Hip-hoppers in Istanbul, Turkey, spend much discursive energy talking and rapping about how the Turkish hip-hop movement is underground, putting a particularly local spin on their uses of a global cultural form. This spatial metaphor has thus become central to local constructions of hip-hop in Istanbul. This paper explores the different meanings the underground concept has for Turkish hip-hoppers through a combination of ethnographic research and readings of locally produced hip-hop texts. Through discourses on and around the underground metaphor, Turkish hip-hoppers use the globally circulating music genre of rap and the associated arts of hip-hop to construct a specifically local identity, re-emplacing rap and hip-hop within the landscape of Istanbul. The paper uses this case study to explore how people can use mediated music in constructing new imaginaries and identities and more specifically how people can use mediated music as a vehicle for the imagining of place.

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This article explores how a focus on the movement of people, especially between countries, might provide new perspectives on music scenes. After a brief case study of a rap song and summary of the origins of Turkish hip-hop, the article presents a series of vignettes from ethnographic fieldwork with Turkish hip-hoppers and their contacts in Istanbul and Stockholm, in which the theme of movement, and the enduring transnational connections it creates, are highlighted. The article then turns to a discussion of recent theorizing on music scenes, addressing the ways in which the local, translocal and virtual levels of the Turkish hip-hop scene complexly interact with each other. Finally, it suggests that Turkish hip-hop may be best understood as a transnational community of affect in which not only attachment to specific places, but also movement itself between them, are crucial to a sense of belonging for those who are able to participate in these movements.