One of her songs was sampled by the very famous American rapper Mos Def in his album The Ecstatic. In 2009, something unexpected happened to Selda Bağcan. This event elevated her career, gaining the singers’ attention from many musicians, producers, and listeners from all over the world. However, with the help of WOMAD Foundation, her passport was returned and she was able to attend the festival and start a European tour, which made her visible in the European music scene. After the 1980 Turkish coup d’état, she was persecuted and her passport was taken by military officials due to politically charged songs which prevented her from joining the WOMAD Foundation Festival, which stands for the world of music, arts, and dance, bringing together many forms of music, arts and dance from countries and cultures around the world, in 1986. Although the music style remained rooted in the folk tradition, Bağcan’s experimental attitude towards music led her to play around with Rock and Roll and synthetic and electronic sounds in her LPs.
During the politically polarized 1970s, in which many conflicts arose between far-left, far-right, Islamist militant groups and the state, many of her songs contained strong social criticism and solidarity with the minorities and working-class, making her especially popular among left-wing activists and sympathizers. With the fame she gained, she released twelve more singles and three-LP records and toured many cities in Western Europe and Turkey. She used protest poets’ poems from Turkey as her lyrics. She rose to national prominence thanks to the six singles she released that year in which she interpreted traditional Turkish folk songs in a strong, emotional voice accompanied by a simple acoustic guitar or bağlama, which is a stringed musical instrument in Turkey.
She started her career in 1970 during her university years with encouragement from a music producer friend. Her music is quite experimental, synthesizing a wide range of genres from Rock and Roll to Electronica. Selda Bağcan, known as the Queen of Psychedelic Folk Music, is a Turkish singer and songwriter who has written some of the country’s most memorable folk songs.