Photo lifted from Helsingin Sanomat
A culture’s music, like its food and design, are windows into it’s soul. What is popular is largely a function of deep-seeded values of sound aesthetic that color’s the culture’s essence.
Finnish music is obviously older than the nation itself. I am not equipped to accurately nor academically decipher from where Finnish music today comes, but the minor key and the Protestant hymn both seem like foundations to what is common today. Much (not all) traditional Finnish music gives a sense of lament and yearning through its extensive use of minor keys. Living through one of their winters currently, I can see where that might be one of many deeper sources to this aspect. But more recent events like a struggle for independence and longer portions of foreign rule before that, might help explain some of it as well.
Jean Sibelius’s life spanned the transition from political subjugation to independence. He was a force—maybe even THE artistic source—in creating a collective sense of Finnish national identity and pride through music. A masterful composer of rich, grand, anthemic, inspirational soundscapes that perhaps capture a nation’s sense of self, better than any western musician before or since. Sibelius gave Finland a modern place from which to be its musical self, doing so by touching the hearts and nerves of his countrymen through his interpretation of the physical place. His 9-minute Finlandia, his most well-known and patriotic tone poem, was written in 1899, a protest to Russian censorship. It still stirs national fervor in the hearts of Finns only rivaled perhaps by La Marseillaise in France, but maybe even greater. But Finlandia is just the locomotive in a train of Finnish-themed orchestral and symphonic music that captures and celebrates the soul of Finland that has lasted and continues to be the foundation of its modern musical self.
As orchestral music gave way to modern pop forms, Finland’s pop music culture feels quite different than what I experienced in America. I feel this is one place where Mimmu and I most differ on taste of things, and I believe it is environmental. Finland has clearly done a strong job of protecting its own modern musical voice, and I certainly can’t sink my teeth into much of it. I think that’s good, but to many western folks, Finnish popular music through the 20th century will come across as fairly quirky. It certainly does to me. The Finnish tango, for example, has had a strong effect—which, I might point out, plays to the minor key lament. Some Slavic forces have influenced Finnish popular music through it’s early and mid-century dance-hall culture as well. Järviradio, (“lake radio,”) remains a nostalgic force in that sector with its accordion-prominent aesthetic, mid- century crooners and ballads, with a flavor similar to but distinct from the Polish polka. Järviradio is big with Mimmu’s parent’s generation and has its own prominent national radio station, the likes of which would have no chance at survival in any major-market sense in the United States. While I don’t stomach it well, I think it’s cool.
These things all factor in to how Finland feels on the radio, which remains my main source of music. I don’t stream much music. I have apple music and use it, but even in Duluth, I listened primarily to Minnesota Public Radio and KUMD, the local radio station Mimmu used to work for. I think this reliance on the radio, for better or worse, helps me taste Finland more flavorfully than burying myself in an aesthetic I took with me on a cloud from the US.
I don’t know how it happened, but we have an amazing connection with Finnish music while having absolutely nothing specifically to do with it. Mimmu and I met indirectly because of a concert she organized in Duluth with some great Finnish musicians. One is a musical icon in Finnish popular music—a voice of Finland so to speak. We call him our “Godfather,” because without him, we simply would not be a family. He is a force of nature too—a timeless pop music voice of a country for several generations. I wish I understood the hit songs better on first experiences like I do with great songs in my mother tongue. But taking the time to pick apart his musical and lyrical voice is an onion that peels back to reveal an artist of massive magnitude—a soothsayer of the Finnish id in 4/4 time. I’ve always been fascinated by his remarkable approachability, sensibility, and the genius one feels in the space all around him. He’s got all the traits of “the greats.” The size of the audience doesn’t change that in any of the true greats of any realm.
His bandmates for the iteration he was practicing in his career at that time of the Duluth gig have since been some of our closest friends; their daughter, our kids’ longest-standing Finnish friend. The music is and always has been an extension of who they are; their passion for their craft palpable in the lives they’ve lived. We see them every trip we come here and nearly every trip they’ve taken to the US. They are special to our family.
Then there’s Mimmu’s high school friend, who is one of Finland’s greatest techno pop hook writers. He’s got a golden mind in how the language rolls off the tongue in a rap/hip hop/techno assertion. I’ve come to realize that the staccato of the Finnish language is great for musicality when wielded well, and he has that down cold. He’s got jingles coming out of his jingles in a way that seems so effortless and self-fulfilling while being so sticky, you can’t remove it from your mind no matter how hard you try. It’s no wonder some of his songs are anthems that every single Finn would know in certain contexts. Like most Finns, he’s quiet and reserved while being deeply reverent towards friendship. But put him on a stage or in a studio, and this alter ego force of sound, rhythm, beat, and language, marry an unabashed audacity of ability and mastery. All from a gentle, soft-spoken hunter/gatherer. He shows us kindness one wouldn’t expect in the requisite American talent of equal formidability in the same cultural genre.
A few years back, we caught wind of a young pop sensation tearing through Finnish pop music. In Finland, he’s the biggest homespun pop star in Finnish history-like the Backstreet Boys, but just him. Mimmu figured out it was her college roommate’s son. Mimmu often gets incredulous reactions from Finns who find out we’ve met him. I absolutely love some of his big hits, and they will forever be linked to my children growing up in America as Finns.
We hear all of them on Finnish radio, which is cool. But Mimmu and I have never been the music groupie type. We’ve kind of marveled at our Forrest-Gump-like proximity to the Finnish hit machine, because, quite simply, neither of us have particularly sought such uncanny connections to that sector of Finland’s culture. I’ve always loved and appreciated music, but I’ve never truly aspired to make the scene—any scene. Closest I came was, I did some songwriting and performing and had a band years ago in Duluth, when I was lamenting my crappy love life. But then I met Mimmu, the libretto dried up, and I came to understand like the vast majority of other mere musical mortals like me, that my songs were ok at best, and rubbish at worst. While I wrote, recorded, and played sporadically around the city for part of a decade, I was never a scenester. So how we ended up with some of Finland’s most renown musicians in our block of friends over here has honestly kind of bewildered us, as fun as it is.
While any one of them would be a great, deeper blog dive for any number of reasons, our proximity to them makes it uncomfortable, so I resist the urge. Still, I feel not posting about Finnish music would be almost contrived of me in and of itself. So I’m steering clear of friends by highlighting a Finnish band I universally and consistently love.
I’ve not made it a secret that Finnish radio, by and large, isn’t for me. I’ve even proclaimed it sucks, which is probably the greatest form of insecurity one can express. Because let’s face it, this a judgement call, not a fact. And more purposefully, it doesn’t suck. It’s at least equally a condemnation of my own musical taste as that of Finnish radio.
I do have some legitimate beefs though, but to keep it brief, I’ve chosen two distinct items I’ll use as Exhbit A and Exhbit B, of what kind of grinds me on Finnish radio.
Exhibit A: I’ve heard Murray Head’s 1985 chanting rant about chess, One Night in Bangkok, more in the last six months on Finnish radio than it warrants in a lifetime. I realize (now after looking it up) that Bennie Anderson and Bjorn Ulvaeus of ABBA fame had a big hand in producing the “art-music” piece, but I’m just going to state the obvious; it’s just not good enough to have that kind of prominence in 2021. Even musical geniuses have off days, and I’m sorry, Bangkok isn’t genius. It’s time-specific in its production, not timeless. It might deserve some love in context to what was going on in 1985, but whomever has it in their mind in Finnish radio that it’s a classic of this air-play magnitude, simply should reconsider. Whomever is pushing the track on Finnish radio needs some more plain-speaking friendships. I’m good hearing it once, maybe a year, maybe even a month, but a couple times in the same day?!
Exhibit B: Richard Marx’s 1988 gem, “Hold Onto The Nights,” seems like it’s on constantly here. I don’t think getting into why that’s a problem even warrants further discussion. Iita has taken to rolling her eyes and giggling when it comes on in the car. Again.
Those are just tips of the iceberg of some of the heartburn I have with Finnish radio beyond what I think is good about it. I can’t say with certainty that Finns aren’t clamoring in 2021 for 1985’s Bangkok street chess culture tribute, or a sappy, craftless, banal love ballad, that was fine as a trendy late-'80's puff piece, but it does highlight a difference in radio here compared to what Americans are used to.
What’s cool about Finnish radio is, Finnish bands get on it as much or more than Bon Jovi does, so that’s a good thing. Finnish radio is still heavy on international hits, but some major national stations are almost entirely Finnish music. I’ve seen my friends able to support their art and craft as a livelihood, at least in some part, due to that system, but I also sense there is room for even greater diversity of Finnish musicians. As I’ve said before, Finland supports its artists, as a small country should. It builds a national identity. Because Finnish radio isn’t driven entirely by free-market forces, good Finnish art survives and maybe even thrives. But some might be getting buried too. My rudimentary observation and opinion is, I think Finnish radio could use a little help in breaking out a bit on the outer edges of both Finnish music and international music by trying some more progressive stuff on the airwaves. I hear very little progressive, Finnish and non-Finnish music on the radio here. It feels a bit formulaic and I'm losing interest faster than I should be after just 6 months here. I haven’t yet found anything akin to American college radio, and I think Finland is the worse for it.
My own pop music sensibilities merge with Finnish radio at, Eppu Normaali. I will use the remainder of this post to gush a little over them.
By American mass-media radio standards, Eppu Normaali are neither radio-friendly nor radio-ready. I could just hear record execs of their era in the States listing the reasons they couldn’t get behind the band. That they have thrived for 40 years in Finland is a sign that more such genre bending could be achieved here, and maybe should be.
I first became aware of the band when the front man and song writer, Martti Syrjä, was featured in one of Taavi’s early favorite Finnish movies, Risto Räppääjä ja Polkupyörävaras, or as the English subtitle says, “Ricky the Rapper and the Bicycle Thief.” To show my lack of Eppu bias, I didn’t even know the guy’s name until I just looked it up. He’s great in the movie. A genuine article as the band’s essence to pop music matches wonderfully with Syrjä’s physical uniqueness.
Martti Syrjä of Eppu Normaali
I wish I could put my finger exactly on what I like about Eppu Normaali but it’s not readily clear. Their heyday was the 1980’s to ‘90s. I hear everything from The Clash to Dire Straights to the Rolling Stones, to AC/DC, yet I hear none of them specifically enough to assert to fans of those bands that they’d like Eppu Normaali. Further, as great and influential as those bands are and deserve to revered, I personally like none of them as much as I like Eppu. They are so clearly not anyone else, and that alone makes me love their songs, most of which I don’t understand the lyrics. But every time a song of theirs comes on the radio in the car, I either turn it up knowing its them, or I say, “this sounds like Eppu Normaali,” in which case it always is, and I get glued to the song.
The recording ambience is that of an ‘80s punk recording, a la, The Clash, but the guitar stylings themselves aren’t even in the same zip code, let alone area code. The song structures feel loose but are organized in odd ways, and often take side trips that you can’t follow on the first listen-through, but by the second or third time you hear the song, the tangents feel obvious, almost remarkably familiar for how foreign they felt the first time through. They stretch what you’d expect to happen melodically to uncomfortable lack of structure only to reveal the structure is actually there if you break out of your pop song expectations. It absolutely grabs and engages me. As I’ve discerned and figured out lyrics, their rhythmic functional use of the language for digestible pop music, is nothing short of brilliant. My fave: “joka päivä ja jokaikinen yö.” How it comes off in the song is almost like a magic trick.
I feel the essence of The Replacements of the same era (one of my faves); not stylistically nor sonically, but in spirit. Like “the Mats,” they kind of tried to be punk but weren’t really great at it. What came out instead was them, and in it was their own genius. Similarly, Duluth’s world renown art-rock powerhouse, Low, reacted to the emergence of grunge out of punk’s roots, creating what they felt was essentially punk music on the far other end of the spectrum of the crashing, in-your-face noise you expect of punk. What resulted beyond perhaps trying to get the listener to reflect deeper on what they hear and subsequently react to in music, was a genre they set in motion and defined—slow core. Low and Eppu have very little in common as song writers, but I’m attracted to similar bucking of convention how they each bend the rules of what we all hear regularly on popular radio, and create something even better.
Eppu Normaali indicates great musical sensibilities. They either didn’t hear what was going on outside Finland and did something totally unique and insular, or, they distinctly were listening to everything everywhere and sampling some of the best things not at all associated with each other, marrying them into songs that don't sound much like anything else going on at the time. You got familiarity with no real resemblance of what you expect to connect it to. I think Dan Wilson (Trip Shakespeare/Semisonic/Adele) described great songs in just such terms in an interview I heard once.
It’s cool to uncover something so fresh to me that is so old. I'm sure some Finns will take offense to what I’ve written here in general, and that’s ok. Music is a taste and we are all products of our environments.
Finnish music has deep musical traditions that aren’t in kinship with much of the world I grew up in, and that is interesting to consider. Eppu Normaali is an enigma to me in Finnish music that somehow plays to the sensibilities I’ve absorbed in one way or another through life, yet still sounds fresh compared to the radio around it, even today. I couldn't appreciate them before I learned to appreciate bands like the Replacements and Low. They sound nothing alike yet they try to be something they just couldn’t quite find the gist of in their time, or didn't want to.
The Replacements trying to do punk hit a nerve with Curt Cobain, and the rest is history. Low counts international heavyweights like Thom York of Radiohead and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin as fans of theirs and influencers on their own music. Great bands' influences don't add up merely as statistics of bought and sold singles over a career, though that kind of success is probably nice. But some bands transcend.
I'm saying Eppu Normaali transcends. Due to the language their songs are written in, and relative reach associated with it, they've had a much smaller audience to influence. But there’s something awesome there still today. That's transcendance. I’m left to wonder who else they may have inspired if their reach went beyond Finland from the outset.
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