The Sociolinguistics of Hip-hop as Critical Conscience by Andrew S. Ross & Damian J. Rivers

Author:Andrew S. Ross & Damian J. Rivers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Diversifying Finnish Hip-hop

Hip-hop culture and rap music, in particular , are currently extremely popular in Finland . The meaningfulness of rap as a music genre in Finland (Paleface, 2011; Westinen, 2014) is testified, for instance, by the visibility of rappers in the mainstream media, digital downloads, radio play and numbers of gigs in various live venues. Rap artists with a migrant background (born in Finland or not; with one or no ‘ethnic Finnish’ parent(s)) are a fairly recent addition to this genre (though not entirely without antecedents; see, for example, Mikkonen, 2004; Paleface, 2011). Roughly since 2010, such young people have become active in the Finnish hip-hop scene. While at first most chose (African American) English as their rap language (e.g. Noah Kin and Gracias), more recently, artists such as Musta Barbaari and Prinssi Jusuf (Prince Jusuf), along with Kevin Tandu and Toinen Kadunpoika (Another/The Other Street Kid) have ‘represented’ (mostly) Finnish-language rap. Finland is, in fact, lagging behind many European countries in terms of (im)migrant-background rap (Jansson, 2011, p. 26); in Finland , such rappers are still often seen as ‘exotic exceptions’, whereas elsewhere, most notably in the multicultural societies of France (see e.g. Prévos, 2001) and Germany (e.g. Androutsopoulos, 2010), they have always been an integral part of the local scene(s). Furthermore, research on rap artists with a migrant background is still largely absent in Finland (but see Kärjä, 2011 for a historical overview of Finnish hip-hop and its relation to Otherness through humor; Westinen, 2016, 2017).

In the context of global (and particularly ‘original’ American) hip-hop culture , ‘Whiteness’, usually the unmarked, invisible category—that is, the norm—against which other ethnic categorizations are measured (e.g. Dyer, 1997; Lipsitz, 1995), often becomes visible and marked (Cutler, 2003, p. 229), that is, the Other. ‘Blackness’, in turn, stereotypically “emerges as normative and authentic” (ibid.). In Finland , until recently, ‘race ’ or ‘ethnicity ’ were not particularly prominent rap topics, perhaps because ‘Whiteness’ has been (stereo)typically unmarked in Finnish society (e.g. Rastas, 2005; Toivanen, 2014), although some discussion has taken place in, for example, rap lyrics , artist interviews and discussion forums about how White youths can ‘convincingly’ participate in the culture and make ‘credible’ rap music.

Recent research on Finnish youths with a migrant background shows that (American) hip-hop culture , stereotypically emphasizing locality and Blackness, can offer these youths an ‘easy’ access and an empowering experience (Lankinen, 2015, p. 278), contrary perhaps to some other youth music cultures such as (heavy) metal (ibid., pp. 289–290). Moreover, the urban American street culture seems to provide these youths with a ‘positive’, ‘Black’ model in contrast with the stereotype of an immigrant (particularly of African origin) as uneducated, unemployed and potentially crime-inclined (see e.g. Halonen, 2009)—an image which still often persists in Finnish media and public discussion (Lankinen 2015, p. 279; see Eronen et al., 2014 on the unemployment rates of people of African origin in Finland).

Due to the relative ‘Whiteness’ of Finnish society, popular culture and hip-hop, the new, up-and-coming ‘Black’ artists need to negotiate their role and status in the already established scene.

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