Sixteen Volts

Inspired by the Eurovision victory by Lordi (but don't get so cocky, since obviously no country sends its A-squad to represent them at the Eurovision contest), I spent some time reading Wikipedia articles about Finnish rock bands and downloaded some songs that I remember from the simpler era when Finland stood firmly on two national legs of lumber and metal, just to see what these bands of my childhood years sound like to my jaded adult ears.

First, Eppu Normaali songs were still pretty good. And it's enough to listen to only two or three of their songs, since conveniently they are all pretty much the same song. I am also somewhat puzzled of the description "first significant Finnish pop group of the new wave" in the band's Wikipedia page: either I have totally misunderstood the term "new wave", or some wikiprankster has struck again.

Now that Tommy Lee, Vince Neil and other similar characters have found new comedic life in various reality shows, I wonder if the same holds for the members of Hanoi Rocks, a Finnish glam rock band who were pretty big in Japan at some point. I actually remember watching the infamous TV interview where "Andy McCoy" explained that he always carries twenty grand of cash with him so that if he ever sees anything that he likes he can just buy it. Such attitude was somewhat unheard of and alien to the frugal and traditional Finland that was just taking its baby steps to become an urban industrialized nation.

CMX is perhaps the one Finnish band that I have ever liked most, to the extent that I actually went to see them when they were playing at the student union house in Tampere. The band hadn't hit it big at that time, so even though the place was packed, you didn't need to buy tickets beforehand or anything. A few years later they were back in town and I thought on a whim that it would be fun to see them, but it turned out at the door that the tickets had been sold out long ago. Screw that! The first time that I visited my future wife in Canada, I took a couple of CMX tapes with me and played them to her. ("Yö ei ole pimeä päivä" is in fact one of the first Finnish sentences she ever learned.)

I couldn't really tell what the Finnish kids who have never known a time before having more than two television channels, both of which show the official newscast at 8:30, the Internet and giant coke bottles are listening to these days. Perhaps Darude, the man whose music is best described by the old joke that new trucks can no longer make that beep beep sound when they back up, because if they did they would have to pay royalties to Darude. Or perhaps that one hippity-hop band whose name I can't recall right now but whose song "Freestyler" was popular in certain circles.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Tuesday, May 23, 2006 at 7:57 AM