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Accepted Paper:
Attachment to a local space via global tropes: Finnish rap music in Finland’s second largest city
Annukka Saaristo
(University of Helsinki)
Rap’s performances provide a sense of locality, authenticity and belonging to urban landscapes. The Finnish rap scene from Espoo connects to global scenes by using tropes from local and global conversations. In which ways can rap form different affective attachments between places and people?
Paper long abstract:
Hip Hop was born in New York and its neighbourhoods, which have provided a blueprint for rappers all around the world to follow when telling their stories. Urban landscapes form multifaceted relationships between places and people that are present in the different performances produced by the artists. Rap and Hip Hop have been a part of the Finnish cultural landscape since the 1980s. Finnish rap has grown from an underground genre into the mainstream and has a following spanning all aspects of society.
Rap provides tools for processing various affects that space and place can provoke. Artists can e.g. use tropes to indicate their love/hate relationships with the places they grew up in in their performances, or write about specific space/place experiences. The meaning of place in rap is connected to other local and global spaces through Hip Hop’s global authenticity conversations. The Finnish locality discussion also touches on a strong sense of belonging and the idea of a home (or lack thereof).
My dissertation investigates these conversations within the second largest city in Finland, Espoo. Artists from the city negotiate the meanings of space and place in their performances by using e.g. humorous elements, global tropes and local knowledge. Performance provides a sense of locality, authenticity and belonging for the local and national audiences. The presentation explores the ways in which rap can form different affective attachments between places and people.