This week is going to be a bit different.
It’s going to be a Turkish song, and it’s also going to be a bit of a rant.
You see, Sakin (Calm) was a good pop-rock band. They were forerunners of a certain musical movement in Turkey, with melodic indie tunes and somewhat psychedelic lyrics that can be interpreted in multiple ways.
It wasn’t just weird nonsense though. This song, Denek Hayatım (My Experimental Life) is a protest song, inspired and heavily influenced by a fatal train accident, describing how it feels like to live within a society with no consequences to wrongful actions.
They started out as a MySpace band—they had free, low quality songs floating all over the internet, kept as a well-known secret. Their first-and-only album “Hayat” (Life) was very well received, enjoyed by both longtime fans and new listeners alike.
While they were certainly on the more successful side, getting more airtime than other bands, and getting coveted gigs like opening for the first-ever Travis show in Turkey, indie rock music was still not as lucrative as other genres in the country.
One minute they were playing gigs and sharing demos for a possible new album, and the next they had disbanded.
Fast forward a couple of years: Frontman Onur Özdemir rebrands himself as Onurr, a mainstream pop singer/songwriter who creates repetitive, formulaic, generic, and quite boring songs. Gone are the beautiful guitar solos, the rebellious songs criticizing systemic racism and the dark history of the country, and the ambiguously romantic lyrics.
That’s where the money was, and I assume still is, when it comes to music-production in Turkey. I certainly couldn’t fault him for “selling out”, but I was disappointed about the direction he had taken.
Sakin went as it came. As they were working on their second album, there were an albums worth of songs, that eventually leaked online. They were demos, and very low quality—very reminiscent of the MySpace era that earned them their record deal in the first place.
Recently, Onur released those same demos, with minor adjustments and of course in higher bitrates. He called the album “Hayata” (To Life), a play on the name of the first album. The album cover is him, wearing a very distinctive hat that’s been a part of his style for all of Sakin’s photoshoots.
I think it’s a nice apology to his fanbase, which he confesses that if he had known was this big when they decided to disband, they might have decided otherwise.