The past decade has witnessed the consolidation of authoritarian forms of governance within formally democratic frameworks across multiple contexts. Within this reconfigured political landscape, regimes stage authority through spectacle and affective saturation, while oppositional actors craft sonic and aesthetic forms that render dissent collectively audible. This paper asks what becomes of such oppositional sonic forms when political transformation stalls yet their aesthetic force endures.

Taking Turkey as an analytic lens, I trace a repertoire of oppositional sonic practices that emerged with particular intensity during the 2013 Gezi protests. Although the protests dissipated and authoritarian consolidation deepened, this repertoire persisted as a recognizable aesthetic of dissent. It includes football-style chants sung at police lines (“Sık bakalım… biber gazı sık bakalım” / “Spray away… pepper spray away”); contrafacta such as the adaptation of the folk song Kızılcıklar Oldu Mu into “Çapulcular Oldu Mu” in response to Erdoğan’s labeling of protesters as çapulcu (looter); and viral music videos including Everyday I’m Çapuling, which riffed on the protest’s musical vernacular, and Tencere Tava Havası, which drew on the cacerolazo practice of banging pots and pans.

I argue that the continued circulation of these carnivalesque forms today—long after the protests dissipated and political horizons narrowed under intensifying authoritarianism—signals a condition of cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011) in which aesthetic attachment to change endures beyond its material feasibility. Framing Turkey not as a regional exception but as a paradigmatic site, this paper advances a musical account of political aesthetics under entrenched authoritarian consolidation.