Years ago (no prizes for guessing how many years ago), when my friends and I were teenagers who literally lived on ‘She Loves You’ or ‘A Hard Day's Night’, I never thought that one day these songs would be more than my favourite music or that they would even inspire my attempts at academic research. Back in the 1960s, the very thought of studying rock music never crossed my mind – reflections on such a pleasant subject seemed too dry and dull. If I were a boy, I am sure I would have joined a group (apparently I was aware even then that rock was a boy's world. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why I never tried to touch the guitar) …

The relationship between ideology and popular culture has largely been discussed in the context of developed industrial societies, in which the ideologies that might be considered to have most bearing on society in general and popular culture in particular are capitalism and socialism in the context of specific nationalisms. On the Muslim peripheries of Europe, however, the situation may be different. The appearance of ‘Islamic’ motifs in Turkish popular music and the ambiguous but conspicuous attempts by a populist government in Turkey to control and co-opt this music over the last eight years suggests that Islam has also played a powerful role in shaping the experience of popular music in Turkey. The extent to which Islam constitutes an ideology distinct and separable from capitalism and socialism has been debated at length within and outside the Muslim world. It is clear that Islam has proved less of an obstacle to the development of capitalist economies than that of socialist economies (Rodinson 1977; Gellner 1981). It is also true that the collapse of world markets in the 1970s resulted in crises which reverberated throughout the Muslim world, in which a pristine and ‘traditional’ Islam has become a focus, in various ways, for resentment at the cultural and economic dependency of the Muslim upon the non-Muslim world. Islam projects itself now as a rival and ultimately superior alternative to the nationalist ideologies within which capitalist or socialist formations have been articulated. In Turkey, the dominant and competing discourses of nationalist Turkism on the one hand and Islam on the other have framed the terms in which Turkish social and political history has been seen in and outside Turkey. The popular music known as arabesk apparently defies both of these ideologies and provides a useful case-study of the way in which they operate ‘on the ground’, shaping the identities and strategies around which people organise their social existence.

I spent the summer of 1990 studying the work of disk jockeys involved in the ‘House’ club scene in London, Manchester and Belfast. What I was initially intrigued by was how a popular music genre could develop such a following, indeed, some notoriety, without the traditional trappings of ‘rock 'n' roll’ (‘star performers’, ‘groups’), and without a manifest ideological stance adopted in relation to mainstream lifestyles. I came to conclude that a shift of meanings had occurred in the activity of mass dancing to records during the late 1980s, a shift which has created a new and central role for disk jockeys.