The Finnish Music Blog

at the moment it's very typical of rappers everywhere to have quite a mumbly delivery. i admit i don't listen to finnish rap very much, other than käärijä, but the finnish rappers i do occasionally hear somewhere seem to have quite a.... lazy delivery, you know? to me, many of them give off the vibe that they kind of want to pretend they don't care about what they're saying? even in the collab songs he has done with other rappers, jere stands out in 1) varieties of flow, 2) use of his voice and 3) diction.

now, you make an interesting observation about the differences between his finnish and english, and it's very interesting that you used the word "chop" there, because finnish can indeed be quite a choppy language in a way.

quick context: finnish is a language with very consistent emphasis/accents. in finnish, the emphasis/accent in a word is, as a rule, always on the first syllable, then after that on every other, but never on the last. so, unlike many other languages, finnish doesn't go up and down and put emphasis on seemingly random syllables that you just have to learn by heart. emphasis is always predictable in finnish, and when going fast, that can indeed make finnish sort of choppy sounding, because it turns quite easily very rhythmic i guess, rather than melodic, like many other european languages.

finnish also has very clean and particular vowel sounds, compared to english, for example. and, importantly, finnish consonants like T, K and P are not aspirated, the way they are in english. (basically, in english, when you pronounce T, K or P there's like a little tiny explosion of air that comes out of your mouth. that doesn't happen in finnish. the pronunciation is sort of "harder" in finnish and "softer" in english.)

ok i might be getting sidetracked here, sorry.

now, with jere's english, you can hear that there are several influences to the way he pronounces his words. on one hand, he does something that is very typical for finnish speakers, and that is, in fact, trying to pronounce every letter in the word. you can hear this mostly when he speaks, and says things like "sausage" or "language". in finnish we don't have silent letters and each letter corresponds with basically just one sound (some notable exceptions like the ng-sound, but shhh about that for now) so to a native finnish speaker, english pronunciations of those words just don't compute, naturally. but then there is the other influence, which is mimicking others. and you can hear that he doesn't always instinctively know where to put emphasis in words in english, but he knows that it's not supposed to sound the same as finnish, so he sort of softens his diction a bit.

also, so far he hasn't really rapped much in english, has he. SFB for example is much more melodic from start to finish, so he's sort of weaving the words together, and it sounds better when it's sung that way. so that's also an influence. but then i think i can hear what you mean even in more melodic songs in finnish too.

i think it comes down to finnish pronunciation just being that much more comfortable for him, where as english has a lot of sounds that are very foreign and very difficult for native finnish speakers. all of the aspirated consonants, the vowels that seem to us like they are actually between two different vowels, sounds like the th-sound, none of these are easy to master if your native language doesn't have them.

sorry this turned into a really long ramble :D

tl;dr: YES he has incredible diction, and some of it might be because finnish is naturally quite a rhythmic and possibly even "choppy" language, BUT he very clearly also makes an effort to be clear and not sound lazy or uninterested (like many other rappers do) and that's just one of the reasons why i find him so damn INTERESTING to listen to.