Ezhel Turkish Rapper With 2M YouTube Subscribers

Early life

Ezhel was born Sercan İpekçioğlu on 1 July 1991 in Çankaya, the district of Ankara that houses much of the Turkish capital's government quarter. Music ran in his family: his mother worked as an Anatolian folk dancer, a cousin, Umut Kuzey Hanoğlu, became a producer, and an uncle made a living as a musician and as a sound and lighting engineer.

He studied at TED school on a scholarship. Around that time he started listening to American rappers, naming Eminem, 50 Cent and Tupac Shakur among the artists he followed. By the age of 12 he had become interested in rap, and at 15 he left high school to concentrate on music. Later he came across the records of Bob Marley, which led him to Rastafari. Ezhel has described his own approach as a mix of the defiance he took from rap and the outlook he found in Rastafarian thought.

Career

At 18 he began performing with a reggae group called Afra Tafra. When that band broke up, he started a new one, Kökler Filizleniyor, with friends from Ankara. For several years he worked under the name Ais Ezhel, a stage name that plays on the English word "ice", and he kept it until 2017. Beyond rapping, he plays the bağlama and the guitar, and he sings reggae with Kökler Filizleniyor.

His first album, Müptezhel, appeared in 2017. The record placed him among the more visible Turkish rappers of the period, and he began working under the shorter name Ezhel from that point. His music mixes trap, hip hop and reggae. In 2019 he released a joint album with the German rapper Ufo361, titled Lights Out, and the single Olay came out in the same year. Made in Turkey is another album listed under his name, recorded with the rapper Murda. A later album, Derdo, followed in 2024.

One of his best-known songs, AYA, has passed 80 million streams on Spotify. The publication Hip Hop Life gave him the title "Freestyle King".

In May 2018, Ezhel was arrested and held in pretrial detention on a charge of encouraging drug use through his lyrics. He went before a court the following month, on 19 June, and was acquitted within nine minutes of the hearing opening. His lawyer, Fuat Ekin, said afterwards that the verdict showed justice had been done, a comment reported by the Media and Law Studies Association.

Recognition

In May 2019, The New York Times included Ezhel in a list of European pop acts that readers should know. His YouTube channel has since grown to more than two million subscribers, according to a count from March 2025, which makes it his largest audience on any platform.

Public roles

Since 2019, Ezhel has lived in Berlin because of legal cases that remain open against him in Turkey. Asked on a television program why he had not returned, he said he believed he would probably be arrested if he went back. He has spoken in public about his cultural roots and has included Kurdish words and themes in some of his songs, and he has a basic command of the Kurmanji dialect alongside Turkish. Some of his public remarks have prompted heated debate on social media.