Sultana makes a miracle of the lyrical proving female rappers can bust out rhymes just as good as their male counterparts. James Snow.

Ask almost anyone in Turkey if they’ve heard of Sultana and the inevitable response will be something along the lines of: “Oh yeah. The Kuşu Kalkmaz girl.” The Turkish translates literally as “The bird can’t fly”, but in slang means “can’t get it up”, and it is this song that Sultana has been unable to live down – no pun intended. RTUK (the country's Supreme Board of Radio and Television) banned the single, which appeared on her first album, Çerkez Kızı (Circassian Girl), for being too sexually explicit and Sultana immediately enjoyed a succès de scandale, which unfortunately distracted people from both her artistry, and the more serious socially conscious messages her songs were attempting to convey. Even now most of the Turkish media seems more intent on presenting this talented rap lyricist solely as a sex bomb, and looking for any hint of salacious content on her new album, Şöhret Yolu (‘Road to Fame’). There is no doubt that Sultana is an “extremely attractive hanımefendi”, but she’s also a “quick-witted poet and rapper and extraordinary singer” as the late Ahmet Ertegün, co-founder of Atlantic Records, put it, after the release of her first album on Doublemoon records in 2000.
At the time, it was a bold move to release a hip-hop album in Turkey, where hip-hop had hardly gained a foothold and was not yet the worldwide phenomenon it is today. Fellow rapper Ceza had more luck releasing music the same year on a German label. Almost a decade later, hip hop appeals to young people here as never before, and has conquered the world since its original incarnation just over 30 years ago in the Bronx. Recent performances showcasing both Sultana’s new and old music have done more than just move the crowds; they have also, to this writer anyway, played a role in saving old skool hip hop from total extinction. At Ghetto in March she collaborated with Berlin-born Turkish-German Aziza A. and Istanbul’s own Fresh B. as well as break-dancers, and dynamic DJs against a backdrop of projected graffiti and other urban imagery recalling the “lost arts” of hip hop. On her own she appears with a live drummer and an electric guitarist as well as the inevitable computers and is not afraid to ‘bring the noise’.
Back in the day groups like Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions, and De La Soul “preached (to) the bourgeois and rock(ed) the boulevard” and Afro-American, populist rap was even dubbed the “Black CNN”, but those days seem long gone. Turkish artists have adopted a bloated, almost moribund, musical form and infused a new kind of populism into it, despite immediate attempts at commodification by the local music and advertising industries. While speaking with TOIST, Sultana is candid about her disdain for the new crotch-grabbing wave of Turkish baggy-trousered B-Boys who merely copy the look and sport the attitude of post-50 Cent artists, without any message or knowledge of the genre’s rich history. On her second CD Sultana ‘edutains’ in old skool fashion, with tracks about consumer envy (Ben de istiom or ‘I want it too’), the so-called ‘war on terror’ (petroil), the organized chaos of Istanbul (Vahşi doğu or ‘Wild east’) and Turkish feminine whiles (Taklaya geldin). It ain’t just apolitical, empty bling and you don’t need to understand Turkish to enjoy the vintage beats, scratches and old skool samples, or her seemingly effortless lyrical flow and playful def rhymes. However, the real genius of Şöhret Yolu is how she has weaved her own country’s cultural legacy into the mix using samples and more traditional oriental sounds to create what she calls “hip hop alla Turka”.  Hip hop, far from dead, as Nas pronounced in 2006, has been injected with new life “by the cultures that continuously shape and reshape it…whatever you call it—favela funk, dancehall, Miami bass, hip-house, grime, kwaito, sleaze, freestyle, desi—it is polyglot street music, populist reinterpretations of American hip-hop informed by the culture of its geography, the technology of the time”* and beats, beats, beats! Şöhret Yolu is out now on Doublemoon Records. Though she delves more into Turkey’s cultural heritage on this CD, the album is informed by the years she has spent in New York and San Francisco and her work with artists as diverse as Jamaaladeen Tacuma and Delerium. This makes it a good musical primer for non-Turks curious about the exotic world of Oriental Hip hop. Just as melodic, but riding a different rhythmic wave, Sultana may be Turkey’s answer to M.I.A. Pick up a copy and hear it for yourself.

*From ‘The “Death” of Hip hop’ by David Drake writing in Stylus Magazine in 2005.