The Problem with Pop Music These Days (and a Really Good Finnish Term to Capture It with)

I am not someone who you could reasonably describe as a “music enthusiast.” Over the past decade or so I haven’t bought more than maybe three or four albums plus a few dozen singular songs from iTunes, and I do not usually listen to radio or watch any of the latest music videos from TV or online. But I don’t hate music in general either, can very well stand listening to most genres, even enjoy much of it. If I can choose, I usually prefer heavy metal, but I can also tolerate or even enjoy most pop music. Except for, as I have just recently discovered, much of the most popular (American and English) pop music released over the past few years. I fear that something has gone terribly wrong in that field of industry. This post will consist mostly of good old fashioned ranting against the major problem as I see it.

As said, I do not listen to radio much or watch recent music videos. But I get exposed to pop music at the gym where I go, about thrice a week, an hour or so at a time. The radio channels that they mostly play there lean heavily toward recent pop music and appear to have rather short play lists. The songs on the play lists of typical pop music radio channels change only slowly over a given period of a few months, so if one gets exposed to such play lists regularly enough, one is bound to hear the most popular current pop songs several times over in that period.  This year alone, for example, I believe I have heard each of the following international hit songs at least ten, maybe fifteen or twenty times, at the gym:

Rag’n’Bone Man: “Human”;

Ed Sheeran: “Shape Of You”;

Clean Bandit (feat. Anne-Marie & Sean Paul):“Rockabye”;

Sean Paul (feat. Dua Lipa): “No Lie”; and

Alan Walker: “Alone”

Yes. These would be the songs that I have been mostly listening to this year [a reference here being to the recurring sketch called “Jesse’s Diets” in the turn of the century British TV comedy series The Fast Show]. And, I am sorry to tell you, these songs have been driving me f’n nuts! For one reason in particular.

I mean, nothing much wrong with any of these songs when I heard them the first time, maybe even the second and third time; heck, I still kind of like that Rag’n’Bone Man’s song – such a distinctive and pleasant sound in his voice. But having had to listen to them 10 to 20 times over the past few months, by gods I feel like ripping off some heads. The problem is that each of these songs has so freaking repetitive lyrics. They belabor their message; fully intentionally most likely, with the purpose of making it an earworm (brainworm), through the sheer volume of tenacious repetition of some or a few simple lines. They do have other verses, or at least some rapping, beside the chorus, of course, some of them quite a few other words actually, but they seem all of them fiendishly designed to stupefyingly repeat some very simple message over and over, ad nauseam, so that at the end the listener only remembers those couple of words and sentences. And the fact that most of these songs vary the chorus a little bit every other time, I would have to say, that does not help much. It might be like with that legendary thing they call Chinese water torture, where one is supposedly strapped down and buckets of water are dripped one drop at a time to a specific spot on one’s head until one goes insane: my guess is that the technique would be even more effective if the drops did not come quite evenly – if there were some seemingly random variation on how quickly a drop followed the one before it.

To demonstrate the repetetiveness of pop song lyrics these days, I am afraid, I have no choice but to go through some of the lyrics of the five songs I mentioned above. (These five are just an exemplification, the first five songs that came easiest to my mind when I started thinking about this; there would certainly be many other recent songs that I could pick on.) To start with the (in my opinion) best one of those five songs, the one that I do not actually hate much, but which nevertheless illustrates the basic problem pretty well in a simple miniature form, Rag’n’Bone Man’s “Human.”

The song (written by Jamie Hartman and Rory Graham) begins, as most songs do, with the first verse. I will here skip that and all other non-repetetive verses and only tell you the repetetive parts. In this case I do not have to leave out an awful lot of other text, because the song repeats a version of the chorus after each and every verse and the verses are pretty short (the first verse is six lines (short sentences); the second, five; the third is just four lines; the fourth verse jumps back up to five lines; but the fifth is again only four lines long; and after that there are but two more lines sang in between two times two chorus). So after the first, full six-lines verse it is time to do the chorus the first time, pretty much in its basic form:

But I’m only human after all

I’m only human after all

Don’t put your blame on me

Don’t put your blame on me

Another, five-lines long verse of other stuff then follows; and, as said, after that, we come back to the chorus, only slightly modified this time around, so that the first line now starts with ’Cause and the second line with You’re:

’Cause I’m only human after all

You’re only human after all

Don’t put your blame on me

Don’t put your blame on me

As one might expect, we have a third verse of other stuff then, this time an even shorter clip – we are down to four lines at this point; and again after that we return to reiterating the point of the song. This third time it is close to the basic form again – that is, the first two lines start with I’m:

I’m only human after all

I’m only human after all

Don’t put your blame on me

Don’t put your blame on me

A fourth, five-lines long verse of other lyrics  then follows, but of course we get back to the chorus soon enough. This time it starts with ’Cause, but now the second line starts with I’m, instead of the refreshing You’re that Rag’n’Bone Man surprised us with the previous time the chorus started with ’Cause. So now we are told that:

’Cause I’m only human after all

I’m only human after all

Don’t put your blame on me

Don’t put your blame on me

Now you might think – might you not – that we are getting close to the end of the song? You would be wrong: we are only about halfway through. Perhaps Rag’n’Bone Man wants to play it safe; or, what is perhaps more likely, given that this sort of repetetiveness is pretty much the norm in pop music these days, some record company guy may have adviced Rag’n’Bone Man on this: Real cool song, man, real cool, but do you really think it is enough to repeat the chorus just four or five times? No, no, no, you have to do it like eight times; that is what the listeners want, otherwise they forget it, maaan, they forget! So again there is a short (four lines) verse of other stuff, and then again we are back with the chorus. And at this point they are doubling up on it, so the chorus is done twice, albeit the latter time with some new little twists:

I’m only human after all

I’m only human after all

Don’t put your blame on me

Don’t put your blame on me


I’m only human, I make mistakes
I’m only human that’s all it takes
To put the blame on me
Don’t put your blame on me

Then follows one more, albeit now only a two-lines long, stretch of other words, sandwiched between doubled versions of chorus. That is to say, the song also ends with yet another pair of chorus:

I’m only human after all
I’m only human after all
Don’t put your blame on me
Don’t put your blame on me

I’m only human, I do what I can
I’m just a man, I do what I can
Don’t put your blame on me
Don’t put your blame on me

Now if I counted correctly, that makes eight times the chorus. The words change a little here and there, but the point of the song, the point that the singer is only human, gets mentioned fourteen (14) times (discounting that one time when he tells us that you’re only human and the time when he says I’m just a man instead). Moreover, Don’t put your blame on me is likewise said fourteen times (discounting the one To put the blame on me). And keep in mind that the verses are pretty short, so the chorus gets reiterated with short intervals; indeed, all the lyrics are sang in a time of about three minutes, so both I’m only human and Don’t put your blame on me are said once in every thirteen seconds or so. (Also: as there are not much other lyrics, there is not much of a story being told in this song; but that would be a topic for another rant.)

Needless to say, I find that somewhat irritating. Especially when I am made to listen to this song like a dozen times over. But if it were just this one song, I could easily live with that. It is not the worst song you will hear, a pretty good one actually, and there is lots of music in this world so who cares if one song happens to be a little repetetive! However, the horrible reality is that most other pop songs at the moment are even worse in terms of repetitiveness. Consider, next, Ed Sheeran’s “Shape Of You” (written by Ed Sheeran and Steve Mac, with writing contributions also from John McDaid, Kandi Burruss, Kevin Briggs, and Tameka Cottle). You will be pleased to hear that I will not go through it as painstakingly as I did with the Rag’n’Bone Man’s song. Let me just point out that, over the course of the less than four-minute-long song, Mr. Sheeran repeats the following phrases or sounds the following number of times:

“I’m in love with the shape of you” x6

“Oh I oh I oh I oh I” x6

“Mmmm” x6

“Come on now, follow my lead” x6

“Come on, be my baby, come on” x14

“I’m in love with your body” x15

Alright, alright, you say: pop music may be a little repetetive these days. But has it not always been? That is how pop songs are. Even some of the best pop songs of all times! Alphaville: “Big In Japan” repeats the title of the song twenty-five times (if I counted correctly); The Human League: “Don’t You Want Me” and Bee Gees: “Stayin’ Alive” do it about the same number of times respectively. Yes, I know this. And I should confess that even those great, legendary pop songs will start to get on my nerves if I am forced to listen to them several times in a row. But I think, overall, pop music truly used to be better in that respect when I was young: there used to be more variety then, so that not every song went on and on about some couple of words. Perhaps the youngest generation of pop music consumers does not even know this because they have grown accustomed to the repetetiveness of pop lyrics? But consider Michael Jackson: “Billie Jean” – a great song, arguably the best pop song ever, and it is not very repetetive lyrics-wise. 

But wait! Not repetetive? Does it not repeat quite a bit that phrase Billie Jean is not my lover?

Wrong, you idiot! “Billie Jean” has plenty of good lyrics, it tells you a proper story. There are four different verses, and the song is in no hurry to get into the chorus. Also consider the structuring of the lyrics: after the first verse, there is a second one, and then comes a transitional bridge part; only then comes the chorus. After the chorus, we hear the third and the fourth verse; then the bridge again; and then the song ends with the chorus done a couple times, plus some repetition of the key line of chorus, which is indeed Billie Jean is not my lover ... But that line is done  no more than about ten times, I think (it fades away at the end, so it is hard to be precise). Ten, that is, not fifteen or twenty times. Moreover, the structure is such that the song does not repeat much anything until at the very end, when the repetition can be seen as a stylistic device, if you will, climaxing the song. That is very different from the present-day strategy of repeating the chorus after every little strip of verse that they have bothered to scribble down, and doing this four or five or six times, likely doubling up on the chorus in the latter parts of the song.

It has indeed been proven hundreds of times that you can write a very good pop song with very little repetition of any specific line; many of the best pop songs of all times are not very repetetive. My hunch is that some of those songs may surprise you with how little repetetive they actually are – that you might have thought that they are rather repetetive, although in fact they are not. That may be because many of them share a somewhat similar basic structure with “Billie Jean” – a structure where the majority of the little repetition they do all comes at the very end of the song. Prince: “When Doves Cry” is a good example, mostly repeating the name of the song toward the end of the song. But all in all, Prince only sings the line like nine times in the whole song. Madonna: “Like A Virgin” repeats Like a virgin actually only eight times. Simon & Garfunkel: “Mrs. Robinson” says the words Mrs. Robinson a pitiful seven times (in a couple different sentences, so there is hardly any repetetiveness at all).





Sadly, present-day artists do not do songs like those anymore. No, it is more like a competition over who is the most repetetive in pop lyrics these days. And a strong candidate for the winner of that competition is Clean Bandit (feat. Anne-Marie & Sean Paul) and their song “Rockabye” (for which the writing credits have been given to Ina Wroldsen, Steve Mac, Jack Robert Patterson, Sean Paul Henriques, Sean Paul, and Anmar Malik).

To leave off the other verses again and go straight to the juicy, repetetive parts of the song, the first time those parts go like this:

So, rockabye baby, rockabye

I’m gonna rock you

Rockabye baby, don’t you cry

Somebody’s got you

Rockabye baby, rockabye

I’m gonna rock you

Rockabye baby, don’t you cry

Rockabye, no

 Rockabye-rocka-rocka-rocka-bye

Rockabye, yeah, oh, oh

Rockabye-rocka-rocka-rocka-bye

This theme they return to a few times during the rest of the song, although it changes a little bit every time. To be more specific, the second time that they do it, they do the beginning like above, but stop at the second Rockaby baby, don’t you cry and after that they go:

Oh-badda-bang-bang-bang, alright then

Rockabye, no

Rockaby-rocka-rocka-rocka-bye

Rockabye, yeah, oh, oh

Rockabye-rocka-rocka-rocka-bye

 Rockabye, don’t bother cry

Lift up your head, lift up to the sky

Rockabye, don’t bother cry

Angels surround you, just dry your eye

Indeed. Getting a little repetetive already, are we? But this is not the end of it. The third time they do it, they, as might have been recommended by some able Chinese torturer, do it again a little differently. In particular, they put that rocka-rocka-rocka thing into the second line already and then repeat it more frequently. And now the chorus is getting longer; actually they stretch it and keep it going until the end of the song, so there are no other verses anymore. Perhaps I should just lay out those final parts of the lyrics to give you a good sense of just how infernally repetetive they get, if I may:

So, rockabye baby, rockabye

Rockabye-rocka-rocka-rocka-bye

I’m gonna rock you

Rockabye baby, don’t you cry

Rockabye-rocka-rocka-rocka-bye

Somebody’s got you

Rockabye baby, rockabye

Rockabye-rocka-rocka-rocka-bye

I’m gonna rock you

Rockabye baby, don’t you cry

Oh-badda-bang-bang-bang, alright then

Rockabye

 Rockabye, don’t bother cry

Lift up your head, lift it up to the sky.

Rockabye

Rockabye, don’t bother cry, yeah

Angels surround you, just dry your eye

Yeah

 Rockaby, don’t bother cry, no

Lift up your head, lift it up to the sky, oh

Rockabye, don’t bother cry

Angels surround you, just dry your eye

The other night I woke up and a part of the chorus of this song was playing in my mind. I could not make it stop. There I was, suffering from a burst of insomnia and listening to “Rockabye” in my mind, over and over and over again. Perhaps that was the intention of the people who wrote the song. But let me tell you, it did not make me consider purchasing the song, let alone the album. It made me want to write this post, to send this as a kind of open letter to you people who cursed me with “Rockabye,” to shake my fist at you and shout: Godsdamn you! Godsdamn you to eternal pain and torment! To listen to this song of your own design a f’n ten thousand times over!

You could have made the point in about half the length of this song, did you know? You could and you should have. Next time, please try to be a little more concise. Out of perverse curiosity I counted how many times Rockabye or rocka-rocka-rocka-bye is repeated in these Satanic verses. Could you believe it, forty-four (44) times.

Yes, I really hate this song.

But I do not want to leave the impression that it is an altogether exceptional piece of sheit amongst present-day pop songs. Alas, that would be far from the truth. Re-introducing Mr. Sean Paul (yes, the same guy who did the rapping in the “Rockabye”), this time featuring the very beautiful (making a career as a model as well as a singer and songwriter) young lady called Dua Lipa, and the song “No Lie” (written by Andrew Jackson, Sean Paul Henriques, Jamie Michael Robert Sanderson, Emily Warren, and Philip Kembo).



Hope you don’t mind if I spoil it a little bit for you by revealing right here at the outset that, this song is not one bit more imaginatively entitled than the previous: it is indeed the phrase No lie that you will find forming the centerpiece of this one.

There is some repetition of a few other lines, too (“Feel your eyes / They all over me / Don’t be shy / Take control of me ...” x4 ; “[Shake / Move] that body, let me see you just do it” x4 ; “It’s gonna be lit tonight” x12 ; and “Feels like we do it” x12), to be sure, but there is no question that it is the No lie that they are out to drive into your brain. If I did not lose count, the phrase No lie is parroted a very respectable thirty (30) times in this song. Admittedly, that would only amount to about 66% of the times that rockabye was repeated in the “Rockabye,” but it might just actually be a little more irritating due to the most damned simplicity (these being just two one-syllable words, all their information value straight out in your face) and the fact that Miss Dua Lipa sings them with pretty much the same note each and every time, elongating the end so that it comes out No li-i-i-ie). That, times thirty, equals despair on my part.



To adapt to Forrest Gump: that is all I have to say about that song. But there is one more of those five I mentioned at the beginning: Mr. Alan Walker and “Alone” (written by Gunnar Greve, Anders Froen, Alan Olav Walker, Jonnali Parmenius, Noonie Bao, and Jesper Borgen). A little bit more imaginatively entitled song than the previous one, I would have to admit, because the message (sang by Noonie Bao, I was told) that the song is trying to sell you is actually I’m not alone. Mercifully, this message is repeated only (or, “only”) twenty (20) times. But on the other hand, the song is only about 2 minutes and 40 seconds long, 160 seconds, so that makes one I’m not alone per every eight seconds. Unsurprisingly, there are hardly any other lyrics in the song at all: lyrics-wise, it mostly consists of trolling those I’m not alones twenty times.

Now, listening to those seemingly endless I’m not alones, I have to say, I get the impression that this could be sang by a child, or some mentally handicapped person, with the intention of picking on and harassing someone who is alone, teasing that other person like: “Ner ner ner ner ner ner, I’m not alo-o-ne! Ner ner ner ner ner ner, I’m not alo-o-ne! Ner ner ner ner ner ner, I’m not alo-o-ne! Ner ner ner ner ner ner, I’m not alo-o-ne ...!” as long as it takes to make the victim break down and cry.

And it is this association that brings me to what I promised in the title of this post: the really good Finnish term to capture the format of present-day pop songs. For we actually have a clear and very expressive noun derived from the verb for (one of) the Finnish version(s) of “ner ner ner ner” -sort of singing, which of course we have been hearing from every preschool and elementary school yard in this country from times immemorial.

The noun is lällätys; the verb from which it is derived is lällättää; and those terms come pretty straightforwardly from the sounds “läl läl lää, läl läl lää, läl läl lää ...!” (The vowel “ä” in Finnish words is pronounced pretty much the same as the voice you often hear in an infant’s cry – a Finnish person might indeed transacribe an infant’s cry like this: “Ä-ä-ä-ä-ä-ä-ä...!”)

One can add words and rhymes to the basic form of lällätys. Perhaps the most iconic, classic version of lällätys is: “läl läl läl läl lieru, sinulta pääsi pieru...!” And here we can see in action a very typical children’s method of songwriting, because “lieru” doesn’t mean anything; it is added for the sole purpose that, first, it begins with “l” and thereby goes phonetically well together with “läl läl”; and, second, of all the possible sounds in the world that begin with “l,” “lieru” is the one that best rhymes with “pieru” (“fart”). The latter part of this particular lällätys, “sinulta pääsi pieru,” means pretty much the same as “you farted” or “you passed gas.” (There is a slight nuance difference between “sinulta pääsi pieru” and another Finnish phrase that could be translated “you farted” or “you passed gas,” namely “sinä pieraisit,” though, the latter being in the form of active doing, so that it can be used to describe also a situation where a person has intentionally farted; whereas in the former case, signaled in particular by the term “pääsi,” the passive imperfect inflection of the verb “päästä,” which has a few English translations but in this case probably best translates as “to get out of,” the meaning seems better fit also to a situation where the person farts or passes gas altogether unintentionally, including even a situation where one has been trying to hold the fart in but then finally fails at that, so that the gas gets out of the body.)

Never mind. So lällätys is something pretty f-ing dumb and childish. It can consist of a mere repetition of läl läl läl läl voices and some stupid ass phrase, over and over and over again, with the singular purpose of mocking someone and making them mad. Yeah, lällätys is stupid as hell. So perhaps it does not paint a very pretty picture of us Finns as people that we should even have such a concept as lällätys. On the other hand, when we do lällätys it is usually when we are like five, six or maybe seven years of age. What’s the excuse for the pop song writers these days, I do not know.

Spede: A Glimpse into the Late-Twentieth Century Finnish Monoculture, and a Word or Two on Language

This post got started with me pausing to think about these two curious, relatively new (probably originating in the 1990s) Finnish terms, the descriptive noun spede and the verb spedeillä. If you are a non-native who hasn’t lived in this country very long and do not have much knowledge of our cultural history, you may find these terms somewhat hard to grasp and, therefore, lose at least some of the nuances of their meanings when translating them. I mean, if you are in a hurry and want to keep it simple, you can probably get away with translating spede with the term “buffoon” (or, “fool,” “bozo,” “dumb-ass,” etc.), and spedeillä with something like “fool around,” but the translation will then not capture everything that someone who has lived in this country in the decades around the turn of the millennium will read into them. In particular, some of the humor of the terms will easily get lost in translation. For in order truly to understand a term you will need to know a little bit about the cultural and historical backdrop, and then learn as many uses of the term as possible, in a variety of sentences or systems of sentences, in different situations or practices (in what Wittgensteinians call language-games). In the case of spede and spedeillä you should know a bit of Finnish (popular) cultural history (of at least the last quarter of the 20^th century) in particular, and preferably also appreciate the fact that it was very much a monoculture back then.

Now, it is a platitude, and yet actually in many cases quite misleading, to say that what for long used to be a (common to all, relatively homogeneous) monoculture in some country has only now quite recently become fragmented because of globalization, secularization, diversifying of interests and genres and subcultures, in the technological context where improving communications, media and most recently the internet, have allowed us (here in the developed countries) to form our identities as sort of combinations or mixtures of many different cultural ingredients. There have been times when and places where this supposed fragmentation of supposed former monoculture has been more an actual fact than in other places and times. And I have lived just about long enough to know that, in my humble opinion at least, it was quite real here in Finland over the last quarter-century.

Consider the fact that, these days, a part of the identity of many people in my country might involve notions like that they are fans of some TV-show or a movie director (“I am a kind of person who likes Tarantino movies”; “I am someone who is a fan of (the HBO series) Game of Thrones” ...); or that they like certain stand-up comedians, or certain YouTube channels, or a particular ethnic cuisine or a special diet; or that they commit much of their time to some hobby – ultra-running, scuba diving, disc golf, parachuting, or some online computer game. Insofar as these cultural elements are indeed constitutive of their identities, and insofar as they have adopted them and possibly to some extent altered their personal manifestations of them because of some sort of interactions with others who share those interests or hobbies, we can say that they are, in a sense, members of a worldwide “community” whose members enjoy the same idols, or the same cuisine, or live by (and preach to others the health benefits of) the same special diet, or form much of the sense of who they are around the same sport, online game, or other recreational activity. As there are now such global communities whose members share this sort of interests – and, thus, contents of mind which constitute bits and pieces of their identity – with potentially millions of other people around the world, those fields of interest can be said to constitute a strand of global culture. And at the same time, the diet or the hobby, the stand-up comedian or the YouTube idol that unites the minds of those hordes of people globally, will often be totally unfamiliar to most people in one’s own neighborhood or country. I mean, choose any YouTube star or starlet who has a seven-figure number of fans around the world, and chances are that most people in your country have never heard of that person.

Things were different back in the day before the internet. For one thing, the teenage kids who now gain millions of viewers on YouTube with their jokes and tricks or by sharing their views on fashion, might once have been successful only as what we used to call the class clown, or perhaps become the most popular girl in school. The most famous or notorious of them might have been known throughout the school or perhaps even throughout a small town or neighborhood, by hundreds of people. But even the most successful class clown and admired prom queen could not have been reasonably described as a global or national level “cultural icon.” Instead, back in the 1980s we had in this country, and in many other countries, dozens of national cultural icons that almost everyone would know and have opinions about; we had, for example, Spede.

Pertti “Spede”Pasanen (1930–2001), a film- and TV-producer, screenwriter, director, and actor, as well as – less famously – an inventor, was a public personality if there ever was one in this country. He produced, scripted, sometimes directed, and almost always also starred himself in, dozens of movies and several TV-shows, mostly comedies, in an era when there were only two television channels in this country – aptly titled TV1 and TV2. (Both were owned and ran by Yleisradio, our national broadcasting company, although it did allot a few hours of daily screen time to the one commercial broadcasting company that we had – Mainostelevisio (literally translated: “Commercial Television”) – for which Spede would also produce his shows. That commercial company would later adopt the name MTV3 after purchasing and in 1993 merging itself with the third Finnish channel, which had started airing in December 1986 (then only to about half of the country – the other half would still only have two channels until well into the -90s).)

The fact that there were indeed only two television channels back in the 80s is worth stressing, I think, because television may have been an important factor in the production of – for a brief, proud(?) moment in the late-20^th century – a peak in the Finnish monoculture. You see, there probably wasn’t at the outset too much by way of common culture here before the very idea of (there being such a thing as) one Finnish people emerged, first in the 19^th century after these lands had been taken from the Swedish crown in the 1808–09 war by Russia and turned into the Grand Dutchy of Finland. (There probably weren’t too much of common culture in any average-size or bigger country, not before the emergence of national identities and and then real nation states with parliamentary democracy, the developments which took place over the 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th centuries, hand in hand with the emergence of nation-wide media, the first key factor behind that having been the invention of the printing press.) Before nation-wide media, so I have gathered, cultures (language, customs, and traditions) differed so much between the many regions of this country that people from Western Finland would have had difficulties understanding people from Eastern Finland, and vice versa, and everybody would have had humongous difficulties understanding the Sami people (from Lapland). Finnish culture was probably more like a cluster of local, though of course variously overlapping, cultures, one in each major part of our present-day country. For although there would have been some common elements – based on similar agricultural practices, religion, and some laws set by the king in Stockholm (before 1809), or the czar (1809–1917) – I would imagine that a majority of the specifics of the “cultural software” running on the brains and practices of the people would have been noticeably different in many different parts of Finland. Only with national media there came to be more commonalities across this disparity. It began with newspapers, which, together with attendance-requiring national schooling systems (the first one of those was instituted only in the 1760s, in Frederick the Great’s Prussia) that were producing growing numbers of literacy throughout populace, started unifying culture, perhaps most distinctly language, throughout the country. Radio broadcasts offered more common experiences and national cultural icons by allowing the whole nation to share, in real time, in events like the speech of the president or one of our athletes winning Olympic gold. But television was in some ways the height of that development, allowing people to see visual images, including living expressions on the faces (which evolution has designed us – the kind of social, small-group animals that we are – to pay close attention to and care about) of would-be cultural icons. That allowed people to share in admiring (or hating), even becoming fans of, specific TV personalities that would be known to everybody.

That is why I think that, in some ways at least it was only with television that the unification of Finnish culture came to a head: with the introduction of television set to most households, allowing people to share in many contents with so many others across the country (and aware of the fact that it was a shared experience). Thus there emerged dozens and hundreds of new, shared contents for a peculiarly Finnish consciousness to marvel at: events and stories, concepts and phenomena, people and fates, all seasoned with so much visual imagery. In that sense, indeed, television unified much of the national culture; and this effect would last (only) as long as there were but two or three TV channels, because then basically everybody had to watch the same few programs every night. A face often seen on TV would be known by all throughout the country. That was the scene which Spede entered, in the 1960s.

It was early days of television entertainment in this country, and Spede was able to make a prominent position for himself in that niche, most likely because he was a very talented and energetic young man who could both come up with lots of ideas and scripts fast and to execute them rapidly too, and who also turned out capable of finding the right people to collaborate with.

Obviously no one could achieve much anything by oneself alone, and Spede too only achieved what he did by collaborating with a number of other people, for instance with such other grand old men of Finnish movie- and television-entertainment as Jukka Virtanen, Ere Kokkonen, Simo Salminen, and Vesa-Matti Loiri. Many of those men became something of cultural icons by their own right: everybody in this country would know who Jukka Virtanen, Simo Salminen, or Vesa-Matti Loiri was; everybody. (I should mention that they became known also from connections other than their collaborations with Spede – Jukka Virtanen, for instance, as a prolific scriptwriter, director, and for many years the host of the long-airing TV-show Levyraati (based on an older format used in American and British television, a show called Jukebox Jury), where a five-member panel graded songs with points from 1 to 10; and Vesa-Matti Loiri as an actor in many other productions besides Spede’s and also as a highly successful singer (here is a clip of him representing Finland in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1980, where he performed the song Huilumies (“A Flute Man”)). To give but one vivid example of just how widely known many of those guys became in this country: there was this one Jukka Virtanen that I knew (both Jukka and Virtanen are very common names in Finland), and as I understand it he had at some point found it rather irritating to share his full name with the famous Jukka Virtanen, not least because the other kids at school had come up with the nickname Jukka “Jukka Virtanen” Virtanen for him – a joke that obviously wouldn’t have made much sense unless just about everybody had known that there was that one particular other Jukka Virtanen.

Spede and the people he collaborated with were tremendously productive. Basically year in, year out, starting from the mid-sixties and all through the seventies, eighties, and much of the nineties, Spede and a group of other usual suspects would crank up a new TV-series season, plus a movie or two – with a shoelace budget – that would be shown in movie theaters first and come on small screen a couple years later.

A word about the movies: first of all, most of those “Spede flicks” (as the movies produced and otherwise orchestrated by Pasanen became commonly referred to) would get pretty awesomely crushing critiques from most movie critics worth their salt, but would usually do very well at the box office. The general public loved them, or at least found them funny and watchable enough to buy the ticket. Many a year one of those Spede flicks would be the most watched Finnish movie; and there were years when they were the most watched movie in this country, full stop. The most successful of them, some instalments in the incredibly popular Uuno Turhapuro franchise, would be seen in movie theaters by about 600,000 viewers or more (from a population of ca. 5 million).

The Turhapuro franchise is probably the first thing that comes to mind when one is asked to say something about Spede flicks. I personally do not think that Turhapuros were the funniest of Spede’s movies, I enjoyed some of the older adventure-comedies better, but they were the most popular and do constitute a good illustration of Spede humor. Turhapuros were a series of films starring Vesa-Matti Loiri as Uuno Turhapuro, a habitual bum and loafer with uncombed hair, stubbled face, and half the front teeth missing, mostly dressed in saggy old grandpa pants, suspenders, a holey string vest, and occasionally a trench coat, who had managed to charm and marry a rich businessman’s daughter. The movies were more collections of sketches than constituting any truly unified storyline, although they did have some vague sort of a background plot, around perhaps someone scheming something and someone else having some other plans and those schemes and plans conflicting in some surprising ways. It was more like there was this unifying theme holding each movie and the franchise together: the theme that much of the humor would come from the rich father-in-law’s loathing of and despairing over his no-good son-in-law and oftentimes coming to suffer from Uuno’s actions, and then perhaps plotting to get rid of him, but Uuno always ending up victorious, either because of some curious stroke of luck or because of coming up with some clever countermeasures or other schemes with his two friends (whom he had promised a share of the inheritance when the father-in-law dies), all the while keeping busy loitering, lying on the couch, finding ways to avoid work, and perhaps drink beer or hit on some beautiful woman that had entered his field of vision (the latter activity could mean him transforming his appearance into this very specific “Charmer Uuno” -look real quick, basically just by combing his hair back with gel and putting on sunglasses).

As to Spede himself, in the Turhapuro movies he would play the part of Uuno’s friend, Härski Hartikainen, an eccentric and (given his social status, surprisingly) arrogant, as well as in certain ways plain dirty –  in a sense to be defined shortly – car mechanic. Actually, here is a good opportunity for you to learn a delightfully multi-sided Finnish word. For whereas Hartikainen is a relatively common surname, Härski was a nickname, from the adjective härski, a term with which one could describe a food product gone bad, “rancid” or (in the case of a milk product) “sour,” but which is more interestingly applicable also as a characterization of personality – and of jokes, stories, pictures, or other acts of communication – in certain senses of “dirty,” the senses of “indecent” or “obscene,” but also carrying the meanings (more pertinent to the specific case of Härski Hartikainen) of “unscrupulous” and “shameless,” and often also transalatable as  “rude” or “disrespectful.”




Should you be a foreigner who has never seen any Spede humor, there might be no better quick clip to watch than this one (from a 70s black-and-white Turhapuro movie) where Härski inspects a car and makes an offer for it. In the sketch, an older man (played by Simo Salminen) comes to the Härski’s garage and offers to sell his car. Härski inspects the car and claims to find all sorts of faults with it. The customer asks, how much would Härski say the vehicle is worth? And Härski then takes his sweet time contemplating the matter, as if carefully considering every aspect. He lights a cigarette and all, thinking about the value of the car. Finally he answers: “Seven marks.” But at that moment his friend and associate, engineer Sörsselsön (also played by Simo Salminen) comes in and greets the older man: “Hi, dad!” Härski is stunned – clearly he did not know that the customer was his friend’s father. The father says: “This man is a härski one, offered me seven marks for this car!” But Härski saves the situation with some quick thinking: “Seven ... seven marks, indeed; seven marks per kilogram. And as this sort of car weighs about 2,000 kg, it makes ... 14,000 marks; so would that be okay with you?”

That is one of the best Spede jokes ever, I think; it makes me laugh, at least. More generally, in the Turhapuro movies and elsewhere, I think it is fair to say that what became known as Spede humor was rather lowbrow or childish; it was direct rather than subtle; and it was certainly manly, if not downright chauvinistic sort of humor. A striking example of the latter: one reoccurring sketch in the TV’s Spede Show in the late-80s was called “Naisen logiikka” (“A Woman’s Logic”), in which Spede played the part of a husband whose wife (very credibly played by Hannele Lauri) would make some silly claims or perhaps ask her husband to explain something, like a car’s differential gear system; Spede would then try and explain/mansplain how it is, but the woman just would not get it and would keep on contradicting the husband with some outrageously stupid remarks, until the man, Spede would end up speechless and in despair. And that would be the joke: there was no surprise twist to it.

The times were different then, of course. In many ways the eighties were still some of the good old days for the patriarchate in this country, so it was nothing too extraordinary to slip in a few chauvinistic jokes. And a good part of Spede humor was still otherwise quite funny. The editing of the movies and much of the other cinematography-technical stuff are rather poor, amateurish, by present-day standards, to be sure (just watch that above clip of Härski offering seven marks for a car if you question my judgment), but much of the jokes and the rest of the humor were pretty OK per se. Many of the actors were good, too, with a great sense of timing, which, as we know, is the key to good humor; and Vesa-Matti Loiri in particular was very good in physical comedy too. So I don’t think that there is much shame in admitting that, especially in the 70s and 80s, Spede did make us laugh. I remember laughing so hard watching, for example, the parody western Hirttämättömät (“The Unhanged”) which Pasanen, Loiri, Salminen and a handful of other guys had shot at some gravel pit near the town of Hyvinkää.

Of course, as I was a young child at the time, I suppose I was perfect audience even for childish jokes. (Though I should mention, in this connection, that there are people who would argue that Hirttämättömät is actually an objectively rather good movie and the humor apt for adults too; if you want, listen to this feature-length commentary by one Hannu Mäkinen, for example, and you can hear in his voice genuine enthusiasm about, as well as remarkably deep expertise on the topic (in Mr. Mäkinen’s enviably fluent English).) But now childhood, as we know, ends at some point. Also my relationship with the cultural icon called Spede Pasanen would inevitably change. Contributing to the change was the fact that, while I was growing up, becoming a teenager, in the late-80s and early-90s, Spede in turn, as the laws of nature would dictate, was getting older and more set in his ways. He now had some very recognizable mannerisms, which just about every imitator in this country would be having a field day on for years and years, even decades after Spede’s death; the humorist was becoming a topic of humor, the joker an object of jokes. (The most memorable of Spede’s mannerisms are how he would make this very grandiose, trademark face-palm, and say “Voe rähmä!” (“Ohh, lema!”); or how he would start explaining something, with a very distinctive tone of voice, by saying “Eh, nimittäin ...!” (“Ah; you see ...!”)) But even besides these I would say that Spede was becoming quite objectively speaking much less funny than before around the early 90s. In retrospect, too, I would say he was getting tired with sketches and jokes, was less into humor. He wouldn’t be making movies as often as before; he more or less stopped writing sketches for and appearing in TV comedy series; and most importantly, he would instead start appearing in this one particular gameshow that he had invented, the name of which changed over the years but finally became Speden Spelit (the first part being Spede in genitive and the latter a playful modification of the plural term pelit, “games,” a modification quite straightforwardly just making the two words alliterate, both now starting with Spe-).

In each episode of Speden Spelit (here is one episode in case you are interested) there would be four famous or, more often, semi-famous people competing in a set of events like jumping rope, bowling with (by kicking) a football attached to their ankle, guessing the color of a playing card, shooting with a light beam pistol, and rotating a hula hoop around the neck. At first there were a sketch or two per episode, too, and the show always started with the same, sort of comic title sequence (which you can watch by clicking the previous link), but over the years the actual show became more and more about the competition only. Spede himself would be hosting it, and I suppose he was trying to keep it light, mostly by just relying on his funny man habitus, but as he was getting older that habitus was arguably fading fast. Perhaps the funniest thing in Speden Spelit was when Spede, who would often challenge the winner of some event, promising to beat their result and offering to double or perhaps triple the prize money if he couldn’t do it, would actually get quite mad at himself and have a brief, genuine outburst of sorts if he failed the challenge. (That tells you something about Spede: he was a very competetive person, to put it mildly; and I should mention that he was very good at the events, even at the more physically demanding ones ... I mean, the man was in his sixties at the time but could jump rope like a f’ing Rocky Balboa, challenge people half or third his age and usually beat them.) But over the years even those fits after failed challenges lost much of their charm; they were getting pretty old, in my eyes, along with the rest of the show, and its host. 

By the late-90s by the latest, I would say, neither Speden Spelit nor Spede enjoyed much popularity amongst the teenagers or the twenty-somethings of this country. To us, Spede was now boring, predictable, dumb, very much an “old fart.” He and his show were all about the same ol’, same ol’ stunts and quips and mannerisms, over and over, dozens of times every year, year after year. He was now like the least funny guy ever, and yet one who you could expect to pop up on TV every week. (I am not  even exaggerating here: I just checked this from the (Finnish) Wikipedia page of the program, and it said there that, although at first there were some sort of summer breaks in the show, from November 1992 until Spede’s death in 2001 Speden Spelit was aired year round. That is, the damned thing would actually run non-stop, every single week. I had forgotten that that was so; but now it comes to me that one very special Christmas tradition in our country in those days was how Spede would be wearing a red-and-white Santa Claus hat in the episode of Speden Spelit aired nearest to Christmas.)

The very appearance of Spede would then piss many people off. I myself may have been so fed up with Spede in those days that I could actually grunt with frustration when I turned on the TV and the first thing I saw was Spede making a face-palm or swinging hula hoop around his neck. Yes, perhaps that sounds like over-reaction now, in this era of dozens of TV channels and unlimited quantities of entertainment available online, but remember that at the time we still had but three TV channels in this country (well, the fourth channel started airing in 1997, and there had long been a couple free cable channels in bigger cities, but still), so there weren’t too much to choose from when you came home and fell onto the coach and started surfing the channels, all three of them. There was a good chance that you would have to watch Spede failing in fun; that freaking Neanderthal grandfather of Finnish comedy, who due to the deplorable state of our country’s television entertainment was still having all the screen time he wanted, week after week, every godsdamnest week. 

An interesting youth-cultural development then took place. You know how when someone tries to be funny but isn’t, and then repeats the same sort of not funny acts time and time again, it might at some point become unintentionally funny? For many of us teenagers of the early-90s, that was pretty much what happened with Spede: we would start finding him so stupid that he was ridiculous, which is to say that he was, after all, kind of funny again. But of course that meant that we had started laughing at this man whom we as children had laughed with.



And then we come to that fantastic little piece of linguistic evolution that so nicely testifies to this: the introduction of the terms I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the desriptive noun spede, which I think most often translates best with the term “buffoon” (or, “fool,” “bozo,” “dumb-ass,” etc.), except of course for the Finnish term’s connotation of that particular person that we knew as Spede; and (a little bit later, I believe) the absolutely wonderful verb derived from the noun, the verb spedeillä, which cannot be as conveniently translated with any single term (though “fool around” does come close) because it means, basically, “to behave like a spede.”


If I had to guess, I would say that the original linguistic innovators behind these terms had been some teenagers. The first time I personally came across the term spede was on the pages of a newspaper, probably Helsingin Sanomat, 1993 or 1994 if my memory serves me, in an article that revealed that many of the commercials targeting young consumers those days failed miserably in their attempts to address that target group with any credibility. To be more precise, the term was mentioned in the specific connection of an ice cream TV-commercial where, I believe, a young rock group was first shown performing or practicing, and then the lead singer (or was it a singer-guitarist?) took a bite of the ice cream bar that was being advertised (Kingis was the name of the product, I believe). The article said that the young people they had been interviewing for the piece had found the commercial lame; and one of the interviewees was quoted as having said (something like) “Toi jätkä on ihan spede” (That guy is all spede).




And so it begun. Since then, I have heard the term used roughly in the said senses several dozens if not hundreds of times. That does not make them the most used terms in Finnish, but widely used enough for them being parts of proper language, not just of some local language-game or sub-culture. They probably started out that way, but the term-uses then spread from the teenagers’ language-games and stuck with us when we got older. In any case, over the past twenty years I have heard countless many thirty- or forty-year-olds use the terms spede or spedeillä. They might use spede like:


“That guy over there, he is an utter spede.”
“Stop being such a spede, man!”
“Oh, f- me, what a f’n spede I’ve been!”


The verb spedeillä (which is conjugated in the present tense like this: I spedeilen, you spedeilet, he/she spedeilee, we spedeilemme, you (plural) spedeilette, they spedeilevät), on the other hand, might be used in sentences like:


“What the hell you guys spedeilette here? Get to work already!”
“We need to quit this f’n spedeily and start doing this right!”
“I thought she would make a decent CEO, but she just spedeilee something at every turn!”


Spedeily in particular is one of my favorite words. It proves how healthy our language is. A lot has been said about how much English is affecting Finnish terminology; how several (American) English terms are adopted to our language every year, usually in some slightly modified form; and of course Finnish has always soaked in influences from other languages, mostly from Swedish, some from Russian, and a bit from German. But we should be pleased to see that there is also linguistic evolution through such endogenous terminological innovations like spedeily. Of course, it remains to be seen whether these terms stick and are adopted by the generations who have never seen Spede Pasanen. But that is the thing with linguistic evolution, of course, or any Darwinian evolution. I for one would be very happy should I hear some teenagers in the year 2050 using the term spedeily, most likely blissfully unaware of its origins.