Humor and parody in Finnish rap music videos

Abstract

In this article, we discuss Finnish rap music by dissecting its relations to various forms of humor and spatiality. While there exists a stereotypical understanding of the rap scene as a continuum of the heritage of a serious, masculine and even aggressive African-American ghetto culture, our purpose is to show how humor and parody have also prevailed within the scene. Through dissecting spatiality, contextuality and humor in Finnish music videos, we first focus on how the tradition of Americanism and African-American hip hop identity is parodied in Finnish rap visualizations. Second, we discuss how rap is localized in humorous ways to fit Finnish conceptual and aesthetic categories. Third, we show how humor allows artists to create temporary hybrid identities for themselves and mix fantasy and foreign cultural influences in their rap videos. The research material consists of Finnish rap videos that were screened at the Oulu Music Video Festival during 2000–2010.

Keywords

Finland geography humor localization music videos rap space

Introduction

Hip hop was originally born in the ghettos of the Bronx in New York City in the 1970s (Riviera, 2003: 58–59; Rose, 1994: 2). It is considered to have four pillars: DJing and MCing/rapping (music), breaking (dancing), and graffiti writing (art). In the beginning it was the DJing that ruled the scene, but quite soon DJs started to establish the musical foundation of the MC, who functioned as the lyricist and became the center of the act (Perkins, 1996: 6). While many of the early hip hoppers were Latinos, it was the Black African-American (male) identity that began to mark the scene (Del Barco, 1996: 64). Most clearly this was seen and heard in rap music, where the emphasis of the lyrics was often on racism and poor living conditions in the inner-city ghettos (Forman, 2000, 2002: 83; Rose, 1994: 10–12). Rap was considered by many as the authentic voice of the ghetto which had a strict bond to ghetto localities and African-American male identity.

Hip hop has proven to be a flexible cultural form, however, and one of the major developments has been globalization of the scene (Mitchell, 2001: 1–2). Hip hop’s capacity for reinvention (Forman, 2011: 3) has resulted in numerous hip hop scenes in which originally American-based influences are mixed with local elements. Finland, the focus of this research, for instance, is a northern nation of 5 million people that still has a fairly homogeneous White population. It is often referred to as a country of high equality and rather extensive social security, and ghettos in a true sense of the word do not exist in Finland (Nieminen, 2003: 188). Most cities in Finland are relatively small with low population density and only one of the urban areas has 1 million inhabitants. Yet, Finland has turned out to be a fertile ground for hip hop, and today there exists an active and versatile scene.

In this article, we approach Finnish rap music through dissecting its various relations to humor, parody and spatiality. Even if hip hop is often conceptualized as being a serious and even political cultural form with a strong ghetto bond, humor and diverse local rap scenes have always been part of the picture. According to Krims (2000: 55–57), hip hop was in fact originally in many ways a culture of entertainment and fun, which instead of politics concentrated on celebration, pleasure and humor. Humor never left the scene and has since been adopted by many artists as one of their performative tools. Humor also serves local audiences: if it is difficult to grasp an unfamiliar cultural context, it is at least possible to laugh at it.

This was the case in Finland, where public awareness of rap emerged as a result of a ‘humor music scene’ at the end of the 1980s, while a more ‘serious’ rap scene was initiated 10 years after. Nonetheless, humor has thrived just the same, and the aim here is to analyze how representatives of second wave rap employ humor in their music videos, and how they balance between their local contexts and the African-American origins of hip hop culture. We analyze a sample of music videos which were shown at the Oulu Music Video Festival (http://www.omvf.net/en/home) during 2000–2010. The article starts with introducing how humor is established as a linguistically and bodily built cultural construct, as well as how humor surfaces in American rap. The history of the Finnish rap scene is also introduced briefly.

The analysis is divided into three sections. The first focuses on how African-American traditional hip hop identity and Americanism are parodied in Finnish rap visualizations. The second discusses how the Finnish context is twisted to bring a humorous footing to music videos. The third shows how some artists – through humor – mix foreign elements and fiction in their productions and thereby create temporary hybrid identities for themselves. The trichotomy we use is by no means exclusive, and a single music video may carry elements of all these three categories. We argue that humor, as a divergence from the everyday and expected, allows rap artists to widen their scope and bring in elements and identities that would otherwise be inconsistent. Humor also serves as a localization tool which reduces the gap between the Finnish artists, their audiences and traditional hip hop identities and articulations.

Humor as a sociocultural construct

There are some purely embodied forms of humor such as slapstick, but understanding humor generally requires knowledge of certain cultural structures, stereotypes and preconceptions (e.g. Hamilakis, 2000; Ridanpää, 2014). Perceiving something as humorous is also a matter of situationality (Ridanpää, 2012), in addition to which one needs to distinguish the social and power structures underlying it, that is, who produces and performs humor. The offensive racist talk of White Ku Klux Klan members, for instance, becomes hilarious when claimed by an old blind Black man who (mistakenly) imagines he is White (David Chappelle, Black White Supremacist, aired 22 January 2003). Understanding this particular joke requires a basic familiarity with American culture, history and race relations.

But what makes certain issues and ways of performing humorous? It has been emphasized how humor consists of a series of moments of absurdity which violate our everyday logic (Atluri, 2011: 212; Mulkay, 1988; Oring, 2008: 14). This approach relates to classic incongruity theories which perceive laughter as the result of a situation in which people are confronted with concepts which are surprisingly in discordance with their expectations in an absurd manner (e.g. McGhee, 1979). Yet this absurdity is always controlled through distinct rules (Mulkay, 1988). There are, for instance, certain socially restricted and culturally dependent boundaries beyond which humor is not permitted to extend (see Palmer, 2005). So-called Auschwitz jokes, for example, have remained a taboo topic within ‘Western cultures’ (Dundes, 1987).

While interpreting humor ‘correctly’ requires cultural understanding, defining its categories and genres (such as sarcasm, parody, irony and black comedy) is similarly a culturally specific process that depends on how language and its structures converge within certain social and cultural contexts and situations (Barbe, 1995: 5; Ridanpää, 2012). Differences between irony and sarcasm are often vague, for instance. Most theories see irony as saying one thing while meaning another (saying ‘what lovely weather’ when it is actually freezing; Giora, 1995). Sarcasm works similarly in many ways, but irony can be unintentional and more ambiguous, whereas sarcasm is always conscious and targeted (Haiman, 1998: 20; Winokur, 2007: 7).

While irony is often approached as a rhetoric device, and sarcasm as its functional application, parody is typically considered a genre of its own capitalizing on both irony and sarcasm as its instruments. Parody is an act of duplication or imitation in which the copy is used as a joke (Hariman, 2008; Kreuz and Roberts, 1993). In Black White Supremacist Chappelle mimics a news report covering a story of the Ku Klux Klan and its doctrines, but the sketch turns mundane racial roles into an absurd, incongruent constellation. A Black man is an acknowledged member of the Klan, but due to his blindness and the community’s custodianism, he is unaware of his own racial background.

While often perceived as a tool for joy, comfort and fun, humor is a politically charged institution which serves many functions (e.g. Rothwell et al., 2011). Sigmund Freud (2002 [1905]) saw humor as a safe outlet for (the pleasure of) breaking cultural taboos and overcoming inhibitions. For social groups, humor can engender a strong sense of affinity and belonging (Terrion and Ashforth, 2002; Vucetit, 2004), but it may also play a role in resistance (Dubberley, 1988) or ensure conformity and maintenance of social order (Billig, 2005: 201–202). Humor also helps individuals and communities to deal with strange, difficult and sensitive issues or to alleviate a fear of the unknown and the uncontrollable (Vucetit, 2004). However, humor may serve negative goals as well, in case that which is humor to one person may be mockery and oppression in the eyes of another (Barbe, 1995). At worst, humor and laughter can have far-reaching, even global consequences, as happened in the ever-lasting Mohammed cartoons controversy, in which assumedly funny cartoons have several times fomented serious international geopolitical crises (Ridanpää, 2009, 2012).

Sense of humor and the manners of using it differ between nations (Vucetit, 2004). Finnish humor has been described as dark/heavy, boorish, forthright, weird and self-ironic, with jokes often capitalizing on well-known (gender specific) stereotypes of the Finnish character: the Finn is represented as introverted, unsocial, lower class (male), not overly smart, violent, interested mostly in sauna and vodka (Häkli, 2005; Tervo, 2004). According to Luostarinen (1997: 118–119), Finnish jokes often downplay and ridicule the nation, which is seen to be a sign of a national lack of self-esteem. Yet it is possible to interpret this self-irony also as a form of resistance in which the ‘low culture’ tries to cope with the demands of the ‘high-culture’ by exaggerating and ridiculing its underlying criticism (see also Shaw, 2009: 133).

Humor may – but need not necessarily – relate to reality: jokes often reflect imageries, assumptions, stereotypes and preconceptions rather than ‘real’ or ‘true’ attributes. In this article, it is on this level that we see fit to discuss the Finnish rap scene. Thus, our aim is not to show or argue what Finland and the Finns are actually like.

Musical humor and parody

It is possible to find humorous moments or pieces in most music genres (Cusic, 1993; Monson, 1994). Musical humor is created by making references to past or particular styles, using tempo modifications, curious notations, writing comic texts, altering performance styles or employing unusual melodic design. Musical parody pokes fun at a certain style or a particular work. During the last few decades, an additional layer of humor in music has been provided by music videos, which present lyrics and sounds with images. In this article, we concentrate on Finnish rap music videos and analyze the ways in which they approach humor and parody.

Rap music is often depicted as a ‘realistic’ and ‘authentic’ voice of the African-American ghettos carrying a serious political undertone. This articulation of reality rap presents a delimited view of the scene; however, rap music in the beginning was already in many ways flexible and mobile. In fact, according to some writers, the first manifestation of the rap scene was actually party rap in the 1970s, which was designed for entertainment and moving a crowd and making them dance. It was also possible to hear forms of self-parody in it (Krims, 2000: 55; Perkins, 1996: 12). Afterward, humor was made the center element by comedy rappers and comic rap style, which was initiated by Fat Boys (originally Disco 3) in the mid-1980s (Perkins, 1996: 15).

When artists wear funny costumes or rap self-parodic lyrics, humor is easy to detect, but interpretation becomes more complex when such obvious signs are dropped (Perkins, 1996: 24–25; Schumacher, 1995; Snapper, 2004: 15–16). Robin D.G. Kelley (2011: 145–146) argues that rap has often been subject to misconception and over-interpretation. He claims that storytelling and playfulness are central to hip hop – and Black vernacular culture in general – and that rap lyrics are rarely meant to be literal. Stereotypes of Black men and women are foregrounded in order to challenge them, to reinterpret them and make fun of their holders. Stereotypes may also carry a self-critical function: some rap music videos such as De La Soul’s Ego Trippin’ (Part II) (1994) parody gangsta and commercial rap videos in order to criticize the fact that rap artists themselves have been involved in creating and promoting negative public imagery of rappers as aggressive, misogynist, consumerist and flashy (Hess, 2007: 135–137).

Rap remained within American ghettos only briefly and ‘outsiders’ such as women and Whites soon entered the scene (e.g. Guevara, 1996: 49; Krims, 2000: 69; Perkins, 1996: 16). One of the best-known American White rappers is Eminem, who Hess (2007: 143, 155) claims has made comedy a central element in his music. Comedy is a tool which Eminem uses to build his identity as a (White) rapper in relation to (Black) hip hop. He parodies elements that are stereotypically associated with White culture (e.g. TV personalities and trailer park life) and makes fun of his own White identity in relation to Black hip hop. According to Hess (2007: 145), self-parodic elements communicate that Eminem is aware of his position as a racial outsider, and that there is a distance between him and traditional (African American) rap credibility. European and Finnish artists carry not only racial but also geographical distance from hip hop’s origins. Sami-singing rap artist Amoc from Northern Finland, for instance, employs humor in an implicit manner as a tool to obliterate these distances: music from the US ghettos is not considered to mesh well with the idea and imagery of the Finnish wilderness and ethnicity (Ridanpää and Pasanen, 2009).

Northern American White rap has also been a subject of controversy. There exists a long history of blackface routines and minstrel shows, dating from late 18th century, in which White performers painted their faces black and borrowed black routines and cultural materials to produce a comic enactment of racial stereotypes (Lott, 2013: 3–4). Even if the make-up has now disappeared, according to Gabbard (2004: 19), it is still difficult to find a White performer who would not somehow imitate Black people – White rappers included. According to Russell White (2005), there is a straightforward analogy between blackface actors and White rappers such as Eminem who employ originally African-American cultural practices:

Eminem has adopted and used the codes and conventions of urban hip-hop to articulate the effects of post-industrialization on working-class masculinity – both black and white – in the United States and, judging by his global popularity, elsewhere as well. In doing so, Eminem stands as the post-industrial blackface minstrel par excellence. (p.74)

The roots of the minstrel show lie in the material relations of slavery and fantasies of blackness, but Eric Lott (2013) has shown that they also played a role in the establishment of a distinctive White lower working-class male identity, which was in a state of transition due to industrialization of American society. Gabbard (2004) sees that the same process is happening now: post-industrialization has altered working-class masculinity, and rappers such as Eminem have taken the place of blackface performers.

As an ethnically homogeneous country, Finland was (and to some extend still is) devoid of an everyday understanding of race relations and confrontations. Representations of distant peoples and races nevertheless played an important part in building an understanding of the Finnish national identity and character already in the beginning of the 20th century (Tervo, 2002). The blackface tradition also migrated to Finland. The word ‘nigger’ (‘neekeri’) was brought into the Finnish language through Sweden, and American blackface culture through American popular music and Hollywood cinema. Musical influences were taken from minstrel shows, and the film characters ‘Pekka and Pätkä’ used blackface make-up in their farce film Pekka and Pätkä as niggers in 1960 (Kärjä, 2005: 249). These were representations of blackness based on American minstrel show representations of blackness.

It is possible to see the beginning of the Finnish rap scene within the continuum of the Finnish blackface tradition, as once again Finnish artists studied African-American culture from American films, satellite TV channels and audio recordings and made their own representations of it. In addition, similar to Finnish blackface performances, some of the first rap performances aimed to parody African-American culture.

Russell White (2005) argues that while blackface parodying in minstrel shows was often harsh and offensive, performers not only understood but also had a great affinity for Black culture and its tropes. Most Finnish rappers admire the talent of American rappers and the roots of hip hop culture, and the question of authenticity has always been rated high in Finnish rap (Westinen, 2014). Rap inevitably imitates the African-American cultural tradition, but mere imitation is not enough: localization is needed in order for the artist to relate with his or her audiences and for him or her to attain some level of authenticity in their eyes.

Finnish rap and music videos

According to Toynbee and Dueck (2011: 2), rap is one of the many migrating musical practices. Music travels to new locations through people and different media. The first phase in musical appropriation is mimesis, which indicates the desire and generative impulse to copy the music of the other. Unfamiliar music scenes offer alterity, become objects of fascination and operate as sources of new and unheard sounds, musical practices and visualizations. In Finland, this phase happened in the 1980s, when American films such as Beat Street were seen on screen. Graffiti started to appear and breakdancing was taught in Finnish dance schools (Mikkonen, 2004: 36–37). Finnish rap pioneers rapped in English and had a serious attitude to their work. ‘Real’ hip hop was learned from films and sound tracks.

Toynbee and Dueck (2011: 7) argue that copying and mimesis inevitably involve some kind of translation, because new music needs to be embedded and translated into local conceptual and aesthetic categories. Over time, further transformations and developments typically take place so much that the original object of copying may fade from view. It is through such localization processes that appropriated music starts to make sense and have value in new contexts (Toynbee and Dueck, 2011: 2–8; see also Solomon, 2009). While the first rap pioneers appreciated highly the heritage of rap and hip hop and saw themselves as the true representatives of Finnish hip hop, Finnish-language ‘humor rap’ groups emerged to disturb the scene at the turn of the 1990s. At times they carried rather slight links to the US rap heritage and pushed the rap pioneers to the margins of the Finnish music scene (Mikkonen, 2004: 50–51). They wore funny clothes and used amusing lyrics, but the major part of the fun originated from the deliberate absurdity of trying to grapple with this palpably alien musical form, its looks and gestures (Kärjä, 2011; Toynbee, 2011: 74; Westinen 2014: 38).

Humorous music was popular in Finland during the 1980s and 1990s (Westinen, 2014: 38). Many early groups, such as Bat & Ryyd, Lapinlahden Linnut and Turo’s Hevi Gee, were compilations of comic roles and a certain Finnish exoticism and employed many of the assumed stereotypic characteristics of the nation (Vähäsarja, 2007: 12). Eläkeläiset (The Pensioners, see http://www.humppa.com/) sang about humppa (a type of traditional music and social dancing scene in Finland), booze and old age. According to their record label, ‘many claim that Eläkeläiset are at their best when they are a bit drunk, half-naked and in front of an enthused (German) audience’ (Stupido Records, 2015). Leningrad Cowboys mixed Soviet nostalgia, Russian soundscapes and the Red Army Choir with peculiar wigs, humorous cowboy shoes, vodka and international hit songs (www.leningradcowboys.fi/). These groups capitalized on popular narratives of the Finnish nation as having peculiar habits and eastern/Slavic influences such as excessive use of cheap alcohol. Their bearing was highly masculine, even slightly aggressive, and exclusive: women were given little role. While this music tradition is still alive, it is less visible at the moment.

It is claimed by many that humor rap was never about making ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ hip hop (e.g. Mikkonen, 2004; Yle, 2007), and some see it as an offshoot of the wider humor music scene. Nevertheless for many Finns, it offered the first encounter with American rap music and hip hop culture, and humor served as a localization tool that transformed an alien music into an understandable and approachable form (Paleface, 2011: 38; Westinen, 2014: 41). It is also said to have created a trauma which delayed the development of the current Finnish-language rap scene for years. No serious rapper wanted to be associated with humor rappers, and many considered the Finnish language unsuitable for rapping. This changed when Fintelligens (MCs Elastinen and Iso H) began to unite beats, boasting and the Finnish language in skillful and interesting ways at the end of the 1990s (Mikkonen, 2004: 61–64). It is widely acknowledged that the roots of the early Finnish rap lay mostly in New York hip hop and rap tradition (Mikkonen, 2004: 50; Westinen, 2014), but in this particular case French influences also played a role: the idea of a serious Finnish-language rap group was the result of a music exchange program between Finland and France. If French rappers could do it in French, why not see if it would work in Finnish, too?

And so it did. Major record labels soon became interested in rap’s commercial potential and the Finnish rap scene grew quickly (Nieminen, 2003: 172). Nowadays most rap acts are in Finnish, but English is still used by some artists such as Redrama. Swedish rap, the other official language in Finland, exists in the margins among Finland’s Swedish-speaking population, and the Sámi language can be heard in the North as well (Ridanpää and Pasanen, 2009). Cooperation and links with other European regions remain tenuous, perhaps due to language barriers, while Northern American audiovisual popular culture still plays a major role in Finnish rap (cf. Crothers, 2010).

The humor rap era has faded away, but humor and parody are still distinct trends in Finnish rap. There is no longer a single genre or premise that would summarize the trend, however, and humor is used in different contexts in different ways. Some artists base an entire alter-ego on humorous elements; some use humor merely as an extra or occasional feature. Humor always carries cultural references, and we argue that the humor in Finnish rap music videos rests upon the intersection of Finnish culture and African-American hip hop conventions.

Research material

During the years 1994–2010, the Oulu Music Video festival screened a total of 2602 videos, of which 112 were rap music videos (1998–2010).¹ After watching these 112 videos, our research material came to consist of 21 humorous rap music videos. Established in 1994, the festival has played an important role in Finland by offering directors and producers a regular venue – unlike Finnish TV – to show their new productions.² A selected jury views the videos and honors the best videos and directors each year. The number of videos has increased and in 2015 there were over 380 music videos sent to the screenings and competition.

The videos selected for scrutiny, parody or otherwise, twist traditional (African-American) rap conventions or popular understandings of Finnishness and the Finnish music scene. Several of the humor scenes play on characteristics traditionally associated with authentic Afro-American hip hop ghetto identity and stereotypical Black masculine aesthetics (see Oware, 2011). The humor also relates to the Finnish context and audiences: excessive use of alcohol is perhaps not funny as such, but may become humorous when understood as a parody of this assumed national characteristic/stereotype of the nation. The humorous music videos are all in Finnish, and the humor in them is created through three tactics: exaggeration, inversion and contradiction between the lyrics and visualizations.

Music videos offer an interesting and vivid but also a highly complex and layered field for investigation. The three elements – sound (music), lyrics (text) and illustrations (pictures) – all converge to create an output that often lacks simple and fixed meanings and interpretations (Vernallis, 2004: 199). The music video is also a cultural product that makes references to other cultural products, signs and visualizations, which makes it an intertextual product and may complicate interpretation even further (Goodwin, 1992: 58–59).

Due to the complexity of music videos as a cultural artifact, a clear focus is needed. Here, our explicit aim is to discuss Finnish rap music and videos by dissecting their relations to various forms of humor and spatiality in terms of rap’s localization in Finland. However, it is obvious that exploring music videos, which are somewhat distinct from the artists’ history, live performances and recorded music, sets certain limits for the study. Music videos do not necessarily reflect artists’ typical profiles or their overall approach to music, rap and hip hop. It is possible for a ‘serious’ artist to use humor in his or her videos once or twice – videos do not need to be an extension of the artist’s general ethos or profile. Also, while live performances take place in front of fans and other interested audiences, music videos are intended as marketing tools and targeted to the wider public, television broadcast and Internet distribution. The music video is one-way media, and there can be no co-presence, ‘spatial being together’, or interaction between performer and spectator (Kelly, 2007). In order to send a message understandable to most viewers, the video, as well as the messages and humor within it, needs to operate on a rather simple and general level.

We investigate Finnish rap music videos by grouping them into three spatial/contextual categories. This is because rap music – regardless of its location – harks more or less back to its African-American roots.³ As Perry (2004: 20) states, hip hop is in many ways arrogantly American, but at the same time it is concerned with region and local specificity. Yet, rappers also transcend these two: foreign cultural elements and fiction are also seen and heard in Finnish rap (cf. Pennycook, 2007a: 6). In the first section, we focus on how traditional African-American hip hop identity and related aesthetics are parodied in Finnish rap visualizations. The second part discusses how the Finnish context is twisted and mixed in to bring humorous footings to music videos. The third concentrates on foreign elements and fiction in Finnish rap. We approach humor through three performative tools: exaggeration, inversion and contradiction (Table 1). Finally, conclusions are reached.

Table 1.

The research material consists of 21 Finnish rap music videos.

Context	Tool
Context	Exaggeration	Negation	Contradiction
African-American	Stig Dogg: 2006 Rakkauden Bermudan kolmio, 2007 Stigidilaatio and 2008 Vadelmasuklaa	Rapped Youth: 2000 Eipähän siinä mittään	Fintelligens: 2002 Heruuks, 2003 Sori, 2010 Hoida hommaCheek: 2004 Avaimet mun kiesiin
Finnish	Petri Nygård: 2000 Vitun suomirokki, 2010 Seopetrii and 2010 Mitä vittuu vaan	Seremoniamestari: 2002 Chillaa meiä kanssaRaptori: 2010 Tosi tarttuva täytebiisi	EduKehäkettunen: 2006 Hellyyden ehdoillaMC Taakibörsta: 2002 Varo tai mä tuun sun kyljestä sisään and 2002 PA 2001
Hybrid	Trilogia: 2004 Hei	Reilukerho: 2007 Kortit jaossa	Rudolf feat. Karri Koira: 2007 Mr. Universum
	NotkeaRotta: 2009 Sadistiset fabiot	Ninjameininki: 2010 Varo ninjaa

We classified them according to the main spatial context and reference point in the video, as well as the main instrument for creating humorous undertones.

Parody of American hip hop culture

According to Hess (2007: 8, 30), hip hop’s representations of social identity are very much tied to social class and carry two opposing viewpoints. The first emphasizes stories of the ghetto, social struggle and growing up poor, while the other centers on displays of wealth and excess and making it out of the ghetto. In the latter case, rap artists are depicted as living like stars, driving expensive vehicles, dressing in expensive clothing and hosting extravagant parties. While these characterizations originally developed in a highly specific (United States) context, similar rap imagery is also seen in Finnish music videos, where it functions to create affiliations with the American hip hop scene, its fashion, ideas and aesthetics (Tervo, 2014).

But appropriation may represent little more than copying and poaching of Black culture if it is implemented without consideration of the local conceptual and aesthetic categories (Hess, 2005; Tervo, 2014; Toynbee and Dueck, 2011: 2–8; see also Solomon, 2009). Most simple way to bring in locality is to use vernacular language or to place familiar names and places within lyrics and visualizations. In addition to these traditional localization tools, humor may also enable and facilitate cultural translation, since it allows artists to employ foreign identities safely without dislocating the impact of one’s own identity (Kärjä, 2011). Cheek employs such a strategy in his video Avaimet mun kiesiin (The Keys to my car) (2004), which takes him to a very un-Finnish landscape on the West Coast.

Scenes portray Cheek driving a Cadillac Escalade on the sunny West Coast with palm trees and skyscrapers. To soften this American edge Cheek brings in humor to suggest his riches and sudden Americanization are not to be taken too seriously. In the first scene of the video, Cheek sits in his small and old car in wintery Finland and comments ‘life must be more glamorous for American rappers’. Later we see him asking his mother for more money. The humor is simple and plays with the gap between the American and the Finnish contexts: the northern and cold environment is replaced with the exotic dreamland of every Finn – a place where the sun is shining all year round and fancy, expensive cars are mundane. Cheek also embeds a scene of self-parody in the video: this apparently masculine rapper is in fact dependent on his mother.

For Cheek humor, parody and playfulness are additional tools that can explain the use of American scenery in his music video, but for Stig Dogg, these are main building blocks. His music videos carry scenes that are parodic copies of artists such as Usher, Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent. His lyrics are about women, sex and his own virility, and visualizations promote excessiveness and financial status. Stig Dogg is a caricature of a rich gangsta; he is surrounded by beautiful women, drives an expensive Rolls Royce and lives in a huge mansion (cf. Keyes, 2002: 172, 216). Stig Dogg self-ironically characterizes himself as Punavuori’s R Kelly,⁴ but instead of being – in the manner of R Kelly and many other American hip hop stars – Black, strong, masculine and aggressive, Stig appears as their counterpart: a skinny and puny White guy with comic, ‘not-so-cool’ glasses. Unlike the targets of his parody, those aggressive muscly machos, Stig is a physically weak wanna-be dancer.

The Stig’s performance becomes humorous through hyperbolic exaggeration of his lack of authenticity, at the same time demonstrating the contingent nature of authentic performance in this specific music genre. When rap employs parody, the explicit pointing is at one’s own artifice, relying upon a performance of artificiality and irony in order to accentuate the humorous nature of the song/video (Albrecht, 2008: 382–384).

The humor in Stig Dogg’s three videos – Rakkauden Bermudan Kolmio (The Bermuda Triangle of Love) (2006), Stigidilaatio (Stigidilation) (2007) and Vadelmasuklaa (Raspberry Chocolate) (2008) – operate at least on three different levels. First, the mere idea of bringing elements from American (Black) commercial hip hop into the (White) Finnish context is ambivalent and humorous – connecting Finland and material excessiveness seems odd and funny in a country where people typically rather hide than display their wealth.⁵ Virtues such as modesty and heroism, as opposed to consumerism, are highly esteemed in constructing a person’s social status (Anttila, 2007: 206). This conceptualization surfaces on many levels: in Finnish popular culture and national art, the ideal Finn has traditionally been equated with attributes such as poverty, diligence and austerity (e.g. Stark, 2011; Tervo, 2004). Ironically, through his parody Stig thus comes to strengthen these traditional conceptualizations of Finland and the Finns, even if his appearance may be understood as contrary to this goal. Humor thus reveals as much of one’s own identity as of the identity that is being mocked or parodied (cf. Kärjä, 2011: 88).

Stig Dogg also makes fun of his cultural distance from hip hop culture. He utilizes parody here in its classic sense, to quote Hutcheon (2000: xii) as ‘a form of repetition with ironic critical distance, marking difference rather than similarity’. According to Hess (2007: 143), this has been a central aspect of White rap in the United States, where artists have been careful in their parodying of hip hop culture but instead have concentrated on their White status and its distance from Black hip hop culture. Stig’s physical status, his White and scrawny appearance and funny mustache are symbolic markers which imply that neither he nor his audience are at the core of Afro-American hip hop culture at this particular moment (Figure 1). Yellow silk kimonos, White designer suits and fumbling hip hop movements and body-language forge a comical impression when done by this skinny man trying to dance like Usher. Cheek uses this same strategy by contrasting the Finnish cold winter to the sunny West Coast using self-parodic elements.

Figure 1.

A scene from Vadelmasuklaa (2008). Girls are hanging gold bullion around Stig’s neck, bullion which turns out to be too heavy for him to carry. Vadelmasuklaa carries also straight cross-references such as the laboratory scenes in 50 Cent’s In Da Club (2003).

Third, the video makes fun of the hip hop culture itself: Stig Dogg’s videos include scenes and rap clichés copied from African-American hip hop culture, such as placing him in a huge mansion (Hess, 2007: 37). Stig takes the camera through his house in MTV Cribs-style, a TV show in which many rap stars have featured, but in Stig’s case everything is exaggerated: the house has 36 bedrooms, 124 toilets, 616 kitchens, for instance, and his fridge is filled with nothing but champagne.

Unlike their White American counterparts, Finnish artists possess both geographical and cultural distance which allows them to parody not only this distance but also Afro-American hip hop culture itself. It is possible to see this within the continuum of blackface humor in Finland: while Finnish humorists Pekka and Pätkä painted their faces black at the turn of the 1960s in Hollywood style, contemporary hip hop artists make their own representations of popular media representations of African-American rap and hip hop identity.

The heirs of Finnish humor rap

Direct references to the Afro-American rap scene, its fashion and aesthetics are often present in Finnish rap music videos, but their topics and visualizations carry also highly local and even personal concerns. Local streets provide sceneries and staging, and artists display their personal lives, careers and colleagues in their videos (Tervo, 2014). These are typical ways to localize rap music into new contexts, for rap authenticity is traditionally built through autobiographical lyrics and documentary-based visualizations (cf. Androutsopoulos and Scholz, 2003: 471–475).

Themes of self-referentiality and localization also attain humorous tones in Finnish rap videos. Raptori, which was one of the early humor rap groups at the turn of the 1990s, has managed to make several comebacks. Tosi tarttuva täytebiisi (Really catchy filler song) (2010) was originally written and recorded by the Finnish group Allekirjoittanut in 1995.⁶ The lyrics tell a self-parodic story of Raptori stealing this particular song, and the video is a collage of rearranged scenes from well-known rap, pop and rock music videos such as NWA’s Straight Outta Compton (1989) and Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit (1991). The video ends with the audience noticing these copyright violations and Raptori escapes but is caught by contract killers. Next we see a funeral, after which three members of Raptori rise from the ground as zombies by the tombstones (Figure 2). Raptori parodies their own career comebacks – thus establishing a parody of a parody.

Figure 2.

Raptori members JuFo III, Izmo and Kaivo imitating a scene from Night of the Living Dead (1968). Image from Tosi tarttuva täytebiisi (Really catchy filler song) (2010).

While Raptori relies on self-parody, Petri Nygård builds his performative strategy on exaggeration and a narcissistic alter-ego. He is sometimes said to have initiated the second wave of Finnish humor rap (Musiikkituottajat, 2013) but is also a highly controversial character because of his lyrics and videos, which are often based on different forms of abuse. His lyrics are a hybridity of degrading and gross sexism, slanderous statements, homophobia and heavy drinking, and he does this all consciously to irritate particular audiences and carnivalize his character.

Petri Nygård takes advantage of the century-old Finnish myth, which identifies the Finns with alcohol. In late-19th-century Finland, drinking was widely considered a social problem which ruined the morals and work ethic of lower class men and eroded the vitality of the nation.⁷ In his videos, Petri is either getting intoxicated or suffering from its day-after complications (Figure 3). Mitä vittuu vaan (What the fuck ever) (2010) takes these themes on board. Cruises to Sweden and later to Estonia have been carnival spaces for the Finns for decades: people enjoy tax-free alcohol and eschew traditional social norms there. Petri parodies this carnival behavior – he buys more beer and alcohol than he can carry; drinks; and picks up another man’s woman in a bar and has sex with her in front of her husband. Ordinary social rules do not bind this character, but instead are meant to be broken in order to establish a parodic narrative of an ‘overly Finnish’ man (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

In addition to an overtly exaggerated active sex life, drinking booze is the other constantly present theme in Petri Nygård’s videos. Image from Se on Petrii (It’s Petrii) (2010).

Similar themes can be seen in the music video PA 2001 (Skint 2001) (2002) by MC Taakibörsta. Pornography, aggressive masculinity, Estonian cruise ships, masturbation and alcohol are its carrying themes. While it is possible to read these videos as degrading and sexist – which they certainly are (cf. Sanjek, 2006: 270) – it is also possible to see humor and parody in them, for many of their elements are so exaggerated that the audience may laugh rather than cringe (Nieminen, 2003: 182). Besides, these artists also parody themselves. Se on Petrii (It is Petrii) (2010) shows Petri Nygård stage diving, but the audience fails, or to be precise, does not even intend to catch him. Lyrics by MC Taakibörsta may appear as aggressive and masculine, but the MCs are actually portrayed as rather pitiful characters in their videos: they either fail to get the women or are dominated by them. These male MCs may exploit other groups in their videos, but they are also able to laugh at and parody themselves (cf. Hess, 2007: 143).

Fiction and hybridity in Finnish rap

Rap music is often claimed to represent the unmediated voice of the ghetto (Kelley, 2011: 145). This view is affiliated with the authenticity claim that started to dominate the scene at an early stage. According to McLeod (1999: 142), a true rapper needed to ‘keep it real’, that is, map the realities of inner-city life and rap about his personal experiences there. He was not to disassociate himself from the community he came from, that is, the street (Hess, 2005: 299; Krims, 2000: 70; McLeod, 1999: 142; Pennycook, 2007b). Authentic rap was Black, honest, masculine and street oriented; the unauthentic one followed popular mass trends, was White, aimed for commercial success, promoted soft/feminine features and came from the suburbs (McLeod, 1999).

The idea of ‘keepin’ it real’ was never a straightforward construction, however. Rappers seldom if ever use their own names as their stage names, and rap lyrics are rarely intended to be read as literal statements: rappers play with words, phrases, identities and stereotypes, and storytelling and playfulness are central to hip hop, which has resulted in much misunderstanding and public disapproval (Kelley, 2011: 145–146). There have been also purely fictive stage personas. Hess (2007) writes about sci-fi identities such as Dr Octagon and Deltron 3030, who introduce dystopian portrayals as well as humorous passages. The roles of these artists vary from interplanetary soldiers to time-traveling gynecologists.

Rap authenticity thus comes in many forms, and identity-play and playfulness are part of Finnish rap as well. Ninjameininki (Varo Ninjaa (Beware of Ninja) (2010)) employs the legend of Ninjas in their rapping and visualizations. The MCs wear ninja outfits and masks, and the lyrics tell about the ancient skills of these mystical characters. The band’s video includes footage of fight scenes and masculine stunts, which carry references to Asian martial arts films, in where predominantly male bodies carry out highly physical performances (Lu, 2011: 102; Qiong Yu, 2012: 163). There are also female film stars in martial arts cinema, but – similarly to rap performances – it is mainly the masculine body that creates the spectacle. Ninjameininki employs this gender anticipation and ends the video with a scene in where the music changes and the main fighting Ninja takes off the mask and turns out to be a woman. She glances at the camera and walks away as the leader of the group. As in classic incongruity theory (e.g. McGhee, 1979), humor is constructed here when the story turns out to be in discordance with the expectations familiar from the ninja myth.

Traces of similar culture mixing can be found in the music video Hei! (Hi!) (Trilogia 2004) in which the three MCs are thrown into a harem. The music takes influences from oriental sounds and scales, and visualizations mix scenes of an Indian snake-charmer, the Kama Sutra, a flying carpet, belly dancers and Arab sheikhs. The video is a mix of vulgar jokes, stereotypical caricatures, assumingly funny costumes, and beautiful women. The scenes are dramatized and punctuated, offering several readings, as women are objectified and subjugated for dramatics. It is, however, possible also to see the humor and self-parody the video carries. The rappers themselves also wear turbans and other props and print false and non-existent 3 euro bills (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Trilogia mixes oriental elements with rap music and rap aesthetics in their video.

Trilogia trusts in exaggerated masculinity in their humor and Ninjameininki operates through inversion, that is, by turning gender expectations upside down. Such twisting of gender roles and downplaying of masculinity can be seen in many Finnish rap videos (see, for example, MC Taakibörsta: Varo tai mä tuun sun kyljestä sisään (Watch out or I’ll Break Your Ribs) 2007, Reilukerho Kortit jaossa (Dealing Cards) 2007). These videos parody and play with traditional conceptualizations of hip hop culture as a masculine enclave where men act out their masculinity through repression of feminine traits and performances of being ‘hard’ (Arthur, 2006).

It is possible to build ‘rap authenticity’ in many ways: humor has been part of rap from the early days and fantasy video scenes provide an easy way to make fun of traditional rap clichés. However, there still are certain conventions beyond which rap performances are not expected to extend and by rejecting these conventions, making a parody of such claims to authenticity, it is easy to make the audience laugh.

Conclusion

Humor has played many roles in rap music. Storytelling, playfulness and parody have always been central elements in African-American rap music, and in White rap, humor has marked the racial distance between the artist’s White identity and traditional (Black) hip hop credibility. Globally, humor has introduced an easy way to approach rap – if it is difficult to grasp an unfamiliar cultural context, it is at least easy to laugh at it.

In this article, we have illustrated, how humor and parody facilitate the translation of a foreign music form into a new cultural and geographical environment. In Finland, humor has been a localization tool for reducing gaps between the Finnish artists, their audiences, traditional hip hop identities and articulations. Humor – as a break from the everyday and expected – allows Finnish rap artists to employ elements and identities otherwise impossible. It offers a simple tool for translating and embedding originally unfamiliar cultural elements into local conceptual and aesthetic categories: depictions of ghettos, limousines and mansions would appear fake and poached from Black culture without obvious humorous elements, for instance (cf. Tervo, 2014). The artist may also employ disposable identities and take on the role of a Ninja or a sheikh and still be a plausible rap character. Rap authenticity comes in many forms.

Yet, there are also many regularities in Finnish rap humor, and in most cases it is the various performances of hip hop masculinity and related aesthetics that are at its core (Oware, 2011). Stereotypic characteristics such as hypermasculinity, virality, aggressiveness, consumerism, domination, misogyny and homophobia are discussed through three performative tools: exaggeration, inversion and contradiction. Exaggeration takes hip hop themes to the extreme and creates a comical impression through overdoing rap elements such as consumerism or abuse. Inversion plays with conversion. It employs opposite affirmations by turning gender hierarchies upside down and by removing rappers from typical signs of wealth. Contradiction combines exaggeration and inversion: in a typical case, hypermasculine lyrics are illustrated with visualizations which show Finnish rappers as subordinate to women or weak in physical appearance. In one case (Fintelligens: Sori (Sorry) 2003), the dynamics worked the other way: apologetic lyrics were illustrated with self-assertive rappers.

In this article, we dissect humor mostly in terms of rap’s localization, but the relationship between humor and Finnish rap deserves a more extensive analysis. The topic should be examined more closely through the concept of gender and by considering more carefully the historical and present articulations of Finnish masculinity. Finally, we acknowledge that the rather voluminous presence of humor in Finnish rap music may also relate to a change in attitudes toward street credibility and authenticity in hip hop in general. Hess (2007: 155) argues that even previously serious and aggressive gangsta rappers can nowadays afford to laugh at themselves. It is thus possible to understand the threads of humor in Finnish rap also as reflections of wider rap trends.

Footnotes

Funding

Research was financially supported by the Academy of Finland (Research project “Urban youth and hip hop culture in Finland” [grant number: 272168] and RELATE CoE [grant number: 272168]).

Notes

Biographical notes

Mervi Tervo has been working as a researcher in the Department of Geography at the University of Oulu. Her research has explored sports, popular culture and identity building in Finland, and current research focuses on localizating hip hop culture and rap music to the Finnish context. Recently she has published in Popular Music and Society.

Juha Ridanpää is an adjunct professor in geography currently working at the Department of Geography, University of Oulu, Finland. His research interests concern literary geography, popular geopolitics and postcolonial theories. Recent publications have appeared in Cultural Geographies, Media, Culture & Society, Social & Cultural Geography, Gender, Place and Culture, and Geopolitics. Ridanpää is also an editor of Literary Geographies.

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