Analysing the Master Analyst: Ben Fero

When you think of 2019, what comes to your mind? The emergence of TikTok, great Marvel movies, Games of Thrones and if you’re really annoying, maybe Fortnite? Well, what comes to my mind is a certain bald-headed individual, rapping about having a good time with friends, fitness, daily life and most importantly street culture.

The Turkish rap scene greatly peaked in 2019 with names like Ezhel, Norm Ender, Ceza and most importantly Ben Fero. When Orman Kanunları dropped, it immediately climbed the charts, occupied them and became Spotify’s #1 Most Streamed Album, Fero was #2 Most Streamed Artist and his hit song “Biladerim İçin” was #3 Most Streamed Song at the end of the year according to this source.

When he first emerged rap purists and critics deemed his music, to put it simply, “ass”. To them it was repetitive, lyrically shallow and sounded like nursery rhymes over heavy 808’s. Looking back from today’s rap scene though, it is absolutely undeniable: Ben Fero was a strategic genius. Stay with me now… I spent way too long reading his interviews for you to be leaving. 

Before the Beats 

Before Ben Fero he was Ferhat Yılmaz, born on February 25 1991 in Bonn, Germany. He returned to Izmir, Turkiye with his family when he was only 3. At the age of 8, he was introduced to rap by listening to Tupac Shakur. Fero says he became familiar with hip-hop culture by watching, listening and studying it for nearly 15 years. He studied at Sabancı University in Istanbul between 2009 and 2015, graduated with a Business Administration degree and worked as a sales manager at a private company. It was during this time that he dropped his first single, “Mahallemiz Esmer”. He followed it up with “Kimlerdensin” in August 2018 and both were major successes. “Mahallemiz Esmer” reached 1 million views in a short amount of time, so naturally he decided to quit his job as a sales manager to focus on his newfound music career.

In an interview with Redbull, he stated the following on the topic of his sudden success with “Mahallemiz Esmer”:

“I had trust in my work. (…) but I was afraid being ‘nameless’ would make me lose time, and that it would take time for me to get to places. I had no leads (to follow) like me, I couldn’t make an analysis on what to expect. It didn’t end up like I expected, which I’m happy about.”

Following his outstanding releases, he dropped “3 2 1”, his last single of 2018. He shared in the same interview with Redbull that he actually started this journey without a proper plan. After releasing 3 singles, as each song was one hit after another, he realized that there is demand for this. But what is “this” exactly? What separated him from other rappers of the time? Was his secret to success being bald and buff? Maybe… but not completely!

 Reading the Room

Before he even released his first single, he took a good look at the Turkish rap scene of the time and realized it was taking itself too seriously. In his interview on the PurpleHej series, Fero talked about his realization that Turkish hip-hop had trapped itself in an idealist box. For decades, legacy acts like Ceza had conditioned the audience to believe that rap had to be a deep, politically charged lecture or a heart breaking tale of street survival to be valid. Even when Ezhel broke through and shifted the sound toward melodic trap, the underlying themes still carried the heavy weight of societal struggle. Fero spotted a massive hole in the market. He realized that nobody was making hip-hop that was simply fun! By recognizing that the audience was starved for mindless, high-energy hype escapism, he created a style that stripped away the heavy political baggage of the old era and replaced it with pure lifestyle entertainment. He even openly admitted in an interview with BirBabaIndie that he treated his music career as a dataset for optimisation:

“I’m a Business graduate, so I like statistics. I followed both the foreign market and the Turkish market, (…) I thought any song had the potential to make it to the Top 50. Because this doesn’t just have to do with my songs being good. It also has to do with the fact that no one who was highly listened to at the time was releasing anything new. I figured I could make it to the Top 50 since the massive artists weren’t dropping anything around then, but I never expected it to reach this level.”

 2019: The Year of the Bald

His style of rap was… different from his peers of the time, to say the least. A major throwback to “at Ali at, Ali topu at”, his style was built on minimalism. His flow was cut into micro-syllables, purposely foregoing the complex poetic metaphors to ensure his music was easy to digest, memorize and repeat for hours on end. They were meme-able and super catchy thanks to his syllable-by-syllable flow and content. Similar to haunting ad jingles, you’d find yourself mumbling “hava kapalı, ama akalım” during the day. Sure, his songs weren’t anything to make Shakespeare turn in his grave, but undeniably they were earworms. This, coupled with his lyrical simplification was a consciously curated aesthetic. He was the friendly neighbourhood gym-bro you’d go to for an ego booster. He promoted a healthy lifestyle and rapped about gym culture, instead of shallow things like how he loves women, and how he loves brunette women, and how he especially loves blonde women. I’m looking at you Lvbel C5.

“Bir kez olsun bizi çalmadın adamım!”

Love him or hate him, Fero’s name was on everyone’s lips during 2019-2020. As he rode off the fame of his previous major hits, he released his first full album Orman Kanunları on February 20, starting the year off strong. Unsurprisingly, it was yet another hit. It was a full album with 10 songs in total including his previous singles, half an hour of Ben Fero was anyone’s dream at that time. Maybe not anyone, but surely it was someone’s dream. 

Fero spent the next two years riding a wave of cultural omnipresence that few young Turkish artists had ever reached. He was like a pop-up ad; he was everywhere the internet could reach. He further monetized his fame by collaborating with names like Khontkar, Anıl Piyancı, Keişan and other less famous names I don’t really care about. Any song he featured in at the time was sure to get an immediate boost of fame. This era was especially anchored by his involvement in the record breaking and highly controversial mega-collab “Fight Kulüp”. The track featured Killa Hakan, Ezhel and Ceza along with Ben Fero, and it quickly became a battleground. Traditional rap purists flooded every corner of the internet with their rage, turning the song into one of the most disliked videos on Turkish YouTube. They were revolting against Fero’s entry into the hip-hop pantheon. Fero handled this immense online toxicity like a man who had media training forcefully engraved into his brain through psychological torture. When asked about the criticism, he said the following in an inreview with BirBabaIndie:

“When you do things differently, people can never remain indifferent. (…) Maybe they will never like me. I completely understand that, but yes, I’m still surprised by people doing this on the internet. (…) I listened to the songs I liked, and I didn’t listen to the ones I didn’t. After all, there’s no rule saying that every released song has to be to my liking. I’ve never gone into the comments section to write ‘this is terrible.’ The artist created it and put it out there. I listened to it once, and if I didn’t like it, I didn’t listen again. (…) It’s up to them, though, at the end of the day that’s a freedom too, so they can make comments if they want.”

It was during this time that Norm Ender, a veteran rapper, dropped a landmark with “Mekanın Sahibi” on July 19. In this diss track he criticized the entire modern Turkish trap movement and the “New Wave”, rappers like Ezhel, Ceg, Khontkar along with Ben Fero was targeted. At the beginning of the song Norm Ender mocks Fero’s rhyme and style by mimicking his flow and combining it with nonsensical lyrics. Which in all honesty, fair, Fero had always been criticized by his distinct style. Norm Ender also mocks his bald head in this song. Twice actually. Ironic for someone calling Fero’s work child’s play, but I digress. Following this the media practically begged Ben Fero to fire back with an equally harsh diss track, but none came. Instead he shut down the expectations simply by saying the following on social media:

“Why would I go and give someone free advertising? In that time, I can just make my own music and earn my own money. Let them write whatever they want; my streaming numbers speak for themselves.”

 COVID-BenFero

Skipping forward a little, the global COVID-19 pandemic hit and locked the world down in 2020. This didn’t stop Ben Fero though, he doubled down and treated the crisis as a sandbox for optimisation. While most artist cancelled tours and lost live performance revenues, Fero gathered a digital audience of home-bound people bored out of their minds. It was during this time that he dropped previously mentioned strategic collaborations with high profile hit makers like Anıl Piyancı,“Sıkı Dur”, and an EP called “YABANİ”, capturing maximum interest when public demand for online entertainment was at an all-time high.

But this hyper-optimised pandemic run would turn out to be Ben Fero’s final harvest before cashing out entirely. 

Ben Fero and Ezhel at a concert. 

As the world began to open up in 2021, the landscape of Turkish rap shifted away from pure streaming dominance and mutated into a torturous “TikTok-ification”. The industry suddenly began demanding that artists became fulltime, short-form content creators chasing short lived virality just to stay relevant. It was at this point that Fero made his most brilliant business manoeuvre: he stopped playing. He simply refused to be a generic content creator. After a few final calculated collaborations, such as “Üçe Beşe Bakamam” with Cash Flow and “50 Kilo” with Gringo, his output stopped entirely. Most artists fear being forgotten, milking their brands dry by releasing subpar singles just to satisfy streaming algorithms. Fero understood this better than anyone. He went completely off the grid, abandoning his social media accounts and stepping away from the public eye.

Post-2021 era solidified the course he would follow: treating the Turkish trap scene like a part-time job. While modern rappers slave away under the domination of the algorithm, Ben Fero treats the industry with a sense of seasonal detachment. Sort of like a toxic ex, someone he texts every once in a while to keep them in his back pocket.

 The Art of Disappearing

His pattern over the last few years has been methodical. He dropped three singles; “Bunlar Anlamaz”, “Çok Kolay” and “Heyecanlanman Normal” featuring Khontkar in 2022, then followed these up by a massive silence. Then in 2023, he emerged just long enough to drop “NEY LAN” and later the highly successful single “BİTMİYOR” which immediately gained tens of millions of views from a starved fan base, before promptly vanishing again. He followed this exact blueprint through 2024 with tracks like “PROBLEM” featuring KÖK$VL, and into 2025 with his solo return “Zor Değil” and his reunion track “Kim O” with Keişan.

These last years are proof that Fero doesn’t need to put out music one after another like a machine, releasing one or two songs a year the same way I hand in my class essays is enough to keep him relevant and rich. By maintaining strict market scarcity, his demand remains permanently high. He conquered internet’s greatest curse, the fear of irrelevance, proving that in the current attention economy knowing when to talk is far more fruitful than becoming a broken tape.

Ben Fero’s calculated silence didn’t just preserve his market value, it also completely altered how his legacy would age in retrospect. By taking a step back from the limelight, he allowed the rest of the rap scene to grow and change (maybe not for the better).

 Aging like Fine Wine

There is an almost comical irony in how Fero’s discography has aged compared to the current landscape of Turkish rap. Back in 2019, when Orman Kanunları had just dropped, it was greatly criticized by rap purists for being “the death of the genre”. Yet, when compared to modern charts dominated by Turkish drill and trap, one thinks that maybe they judged Fero too harshly. The current scene is heavily driven by figures like Lvbel C5 and an endless loop of TikTok driven hits. Almost all of these songs rely on a monotonous, deeply uninspired formula. A quick glance at these massive hits, “COOOK PARDON”, “HAVHAVHAV” and his most recent album “BABAYLA ZOR YARIŞIRLAR” reveals an utterly materialistic scene with explicit references to wealth, luxury cars, pharmaceutical drugs and highly objectified women.

This is where the irony of Ben Fero’s career shines. While yes, his flow was objectively basic, his lyricism was inherently wholesome. He didn’t rap about shooting his rivals, how many cars he owns or how many women he can bag. He rapped about self-improvement, physical fitness and staying loyal to his “bilader”s! And if the man insisted on constantly writing an imaginary black friend into his narrative, let him be! Everyone has their weaknesses. He managed to craft a brand of trap that was high energy and club-ready without having to rely on toxic street tropes or making a fool of himself to farm clout.

His music outlived the very purists who claimed it wouldn’t last a summer. We now realize that yesterday’s “industry plant” and “talentless sellout” has accidentally turned into today’s nostalgia. In an era where the current charts sound like hedonistic boasting rituals, Ben Fero’s carefully curated gym anthems stand out as a cleaner, lighter and overall more fun era of Turkish trap. He just, temiz hissettiriyor.

Finishing up my mega-rant about a rapper who I claim is a genius! In a time where the majority of the Turkish rap scene was busy treating hip-hop like some sacred religion where you had to lose an arm and a leg for your legacy, Fero simply looked at it like a math equation he had to solve. He was simply a business graduate who had something new and fresh to bring to the table. I’ve just noticed how I forgot to mention one important detail. He is extremely charismatic. Like, worryingly so.

When the dust settles on the history of the New Wave, Ben Fero will go down as the ultimate puppet master who toyed with the Turkish rap industry. He squeezed the scene for all it was worth, built a brand that became immortal and casually turned off his phone to go… lift some weights maybe? He has truly been off the grid; I’m worried he will come back with a head full of hair. He’s living proof that in the digital age you don’t need to be a tragic, angry poet with hair to make an impact. Sometimes you just have to be a bald gym-bro. Sorry, done with the bald jokes now, I’m not Norm Ender. Sometimes, all it takes is an analytic understanding of supply and demand, a completely unbothered mentality to playground insults, and the business intuition to leave the entire industry when the time comes.