he’s been left behind by his lover, yet how he can’t keep away because they’re different. In closer Verme (Don’t Give) he’s all the more convinced that the rational people that “sadden love” don’t have it any easier than he does. By this point, though, he chooses to walk away from this seemingly doomed love: “If you want to come back, do it now / I won’t wait”, he sings, and, broken and weary: “Don’t give me any advice.”
Tarkan is an immensely emotive vocalist. This makes sense based on his music education and love for Turkish classical music, where clear enunciation and vocal style makes or breaks a performance. It informs much of Tarkan’s approach to music. A benefit to this is that even if you can't speak the language, you can hear the general gist of the lyrics just based on his performance, with Ask perhaps one of the clearest examples of this. The magic of Gitti Gideli’s guitar balladry is how hurt Tarkan sounds. Sexy on Hüp and Kuzu Kuzu, exhausted on Verme, utterly exasperated on Sen Başkasın. Though the liner notes read background vocals of artists such as Özkan Uğur (The Ö of MFÖ), Deniz Seki, and Özlem Tekin, all of which fantastic vocalists in their own right, Tarkan’s vocals come through clearest, his presence the most magnetic.
Karma also means mix in Turkish. In this manner, the entire point of Tarkan’s fourth album is the flux. The mix of Turkish music - itself an immense hodgepodge that has influenced and been influenced by all its neighboring cultures - and the world’s sounds at large come together on a musical aspect as well: a single düdük in electronic offering Verme here, a strings orchestra at the chorus for guitar-led Gitti Gideli there, bossa nova in Her Nerdeysen, a melody that invokes flamenco for Kuzu Kuzu’s bridge, bağlama setting the tone for Yandim, but also a darbouka and quick strings for uptempo songs Hüp and Tas. Meanwhile, Aşk and Uzak both recall the work of Madonna on Ray of Light. But where Ray of Light is the white woman shaping Middle Eastern sounds to her American pop, Karma is the Turkish man shaping everything else into his Middle Eastern/Mediterranean rhythm. Even in lyricism, the two are concerned with wildly different things. Ray of Light details pure, unconditional love that Madonna had missed so far in her life, re-centered and finding peace and solitude with her newfound role as mother. On Karma, Tarkan sees the entire world through broken rose-tinted glasses. They meet on the openers: “Some things cannot be bought,” Madonna reminisces, while Tarkan says: “I understood that material goods are false.” Love will save them both, they decide, only to reveal at the end what they really look for is a sense of peace. “I ran and I ran / I’m still running,” Madonna admits on Mer Girl, a track in which Madonna runs in her hometown only to stop at her mother’s grave. In contrast, Tarkan neither runs nor hides, but whatever pain he goes through has left him bruised nonetheless.
A few years prior to this album, in the midst of trying to bring compilation album Tarkan and Şımarık to a worldwide audience, Tarkan - by this point already nicknamed megastar and the most popular male singer in Turkey - and Ahmet Ertegün, founder of Atlantic Records, had planned, then broken off conversations around a possible American debut. Both cited creative disagreements as the cause. Ertegün had asked Tarkan to stick to sounds more familiar to the American audience: hip hop and rnb. “I wanted to protect the Turkish spirit and the Mediterranean warmth,” Tarkan had said later in an interview, “and combine it with sounds the West is already familiar with, but as a different style.”
On Karma, his vision came to full fruition. It is a record in which a healthy synthesis of different musical styles all over the world could exist without veering off into cultural appropriation territory. It’s a very deeply Turkish record, yet it opens itself up to foreign listeners, so ahead everything that came out at the time, so clear-eyed in what it wants to be and present itself as. Due to issues with Polygram — now Universal — the release of this record got delayed in Europe, stalling the progress Tarkan had made before. Still, this marks Tarkan’s strongest artistic statement at the peak of his popularity and powers. He would never go back to long hair again, no longer dance flamboyantly in the desert, instead going for a suit and close-cropped hair, displays of stereotypical masculinity. And though Tarkan will never see a bad album sales day ever again, it’s factually impossible to recreate what Karma holds in his discography. The album has become part of the fabric of the elusive 00s Turkey, the one that won Eurovision and got third on the World Cup and didn’t invade Iraq due to protests. A Turkey that thought it could seriously join the European Union, open to the world at large, where I’d hear how much my classmates and other adults enjoyed popular tourist spot Antalya. An open, democratic Turkey — like Tarkan’s voice vocalizing with the electronic percussion at the end of Verme, it sways into the mist of oblivion, more and more obscure by the day, a gold standard that we do not see ourselves in any longer. In his interview in the show Frekans for CNN Türk, nineteen years ago, Tarkan is asked about what politicians should focus on instead of having an opinion of him. “The economic crisis,” Tarkan answers. He might as well be talking about today.