Finnish Rap, the Far-Right and Racism
A new radio station called ”Suomiräp” (a colloquialism for Finnish rap) started broadcasting in Finland on 14 September 2020 on the same frequency that had until then hosted Bassoradio, a station known for its diverse music programming. In addition to the sudden appearance of the new station, bewildered listeners were also faced with municipal election adverts by the right-wing national-populist Finns Party. Several Finnish rap artists quickly reacted and stated that the adverts are not compatible with the anti-racist ethos of hip hop. But what is the relationship between hip hop and the far-right? Is Finnish rap really anti-racist?
This article is a revised and expanded version of the article “Suomiräp ja rasismi” originally published in Finnish on September 18, 2020. We thank Miia Laine for additional help with the translation.
A new station appears
On Monday, September 14, 2020, a new radio station called Suomiräp (a colloquialism for Finnish rap) began broadcasting in Finland. As the name suggests, the station focuses on Finnish rap music. Like in many other countries, rap has become the biggest genre of music in Finland, which certainly warrants a station dedicated to the music. Nevertheless, many fans and artists were not thrilled about the circumstances under which the new station was launched.
One of the reasons for the initial disaffection towards Suomiräp was that the station appeared without any public announcement or notice on the semi-national FM frequencies that had until then maintained the station Bassoradio. The latter had already gone through some significant changes during the last year to the disappointment of its core listeners. Bassoradio, which started originally as an independent internet radio, was from 2004 up until September 2019 home to around 50 different DJ driven shows specialized in hip hop and different electronic, club and dance music genres. In September 2019 Bassoradio laid off most of these shows in favor of a more streamlined radio format dominated by playlists. Again, the station did not issue any official announcement about these changes — rather, the news reached the public through the social media channels of the DJs who had been let go. As Jaakko Strömberg, DJ on one of the station’s most popular and long-running shows focused on Finnish rap, Kultabassokerho, suggested: “There was no communications strategy — the job was given to 150 different communicators” (Hätinen 2019).
Several DJs speculated that the independent station Bassoradio that had only been profitable for the last two years (Ylä-Anttila 2018) and functioned largely thanks to the private investor Jacob Ehrnrooth (Kauppalehti 2013), was being groomed to be sold to a larger media corporation. In April 2020 it was announced (Bauermedia 2020) that Bassoradio had been acquired by the Finnish subsidiary of the German media corporation Bauer Media Group that operates in several European countries and in the US. In Finland, Bauer Media is the largest commercial radio conglomerate operating after the purchase of Bassoradio 17 different stations across the country. No larger changes in the programming of Bassoradio were announced in conjunction to the acquisition although the station’s head of music, Henrik Suhonen, who had been quiet throughout the whole renewal process, left his position shortly afterwards. Consequently in September 2020 the station appeared to just have vanished from the airwaves and been replaced by the station Suomiräp.
The other reason audiences were displeased with the launch of the Suomiräp station was the adverts for the Finns Party broadcasted on the station. The Finns Party — the second largest party in the Finnish parliament at the moment — have been in the headlines on numerous occasions for their use of racist language and for their connections to various far-right and Nazi organisations. The party also explicitly describes its opposition to “multiculturalism” in their official program. The Head of the Party, Jussi Halla-Aho, whose voice was heard in the adverts, has been convicted for ethnic agitation, which is the closest equivalent to a racist crime in Finnish law. In the adverts, the head of the party professes that the Finns Party is a “grassroots” party, where “anyone can be anything”. He goes on to rally listeners to “take Finland back” and encourages them to run for his party as council members in the next municipal election.
For many hip hop fans and rap artists, the music has, during its short history in Finland, explicitly represented anti-racist sentiments (Ramstedt 2019). It is, thus, understandable that several commentators considered the adverts misplaced on a station focused on rap music. But were the adverts really talking to the wrong audience? What is the connection between the far-right and hip hop?
Hip hop and the far-right
The long-running Finnish music magazine Rumba was the first media outlet to report about the incongruity of a radical right wing populist party’s adverts running on the newly established radio station focused on rap music. In an article (Hätinen 2020) published the day after the launch of the Suomiräp station, Rumba had contacted several Finnish rap artists for comments. Rap artist Gettomasa summarised the criticism that had been accumulating up until then as follows: “Hip hop and racism will never belong together. Hip hop and the Finns Party will never belong together”.
In the same article, rap artist Paleface reminded readers that “one of the central messages of US rap has been the structural racism of the country and the oppression of Black people — the same problems the Black Lives Matter movement emphasizes. There is probably no need to spell out how several Finns Party members of parliament have reacted to the BLM movement in public.”
Other rap artists quickly followed to condemn the adverts. Artists Elastinen and Redrama announced on their social media that they had been in touch with the radio station and demanded that the they adopt an anti-racist policy. It is unclear how many POC artists the media contacted for comments — up until the time of writing, larger media outlets have solely featured statements by white rappers. The media has possibly sought to reach out to those local artists who had been featured on the Suomiräp channel’s playlists, which especially during the first few days have been almost exclusively white. Additionally, for example MC Lehmä criticised on her Instagram the male dominance of the playlisting. Another station owned by Bauer Media, Radio City, had only a week prior been heavily criticised for the apparent sexism in their new advertising slogan “Classic rock for those who pee standing up”, a slogan that has now been removed.
Responding to the criticism sparked by the adverts, Bauer Media’s CEO Sami Tenkanen admitted that they had made some significant mistakes with the launch of the new channel (Räsänen 2020). Bassoradio had not disappeared after all, but was to be relaunched with new content and an even larger reach through a new national FM frequency licence starting September 30, 2020. Regarding the Finns Party adverts, Tenkanen admitted that there was a “clear contradiction” between the genre of the station and the content of the adverts and that a decision has been made to remove adverts from rotation (Vedenpää 2020). According to Tenkanen, the adverts had ended up on Suomiräp unbeknownst to the station through the advocacy organization RadioMedia that represents commercial media outlets in Finland. All its member organizations, Bauer Media stations included, are obligated to broadcast the societal advertising they sell.
While it was clear within a few days of the channel’s launch that the station’s administration, many of its listeners and the rappers played on the station considered hip hop to be essentially anti-racist and, as such, incompatible with the policies of a right-wing radical party, few people discussed this from the party’s perspective. To our knowledge, the only Finns Party representative who commented on the issue publicly was member of parliament Sebastian Tynkkynen. In his tweet to some 20.000 followers, Tynkkynen turned the conversion into a freedom of speech issue — a typical strategy for many far-rightists when they meet accusations of racism. Changing the narrative to civil liberties effectively normalises racist hate speech, as the actual racism is never critically discussed. Similarly, none of the 30 comments in Tynkkynen’s Twitter thread denied the racism inherent in the party’s policies or commented on its compatibility with hip hop, but simply focused on how their opinions were being censored by the removal of the advert from rotation.
A week later Tynkkynen dug deeper into the issue on his podcast/vlog, gaining close to 20.000 views on YouTube and another 10.000 on Instagram, where he again insisted how the Suomiräp station has to choose between defending democracy and keep his party’s adverts in rotation or cowardly suck up to a few offended rappers. More interestingly, replying directly to the rappers who had expressed a diametrical opposition between hip hop and the policies of his party, Tynkkynen declares that these rappers have a significant number of listeners among the Finns Party supporters. To demonstrate this, Tynkkynen brought up statistics from Spotify, where the podcast is also distributed, which shows that the most listened to musical artists among users who tune in to his podcast are Finnish pop star Arttu Wiskari, the aforementioned rapper Gettomasa, as well as the popular mainstream rap duo JVG. Tynkkynen explains his supporters’ appreciation of rap with the fact that a lot of it is lyrically very “anti-feminist”.
While the radical right’s interest in rap might come as a surprise to the Finnish rappers who where quick to issue a statement about the anti-racist ethos of hip hop, it is in line with larger global trends regarding far-right rhetorics. The rise of far-right groups around the world has been characterised by a distancing from former narrowly defined extreme positions in favor of a more direct alignment with the mainstream, where neutral or even liberal symbols have been co-opted for their own use. For example the term “alt-right”, coined by white nationalist Richard Spencer, has been a conscious strategy of detachment from earlier far-right symbolism. The “alt” prefix seeks associations with trendy progressive alternative culture, rather than radical white supremacy (Winter & Mondon 2020).
Halla-aho’s reference to a “grassroots level” in the aforementioned radio advert, the Finns Party supporters’ interest in hip hop and the use of a rap radio station to recruit council member candidates represents this same trend. Sam de Boise (2018), music lecturer at Örebro University in Sweden, who has studied the use of music in the rebranding of far-right groups online, notes how hip hop in particular has been re-coded to suit a far-right agenda. Although, as De Boise notes, many in the far-right also resent rap, there are a number of people who have taken a liking especially to the hyper masculine forms of rap with often sexist content degrading women. Especially US artist Eminem has been interpreted to represent a far-right ideology because of his disdain for political correctness. And it should also be noted that there are rap artists who identify as white nationalist and openly express racist and far-right ideologies in their music (see Teitelbaum 2017).
Racism in Finnish rap
As racism is normalised and white supremacist ideologies gain ground, it would be increasingly important that actors within the hip hop scene in Finland publically comdemn the Finns Party advertising on the Suomiräp channel. But has this happened and is hip hop music and culture in Finland really anti-racist?
Finnish rap developed in the 1980s, when US hip hop culture found its way to Europe. At first, Finnish artists rapped in English, following general European trends of hip hop localization through imitation (see Rantakallio 2019). In early Finnish media articles, Black US rappers were often referred to in othering and even racist terms. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the first artists rapping in Finnish took a humorous approach to their music making; this wave of “humour rap” has been interpreted, on the one hand, as a strategy for alleviating the artists’ experience of a socio-cultural distance between US and Finland while culturally appropriating US hip hop, and on the other hand, as a way of accentuating the perceived difference between Black US artists and the white Finnish artists by ridiculing and exotifying Black hip hop. Humor and parody more generally have been used to excuse the othering and racist functions of Finnish rap. (Kärjä 2019.)
More recently, white Finnish rap artists such as Pyhimys and Huge L have used the n-word in their lyrics, and rapper Uniikki has used harmful stereotypes about the indigenous Sámi in his music video (Enqvist 2015). The comment section of Black Finnish rap artists’ Youtube videos nearly all feature racist comments. Some artists of color have also come forward about their experiences of racist treatment in the scene.
In 2017, Kalle Kallonen, the CEO of Blockfest, which is the biggest hip hop festival in the Nordic countries, was reprimanded for his use of racist expressions (Kanerva 2017), causing a nationwide debate about whether racism is tolerated in Finnish hip hop culture. Many notable white rap artists and practitioners in hip hop culture chose to stay silent or even defended Kallonen, instead of condemning his racist actions.
In critical race and whiteness studies, the term “white solidarity” (see for example DiAngelo 2011) is used to describe a process where white people dismiss the topic of racism or even defend accusations of racism against other white people rather than pointing out and condemning racist speech or actions. Among white people, conversations about racism are often seen as uncomfortable, because they might stir conflict and break the assumed mutual understanding that none of us are racist. However, silence is not a neutral position — it communicates that racism is acceptable. Silence helps to maintain racism and whiteness as a societal norm.
A similar case was seen in 2018 when Radio Helsinki, apparently with humorous intentions, posted a video of the white Finnish R&B artist Stig Dogg teaching the channel's head of music Henri Pulkkinen, an acclaimed white rap artist in Finland, how to tie a durag. A durag is a head scarf originally used especially by Black men to protect and preserve different kinky/curly hairstyles. Instead of criticizing this as an act of cultural appropriation, several people criticized the channel’s then journalist Renaz Ebrahimi, who publicly pointed out that a white R&B parody artist teaching another white artist how to imitate Black culture is problematic. Ebrahimi also discussed the matter later on her Random Life (Mixcloud 2018) programme where studio guests pointed out that white people are not subjected to the same criminal stereotypes as Black men for wearing a durag. Instead, the headwear becomes merely a fashion accessory or an item that ridicules Black culture and its difference vis-à-vis whiteness.
This case demonstrates distinctly the behaviour of many white Finns engaged with rap music — they use elements and symbols they encounter in hip hop culture without understanding or considering their meanings in their original Black context. White hip hop in Finland is riddled with adaptations from Black culture, often used simply for the purpose to communicate hip hop authenticity. Typically this means appropriating stereotypical exoticized tropes of Black masculinity and criminality in connection to what is perceived as the realities of dangerous and underprivileged urban spaces. This can be seen for example in the use of names and titles, such as Pikku G (Little G [gangster]), Euro Crack or Gettomasa (Ghetto Masa).
Depending on the context, these kinds of names can appear to be relatively harmless and they can even be a way of detaching harmful tropes from their association with Blackness and replacing them with a connection to hip hop culture. However, while hip hop is still primarily framed as a Black culture, it is also Black people (globally) who suffer from stereotypical images upheld within hip hop also by its white practitioners. As race and hip hop scholar Michael P. Jeffries (2017) notes, hip hop allows white participants to experience the thrill of what is perceived as a dangerous outlaw culture without any of the material consequences (see also Rantakallio 2019).
This ability to be or do anything without whiteness itself being noticed in any way is at the root of whiteness. White people do not have the same burden of race as people of color, because whiteness is considered the norm and default setting of humanity (Dyer 1997). This has led many white people to assume that they can move within, borrow and use other cultures freely without responsibilities or consequences. This norm of whiteness is, however, slowly being challenged more and more thanks to the globally increased visibility of Black Lives Matter and other anti-racist movements.
What next?
In most of the criticism directed towards the Suomiräp station, the connection between hip hop and anti-racism seemed to be taken for granted. But merely participating in hip hop culture does not make anyone anti-racist. Hip hop has been important in resisting oppression and in spreading the message of the Black Lives Matter movement. But if the music is first and foremost categorised as political and anti-racist, this is done from a white perspective: the music is reduced to a reaction against oppression and renders its Black creators as the eternal victims. Black culture and hip hop as a style and aesthetic grows and thrives also outside the framework of whiteness.
The aforementioned cases are a few examples of the complex relationship between Finnish rap and racism; the conversation is, however, only getting started. Anti-racism demands continuous actions and conversations that visibly and audibly challenge white normativity and racism. What are the strategies that the Suomiräp channel is now going to develop to meet the demands of an anti-racist policy? Will the artists who have spoken out against racism still hold the station accountable or is the case considered closed now that the adverts have been removed? And will the artists who have chosen to stay silent, continue to do so? By not speaking out about racism, white Finnish rap artists send the signal that they do not want to alienate listeners with far-right sympathies or listeners who might perceive talking about racism to be too “political”. However, artists involved in hip hop culture cannot cherry-pick the pleasures of Black music without also speaking out about the uncomfortable truths that come with that engagement.
Kim Ramstedt is a music researcher, journalist and DJ
Inka Rantakallio is a hip hop researcher, music journalist and DJ.
References
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