Finland
is known as being a sort of Mecca for metalheads. Sure, Germany has Wacken, the
UK has the ones that started it all, and Norway is kvlt, where else can you go
and easily find a bar that plays exclusively rock and metal music? And I don't
mean just once a week or the possibility of one song a night. Or, where else
can you find a country where most of the population can play at least one
musical instrument and and a good few of them have been in a band at some point
in their life? Where can you go and hear Nightwish or Sonata Arctica coming
from the speakers in the lingerie department of a major department store (a
Finnish version of The Bay or Macy's)? While I am not the most traveled
person, hailing from Toronto, Canada, having only traveled to a handful of
European countries in my short years, I think I'm pretty safe to say that
Finland really is a haven for metalheads. That gif of Vreth (Finntroll) saying
“in Finland its metal all the time, in every bar” is pretty damn close to the
truth.
I first found out about/fell in love
with Finland through listening to music. Yes, I was one of those14 year olds who wanted to marry Ville Valo of HIM; probably
one of Finland's best known musical artists. But before you close your browser
window in a fit of “she's not metal” rage, let me finish. I was a diehard HIM
fan, and still really appreciate their music even though I've stopped listening
to only them, and through that band I
was able to discover popular Finnish rock bands, some that have reach international
fame and some that have only really been popular within Finland. The rock bands
here have got a pretty strong fan-base around the world regardless of how small
that fan-base is. But because I listened to so much music from Finland, it
spurred me on to find out more about this little-known country which seemed
similar to my own snowy homeland. As for metal, well I wasn't quite the metalhead
back then as I am now; I only listened to a sprinkling of metal amongst my hardcore
HIM listening. To be frank, half the vocals drove me nuts because they weren't
Valo's baritone; ah, to be a pigheaded teenager. I was determined to go to
Finland and I got the chance through my university as an exchange student at
the University of Helsinki. In late August of 2011, I became a resident of
Helsinki and the real fun began.
Remember how I said I wasn't that
into metal when I was younger compared to now? Well, since I was in Helsinki,
basically the centre of the Finnish universe, there was usually at least one concert happening every
week somewhere in Helsinki. To put it into perspective, between late 2004 and
August 2011, I had been to eight concerts. Between September 2011 and May 2012,
the time I lived in Helsinki, minus almost a month that I was back in Canada
for Christmas, I went to 38 concerts. Some of these bands weren't metal bands,
but, I did grow to love metal so much more because of concerts I went to just
for shits and giggles because it was so cheap to see these bands compared to going
to shows in Toronto. I was seeing bands I wouldn't normally see in Canada
because it would just be too expensive for me; I live 2 hours from Toronto/a
decent venue and normal concert prices for these bands would be around 35
Canadian dollars. I really was able to expand my listening repertoire while
living in Helsinki. My friend would want to see a band that I had heard of but
never listened to before and I’d agree to go, then I would come out with a new
band that I was into. This is when my love of Folk/Viking/Pagan metal really
ignited; I had always liked the idea of it but had only ever really listened to
less than a handful of decent bands from those subgenres. It was from seeing
these bands live that I was able to fully appreciate their music - for example
Lauri “Varulven” Õunapuu of Metsatöll who made me dizzy from the amount of
times he switched from guitar to a traditional instrument that I’ve never even
seen before. If you can play bagpipes and make them sound badass, I’m pretty
sold on your music.
I think
that could be where Finland has such a strong connection to music. You may or
may not know, Finns are NOT Vikings (Finland is a Nordic country not a
Scandinavian one. Educate yourselves) so that means they don’t have the same
Viking lore as the Scandinavian countries. Which means their mythology is not centered
on warriors. Without going into it too much, Finnish Paganism has lots of
nature (birds, lots of birds) and lots of music; the stories were passed
down orally through runo songs for centuries before Elias Lönnröt wrote them
down in The Kalevala. The main
character in The Kalevala, the shaman
Väinämöinen, who has been identified as one of Tolkien's sources for the
character of Gandalf, is portrayed as having an amazing voice and carrying a kantle
made of a pike's jawbone with him everywhere he goes. A kantele made of a
pike’s jawbone? Sounds pretty metal to me. I took a class at the University of
Helsinki that was called The Kalevala in Music. In that class we focused a lot
on the classical composers that wrote music based around the Kalevala, but we
also talked a lot about modern day Finnish musicians that use the Kalevala for
inspiration, like Amorphis and Korpiklaani. How cool is the idea that Amorphis
can play the main stage at Tuska Open Air Metal Festival, the biggest Metal
music festival in the Nordic countries, and all they do is sing about centuries-old
myths of their home country and a large number of people in attendance won’t
have any idea that Mermaid is
actually about Väinämöinen being a creep about marrying Joukahainen’s beautiful
sister, Aino, who had been promised to him if he saved her brother, so she
turns herself into a salmon. The mythological Finns fought with songs and
spells rather than relying on swords and other weapons all the time. It’s not
surprising that music is such a part of Finnish life that it’s basically second
nature to Finns.
I
haven't yet been fortunate enough to stay in Finland past May, so I've missed
the Finnish summers which means I haven't had the chance to attend the copious
amounts of festivals that happen here in the summertime. But if Wacken, in
Germany, is the biggest metal music festival, Finland has to take the cake for
the most metal music festivals. Tuska
Open Air, Sauna Open Air, Provinssirock and Nummirock being some of the big
names, along with a host of smaller festivals; you could probably do a festival
a weekend if you had the time and funds. I’ve only ever been to one metal festival,
and I guess only one summer music festival, and it was this past summer when I
went to Mayhemfest at Ontario Place. If you want to know how tiny the metal
scene is in Toronto, the bands at Mayhemfest were complaining that it wasn’t
worth it to do a Toronto date because it was the smallest turnout on that tour,
a measly 7000 people. A band like Children of Bodom can easily sell out, or at
least pack a house, in Finland, and probably most other places, like Germany,
but as one of the bands at Mayhem, they were on a side stage. I went to see
Finntroll in Toronto before I moved back to Finland this summer and there were
probably just over 100 people there. It was lovely because it was an awesome
small show but that would never happen in Finland. I think it’s threat to
future decent metal shows in Canada because the bands and their management and
whatever other powers that be don’t see the point if no one is going to show up
if they can just focus on places where they are assured a big turnout.
Let's get back to the metal culture that thrives
in Finland. Remember how I mentioned Vreth saying that it was metal all the
time in every bar? That's because there is a scene for it, meaning that more
than one bar can survive on catering exclusively to a specific subculture, even
though people outside the subculture go to these places as well. You don't get
that in Canada, or at least I haven't found it. We might have Hot Topic (cue
mass eye-roll) and the odd struggling shop that sells band merch and albums,
poor HMV, but in Finland, at least in the bigger cities, you can easily find a record
store that is stuffed full of the albums you are looking for; Music Hunter in
Helsinki and Swamp Music Second Hand in Tampere, my favourite second-hand music
shops: CDs and vinyl galore. I can sit in the main building of my university,
Tampereen Yliopisto, and probably see 10 metalheads walk past me within an
hour, no problem. Every Christmas season there is a musical event called Raskasta Joulua, which roughly
translates to Heavy Christmas, which
is a bunch of well-known Finnish metal musicians, including Marco Hietala of
Nightwish, Tarot, and Northern Kings, Tony Kakko of Sonata Arctica and Northern
Kings, Ilja Jalkenen, ex-Kiuas, Ari Koivunen of Amoral, JP Leppäluoto of
Northern Kings, Harmaja, Charon, and ex-Poisonblack, as well as a host of other
Finnish musicians, singing Christmas tunes with a metal twist. They do quite a
few shows in Finland and they get a huge turnout. I went to one of the Helsinki
shows back in December 2011 (it's so popular that they have to do two shows in
Helsinki) and it was fantastic. It really showed how metal is pretty mainstream
in Finland because among the metalheads there were business people in suits and
ties and other "ordinary" people who you'd never see at a metal show
in any other country. In fact, I think this is the perfect example of just how
metal Finland is. Maybe it’s because Finland is quite a small country compared
to Canada, in both geography and population, so everything is a bit more
concentrated here. Unlike in other countries where the top 40 radio playlist are
lacking in metal-ness, in Finland, it’s perfectly normal to hear one of the
many Finnish metal acts on mainstream radio and to know loads of people who are
into metal bands across all age groups. If metal is a subculture of outsiders,
I think they can find a home in Finland.
Don't forget to comment! You can also send me questions to my Tumblr and you can check out my Flickr, which consists of many pictures of Finland!
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