Matkailun affektiivisuus 2010-luvun suomalaisessa populaarimusiikissa

Authors

• Susanna Laamanen Itä-Suomen yliopisto
• Juhana Venäläinen Itä-Suomen yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33351/mt.112020

Keywords:

popular music, tourism, affectivity, emotional tonalities

Abstract

This paper examines descriptions of tourism affectivity in Finnish-language popular music in the 2010s and the early 2020s. The study helps understand the imagery of travel stories, their evolution, and their connections to the present. Songs can express feelings, experiences, and trends related to tourism and extend the shared vocabulary of travelling. The source material comprises 84 songs representing both mainstream and independent bands and artists. The affectivity of tourism was examined using content analysis, resulting in four emotional tonalities: escaping, boundlessness, reminiscence and staying. The songs were categorized based on their most characteristic tonality, although it was noticed that different tonalities could also overlap or merge. Quantitatively, the most prevalent tonality was escaping, which manifested itself as carnivalesque stories, the need for rest, and the strive to flee from everyday life and the domestic climate. The tonality of boundlessness, linked to the themes of nomadism and cosmopolitanism, built a new kind of travel imagery in the form of boundless and ostentatious tourism. Reminiscence appeared especially as an autobiography related to past relationships and shared travel experiences. The fourth emotional tonality, staying, was linked to poverty, climate change, love for the homeland, and criticism of bourgeois travelling culture. The travel songs of Finnish popular music in the 2010s are in many ways a continuation of the travel imagery of the previous decades’ songs. Still, the songs also reflect how tourism has grown and travelling has become ordinary – as well as critically discussing the social and ecological sustainability of tourism.