Şımarık

Tarkan first heard the song from Sezen Aksu while preparing for a television shoot, and he liked it so much that he kept asking for it. According to the Turkish account, Aksu finally gave in and let him have it for 40,000 dollars. She wrote the lyrics, a teasing chorus that calls a lover a little troublemaker and ends with two kiss sounds; the music was credited to Tarkan, though he admitted in a 2006 interview that this had been done without Aksu's consent. Ozan Çolakoğlu arranged it, and the album sessions for Ölürüm Sana stretched over about a year and a half, partly in New York. Released in July 1997, "Şımarık" went to number one in Turkey and set off a boom in album sales. Turkish pop was an album market, so even after three records Tarkan had never released a proper single; this became, in effect, his debut. A new video shot in the narrow streets of Marseille's Le Panier, in which ever more women chase him for a kiss, launched it in France in 1998 and across Europe the following year. It reached number one in Wallonia and the top three in France, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. Tarkan won a World Music Award as best-selling Turkish artist, the first Turkish singer to do so. The song lived on in other languages, most famously as "Kiss Kiss", which Holly Valance took to number one in Britain and Australia in 2002. It remains the moment Turkish pop proved it could travel.