WHO İS PARS a.k.a KANTER ?
My introduction to rap music goes all the way back to my elementary school years. I first started writing lyrics in 2019 by filling notebooks with poems. Around that time, Tupac became my biggest influence and the only artist I seriously looked up to as a guide.
During my first year of high school, me and my close friend “Garm” used to write lyrics together on paper, rap together, and freestyle over simple beats. That’s where my journey with rap really started. About a year later, I continued on my own, although that period was mostly unproductive.
In my third year of high school, I recorded my first track called “Hip-Hop Is…” followed by another song titled “Lyrical Whipping.” Both tracks were in English. Later, one of my teachers advised me to return to making music in my own language, and that advice changed my direction completely. I recorded my first Turkish track called “Battle Rap” and eventually released my first project, “Mahlası Kanter EP.” I even printed a few physical copies myself.
That project was a mix of political rap and battle rap, mostly created through excitement, passion, and pure ambition. Even today, it still represents one of the happiest and most genuine periods of my life.
I usually create albums to seal moments in time. Every project I release carries the atmosphere of the era it came from. Later on, I released my second album, “School Of Hard Knocks.” This project was much more personal and focused on future anxiety, pressure, and experiences that deeply affected me mentally. During my first two albums, I used to release songs individually before later collecting them into full projects.
A year later, life started changing around me and I released “City Of Bayview.” Up until that album, my artist name was KANTER. This was the first project I released all at once without dropping singles beforehand. It was also the first time I fully focused on personal subjects and emotions. That album represented an entire universe inside my head. The meaning behind the name “Bayview” itself is a long story.
More recently, I changed my artist name to “Pars.” I felt like it represented me better and carried a stronger and more aesthetic identity.
When I first started recording music, I was recording everything through my phone. Sometimes I would redo the same song nearly twenty times just to get a version I could accept. It was exhausting, but I learned to love this path through struggle. If I was ever going to quit music, I would have quit at the very beginning.
On the surface, this is the simplest way to summarize my rap career. But every song and every album I’ve made carries a much deeper meaning for me. There is a huge emotional and spiritual weight behind every release. Some records were made during extremely difficult periods of my life, both mentally and physically.
Honestly, everything I explained here is only half of what I’ve experienced throughout my journey. I wrote constantly, overthought constantly, and despite still having high goals, the most valuable thing music ever gave me was people. Through this culture, I met genuinely good people. I built connections with artists from other countries and also met truly quality people from my own country, Turkey.
If I ever reach a high level one day, I want to give real support to the people around me. Throughout my entire career, almost nobody truly supported me. From writing lyrics to building and curating my own website, I learned everything by myself and created my own strategies.
I’ve felt the underground culture deeply from the very beginning. During my early years, music became the first place where I could openly talk about my anger, fights, disappointments, and sadness without holding anything back. More than the people around me, my microphone listened to me.
At this point, I’ve been around longer than some of today’s new school rappers with millions of streams. The difference is that I never enjoyed aggressively marketing myself. For me, music was always something spiritual before it was anything else.
