In Marseille, Rap Helps Keep the Peace

From the New York Times
December 19, 2007
Abroad
In Marseille, Rap Helps Keep the Peace
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

MARSEILLE, France — The other day, a dozen or so teenage rappers in baggy jeans and hoodies gathered outside a community arts center called Le Mille-Patte in Noailles, a poor immigrant neighborhood here, hard by the Old Port.

One of this city’s most successful hip-hop artists, M’Roumbaba Saïd, who calls himself Soprano, lately wrote a track called “Melancholic Anonymous”: “I can’t help it, expressing my feelings, my melancholy in my lyrics,” he rapped. “I can laugh at my sadness. It helps.”

When the slums outside Paris, Lyon, Toulouse and Strasbourg exploded last month, repeating the violence that erupted two years ago, here in Marseille, France’s second-largest city, all remained calm. Back in July, in one of this city’s impoverished northern neighborhoods, a 14-year-old boy named Nelson Lobry-Gazelle was killed by a police car. Four hundred people demonstrated peacefully, so the incident barely made headlines. As it happens, it was also a police car’s killing two teenagers in Villiers-le-Bel, a destitute suburb about 10 miles north of Paris, that sparked the trouble that broke out across France in November. A bus-burning here in October 2006 was considered an isolated incident and failed to ignite a local chain reaction.

The Marseillais have plenty of explanations for this disparity, aside from the obvious one that the poor areas here aren’t segregated on the city outskirts, as they are in Paris — but it is hip-hop, as much a source of local pride as the town’s soccer team, that turns out to be a lens through which to examine why this city didn’t burn.

Melancholy is the word often used to describe the local rap style: melancholy as a reflective state of mind. In contrast to the city’s sun-and-sea context, melancholy actually suits lots of its culture. A Marseille novelist, Jean-Claude Izzo, who died just a few years ago, became famous in France for writing grim, pessimistic detective stories. Robert Guédiguian, also from Marseille, is a filmmaker whose reputation is based on dark movies.

Rappers in Marseille, some of the most original and distinctive ones anyway, compose sad odes to their local neighborhoods and hymns to the whole melting-pot city. The sound of Paris hip-hop, slicker and more aggressive, adopts much from American gangsta rap, as Marseille hip-hop does too, but Marseille boasts a groovier style. It mixes in blues, flamenco, Jamaican ragga.

The number that a decade or more ago helped fixed IAM, the Marseille group, on the French charts, borrows from George Benson to lay down a mellow beat. "Belsunce Breakdown," about one of the city’s downtown neighborhoods, by Bouga, a rapper from there, begins with a hypnotic piano riff, jazzily syncopated — a little Steve Reich crossed with 50 Cent.

Here the basic interconnectedness of all modern music expresses a local truth about the city’s cultural identity. An ancient, gritty seaport, Marseille flaunts its history as an immigrant magnet. Its population of 820,000 includes 200,000 Muslims, 80,000 North African Jews, 80,000 Armenians. One of the largest immigrant groups is made up of Muslims from the Comoro Islands, near Madagascar. Three of the four musicians in PSY4 de la Rime, Soprano’s band, are Comorians who grew up in the northern part of Marseille where Mr. Lobry-Gazelle died. The fourth member of the band, DJ Sya Styles (of Moroccan background, born Rachid Aït Baar), like many of the teenagers at Le Mille-Patte, comes from Noailles.

Marseille lyrics can be full of rage but they’re not violent, the way those of certain Parisian bands are. Two years ago 152 conservatives in the French Parliament brought suit against seven rap groups, but notably none from Marseille, for fostering hatred and racism against whites and for what one politician called “anti-French ” sentiments.

PSY4, by contrast, wrote a rap not long ago called “Justicier”: “I know all the cops are not that bad, but why do you always ask me for my ID? To your violence I prefer responding with my lyrics. Can’t we have a proper dialogue?”

The other evening PSY4 occupied a recording studio in Grottes Loubières, just northeast of the city. During a break the members talked about the way rappers help one another here, and about how success comes not from landing studio contracts but from earning respect, ground up.

“Rap’s not a business here, the way it is in Paris,” DJ Sya Styles said. “It’s not like Paris, where the suburbs are just concrete. Here you first have to prove yourself in the neighborhoods.”

Stéphane Gallard put it another way: “Paris is more hard-core.” He is the quiet, suave young man in charge of music programming for the nonprofit Radio Grenouille, the city’s most popular hip-hop station. “The fact that hip-hop artists sell their music on their own blocks contributes to their identifying with Marseille, and this explains why there’s no car burning,” he said. “Different communities in Marseille are still quite separate, there’s racism here, but it’s a city in which you have the freedom to move among communities if you choose.”

It’s also true that this city has a contrarian streak going back at least 2,000 years, to when it backed Pompey over Caesar. You might say Marseillais rappers reflect the tradition of “pays,” or local communities, to which their inhabitants maintain more powerful loyalties than to France. At the same time, it’s a place proud of its old Corsican and French-Italian mob heritage (a popular downtown clothing store was named for a famous mob boss), and the prevalence of drug dealers and North African gangs does partly explain why there’s relative calm in destitute areas: Calm is maintained for the sake of their businesses.

Unemployment nears 40 percent in those same parts of town among those 18 to 25; it’s 13 percent citywide, much more than the national average of 8 percent. So clearly job opportunities alone, or their lack, don’t account for the absence of urban violence recently.

It helps that an old, Mediterranean-style civic patronage system doles out favors to earn loyalty and keep the peace. And, as everybody says, unlike Paris, where immigrant poor occupy huge concrete blocks cut off from the city center, Marseille has its neighborhoods, like Noailles, that are smack in the middle of town, while the hard-pressed quarters to the north are linked to the center by cheap public transport and remain inside city limits. So residents feel that they belong to Marseille, because they do, and in turn they feel that Marseille belongs to them.

Out of these communities, where musicians have their own version of a patronage system, the hip-hop scene has emerged — besides PSY4 de la Rime, IAM and Bouga, others, like Keny Arkana, FAF Larage, Fonky Family, DJ Rebel and Prodige Namor, have made it big here.

“Marseille rap never integrated violence the way Paris did,” Philippe Fragione told me. He’s Akhenaton, the leader of IAM. He, like other older musicians here, supports younger Marseille rappers. It was his studio in Grottes Loubières that PSY4 was using. Marseille rap is “more socially conscious,” Mr. Fragione added. “That’s because there is a real sense of community.”

I stopped in the waterfront office of Paul Colombani, the deputy director of the redevelopment program Euroméditerranée. With more than $5 billion in public and private investments, it plans, by 2012, to turn some 2.5 miles of downtown into office towers, mixed-income apartments, museums and esplanades. Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel and other archistars have signed on. Outside the porthole office window, the Danielle Casanova, an enormous white ferry, waited to carry passengers to Algeria. Passengers coming back often bring knockoff goods that merchants hawk on sidewalks. “Les jeunes errants,” as migrant street children, some as young as 12, are called, hide in boats, then head for Noailles when they land. A few have become aspiring rappers through community cultural centers like Le Mille-Patte.

Mr. Colombani noticed my gaze. “That will be moved out of this area,” he said about the ferry. He meant to L’Estaque, far to the north, “easier for customs,” he explained. Luxury cruise ships will dock here instead.

Marseille can surely use the money, but hardly at the cost of undoing the social chemistry that has kept the peace and fostered, among other things, the city’s musical life. At Le Mille-Patte those dozen or so young rappers outside were a typical Marseille mix: first-, second- or third-generation immigrants from Algeria, Morocco, the Comoro Islands, Eastern Europe, Argentina.

Habib was a skinny 18-year-old with a doleful face and a band called Urban Revolution. “We all get along because we share music,” he explained. Le Mille-Patte had first encouraged him to rap as a young boy: “I didn’t know what to do with my days, so this place was very important.”

Bacariane, a slightly older rapper wearing a New York Yankees cap, its brim pressed down over his eyes, piped in: “This is a rough neighborhood, but there’s not violence here without meaning, like in Paris. I lived there for a while,” he said, meaning in the isolated suburbs outside the capital. He paused to consider the difference. “Here there is a culture of respect,” he said. “We’re all Marseillais.”

Traditional Changing of Gender Identity in Albania

The Sacrifices of Albania's 'Sworn Virgins'
A Rockville Filmmaker Tells Of an Old Custom That Both Liberates and Limits Women

By Joshua Zumbrun
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 11, 2007; C01

When the Albanian journalist and author Elvira Dones was traveling in the mountains of northern Albania, she asked for directions from someone she thought was a man walking his mule through a village, rifle on shoulder.

After the exchange, her guide whispered, "That is one of them."

Dones, who lives in Rockville, had just met an adherent of an ancient northern Albanian tradition in which women take an oath of lifelong virginity in exchange for the right to live as men. The process is not surgical -- in these mountains there is little knowledge that sex-change surgery is even possible. Rather, sworn virgins cut their hair and wear baggy men's clothes and take up manly livelihoods as shepherds or truck drivers or even political leaders. And those around them -- despite knowing the sworn virgins are women -- treat them as men.

The idea that a woman would need to forsake love and live as a man to control her own fate seems primitive to modern eyes. But perhaps, in the context of a once-upon-a-time culture, a culture before feminism, it can be seen as progressive. The existence of sworn virgins reveals a cultural belief, however inchoate, that a biological woman can do all the work of a man.

"Why live like a man?" one virgin, Lule Ivanaj, asks herself rhetorically in an English-subtitled documentary that Dones (pronounced DOH-nez) made on the women for Swiss television called "Sworn Virgins." Ivanaj looks like a man in his 50s, with short hair, thick arms and a wide metal watchband on one wrist. "Because I value my freedom. I suppose I was ahead of my time."

Dones, 47, learned about sworn virgins 25 years ago from her university classmates in Albania's capital, Tirana. The practice has existed at least since the 15th century, when the traditions of the region were first codified, according to Dones. The sworn virgins came into being for emergencies: If the patriarch of the family died and there was no other man to carry on, a provision was needed so that a woman could run her family.

When Dones was in college, the country was under the control of communist dictator Enver Hoxha, who ruled for more than 40 years until his death in 1985. Dones had the itch to tell the story of the sworn virgins, but the communist regime tightly controlled the media and travel to the north was not allowed.

In 1988, Dones -- then a journalist for state-run television -- defected, in part because of frustration with her country's government. She moved to the Italian-language region of Switzerland, where she worked for Swiss television and wrote novels.

Three years ago, she moved to Rockville, where she continues to write and make documentaries for Swiss television. She is now a popular novelist in Italy and Albania, having written eight books of fiction; her most recent novel, published this year in Italian and Albanian, is about a 34-year-old woman named Hana, who comes to regret her decision to live as a sworn virgin. For her book, Dones read up on the tradition, which has been documented by historians and sociologists. But until recently she had never met a sworn virgin, except for that brief, unwitting encounter with the rifle-toting virgin while filming a documentary on another topic.

"I was happy with the novel, but I wanted to see them," Dones says, "I was obsessed by them."

So last year Dones traveled to meet with them. There are only about 30 to 40 sworn virgins remaining in Albania, Dones says, with perhaps a few in the neighboring mountains of Kosovo and Serbia and Montenegro. Dones interviewed 12, from elderly women to 20-somethings. The documentary debuted on Swiss television this year and has been accepted into the Baltimore Women's Film Festival, which takes place in October. It also is available through Dones Media, the U.S.-based production company Dones co-owns with Swiss television.

In the mountains of northern Albania, throughout modern history, women have had very few rights. They cannot vote in their local elections, they cannot buy land, there are many jobs they are not permitted to hold; they cannot even enter many establishments. An ancient set of laws called the Kanun still helps govern the region. The Kanun says, "A woman is a sack made to endure."

Other traditional practices of the north were repressed by the communists, but leaders in Tirana simply never cared if a woman in the impoverished and remote mountains wanted to dress and labor as a man.

Over the years, women became sworn virgins for different reasons. Some swore the oath if the patriarch of the family died. Others swore the oath out of a fierce streak of independence, and others because it was the only way to avoid an arranged marriage without disgracing the family of the selected groom. The oath is traditionally sworn in front of a town's elders, though some women take the oath privately.

One virgin that Dones interviews in the documentary, Shkurtan Hasanpapaj, once served as the local secretary of the Communist Party, the top office in her region. She was in charge of all the men, and though they knew the reality of her anatomy, her authority was unquestioned.

Asked if she would have felt restricted in a marriage, the virgin Ivanaj responds, "Absolutely! More like squashed than restricted. . . . Even when there's love and harmony, only men have the right to decide. I want total equity or nothing."

"I wanted to tell their stories and respect the way they told their stories," Dones says. "I found an extreme sense of beauty in them. They are not bitter. They carry the stories with such dignity. . . . They are so comfortable with their role."

But the virgins in Dones's documentary acknowledge there are many sacrifices with this lifestyle. The women may enjoy the rights of men, but they are denied their womanhood. They will never experience the pleasures of having a lifelong partner or bearing children.

Sanie Vatoci, a 50-year-old who took the oath as a teenager when her father died, speaks of how she has slowly come to regret the life she now leads as a solitary truck driver.

"While looking at other couples, reading books, watching movies -- I began to wonder: Why don't I have a partner? Why am I acting like a man?" Vatoci says. "There must have been a man out there for me."

But it may be too late for her. Even as movies and television creep into northern Albania, even as traditions slowly die, Vatoci could never go back on her oath, she says. Breaking the oath was once punishable by death, and though Dones doubts such punishment would be enforced today, a deflowered sworn virgin would nevertheless be shunned, she says. She would certainly never be accepted as a woman.

It's easy now for people to come down from the mountains. Travel is no longer restricted. The city beckons. And just as many members of the new generation leave their ancestral homelands for a modern life, modern life slowly trickles back into the mountains. The choice between being a woman and having the rights of men is no longer absolute.

"I asked the young girls of the region what they think of the sworn virgins," Dones says. "They said they respect them, but they would never follow their path. Not now."

Vatoci, the truck driver, has applied to immigrate to the United States, where her sister has lived for seven years, and maybe here, Vatoci figures, she could have a fresh start.

"She deeply feels that she needs to give love to someone else," Dones says. "And of course, she's not delusional. She knows that perhaps she will never find a man. And perhaps she could never start a life as a woman at 50."

Though Vatoci speaks no English, she has the "skills of a man," and Dones thinks she could make it in America: "She went to school for being a truck mechanic. She's a tough guy."

Fascist Overtones From Blithely Oblivious Rock Fans

NYT
July 2, 2007
Zagreb Journal
Fascist Overtones From Blithely Oblivious Rock Fans
By NICHOLAS WOOD

ZAGREB, Croatia, June 30 — On a hot Sunday evening in June, thousands of fans in a packed stadium here in the Croatian capital gave a Nazi salute as the rock star Marko Perkovic shouted a well-known slogan from World War II.

Some of the fans were wearing the black caps of Croatia’s infamous Nazi puppet Ustashe government, which was responsible for sending tens of thousands of Serbs, Gypsies and Jews to their deaths in concentration camps.

The exchange with the audience is a routine part of Mr. Perkovic’s act, and the gesture seemed to lack any conscious political overtones. The audience — most of whom appeared to be in their teens and early 20s — just seemed to be having a good time. But Mr. Perkovic’s recent success among a new generation — many of them apparently oblivious to the history of the Holocaust — has prompted concern and condemnation from Jewish groups abroad and minority groups in Croatia.

[Despite those objections, the concert — his biggest ever, with an estimated 40,000 fans in the soccer stadium — was shown in prime time on Sunday night on state-owned television, prompting further protests from Jewish and Serbian groups.]

“We don’t want to pay for something that strikes fear into my children, or distances them from their friends or neighbors,” said Milorad Pupovac, leader of the largest Serbian political party in Croatia, referring to the plan for the broadcast.

What has shocked those groups more, though, is that in the ensuing debate, many senior politicians and journalists have said that they see no problem with the imagery or salutes.

“They just don’t seem to get it,” said Efraim Zuroff, the Jerusalem director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who has urged President Stipe Mesic to ban future concerts and help outlaw the use of extremist symbols and slogans.

The Croatian government has been trying to improve its image so it can join the European Union, and it did issue a statement after the concert criticizing the open display of Ustashe memorabilia and slogans. But much of Croatia’s political establishment cannot understand what all the fuss is about.

“You can’t see any anti-Semitism here,” Dragan Primorac, Croatia’s education minister, said in an interview. He said he had planned to attend the concert, before rain caused it to be postponed by a day. Others who did get there, though, included a former foreign minister and two Croatian basketball stars.

“At most, you could blame four to five people,” Dr. Primorac said, for wearing Ustashe regalia, or giving the Nazi salute during the concert. He emphasized, too, that Croatia was a good friend of Israel and pointed to a photograph on his mantelpiece of himself with the Israeli elder statesman Shimon Peres as evidence.

Over the last three years the conservative prime minister, Ivo Sanader, has to some extent managed to shed the country’s image as a nationalist state that once harbored war criminals. The effort has been successful enough that Croatia is a favorite to join the European Union. What was seen for much of 1990s as a war-torn nation is now widely perceived as a prime tourist destination, with 10 million tourists a year and visitors flocking to its Adriatic coast.

Photographs and memorabilia from the Ustashe period are no longer sold openly in Zagreb’s city center. Restaurants no longer display photographs of Ustashe units on their wall. But souvenir shops do still sell key rings and baseball caps with the Ustashe U, as well as the slogan used in Mr. Perkovic’s concerts, “Za Dom: Spremni!” or, “For the Homeland: Ready!”

And many Croats still display an insensitivity to Holocaust issues. Mr. Perkovic’s public affairs manager, Albino Ursic, has a large poster that he designed in 1994 on the wall of his office with the words “final solution.” The poster shows a package of cigarettes marked with a large Swastika and labeled “Adolf Filters,” poking out of a black leather jacket. “It’s an antismoking picture,” he said.

“It won an award in Lisbon,” he added, emphasizing that he viewed himself as left of center. As for Mr. Perkovic’s performance, Mr. Ursic said, the fascist salute is made by soccer hooligans across Europe who have little understanding of it. “It is just teenage rebellion,” he said.

Mr. Perkovic’s patriotic — and sometimes violently nationalistic — songs first became popular here during the Balkan wars, when he fought in the Croatian Army. Most Croats know him better by his stage name, Thompson, given to him during the war, when he carried the British-made submachine gun of the same name. He, too, has recently sought to distance himself from the Ustashe association. In an interview, the soft-spoken singer said he had never raised his own arm to make a fascist salute. Nor, he said, did he encourage people to wear Ustashe uniforms. As for the Ustashe slogan he uses, he claims it is a traditional Croatian salute that predates World War II.

Others are unapologetic. Vedran Rudan, a columnist with the Croatian center-right daily Nacional, accused Mr. Zuroff of “extreme arrogance” for writing a letter to the president of Croatia asking the government to bar future Thompson concerts.

She also accused him of branding Croatian youths fascists while ignoring the activities of a well-known ultranationalist member of Parliament, who has close ties with Israel.

“Why do Jews forgive him everything, and the beardless youth and Thompson do not have right to mercy?” Ms. Rudan wrote.

But rights groups here say there is a fundamental problem. While Croatia is now seeking to move away from the nationalist period of the 1990s, the current generation of young people has largely been schooled to believe that the Ustashe government’s actions were no worse than those of Communist leaders in Yugoslavia during the same period.

“They want to put them on an equal footing,” said Danijel Ivin, the president of the Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights. “The education about the recent history of Croatia is not adequate.”

Dr. Primorac said that was slowly beginning to change and pointed out that since 2004, Croatian schools had dedicated a day each year to studying the Holocaust.

Others do not think it is changing quickly enough. “It is an issue,” said Tomislav Jakic, an adviser to President Mesic. “It is far from Ustashe nostalgia that was 15 years ago, when the ghost was first let out of the bottle. But the ghost is still here and it will be for years to come.”

Monster Metal Finns Win Euro-Vision

Finns 'Turn the Amps Up,' Win Eurovision

By JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press WriterSat May 20, 11:01 PM ET

There's a giant stadium, highly toned participants, intense rivalry and flag-waving fans from many nations.

It's not the Olympics: It's the Eurovision Song Contest, the annual kitsch extravaganza, known for its bland dance music and bubble-gum pop, that sees acts from 24 countries face off before tens of millions of television viewers.

But in a stunning upset for the contest that launched the Swedish group ABBA, a Finnish metal band with monster masks and apocalyptic lyrics won the contest late Saturday.

The band Lordi scandalized some of their compatriots when their song "Hard Rock Hallelujah" was chosen to represent the nation. At a press conference, the band's frontman said his plan for the final was to "scream louder. And turn the amps up."

"This is a victory for rock music ... and also a victory for open-mindedness," the band's lead singer, Mr. Lordi, said after the win — Finland's first. "We are not Satanists. We are not devil-worshippers. This is entertainment."

Combining crunchy guitars, a catchy chorus and mock-demonic imagery, Lordi is reminiscent of U.S. '70s stars KISS — an acknowledged inspiration of Mr. Lordi.

Band members never appear without their elaborate masks and makeup, and do not reveal their true names.

Lordi beat an unusually eclectic 24-nation field, which ranged from the perky pop of Danish teenager Sidsel Ben Semmane and Malta's Fabrizio Faniello to the balladry of Ireland's Brian Kennedy and the country-pop of Germany's Texas Lightning.

Regarded by many as the contest good taste forgot, Eurovision is adored by fans of camp everywhere.

"You don't imagine something so bad could be so good," said Carmela Pellegrino, an Australian who traveled to Athens from London to watch rehearsal ahead of Saturday's finale.

Since 1956, it has pitted European nations against one another in pursuit of pop music glory. Previous winners include '60s chanteuse Lulu, ABBA — victors in 1974 with "Waterloo" — and Canada's Celine Dion, who won for Switzerland in 1988.

Saturday's showdown was broadcast live in 38 countries to a TV audience estimated at 100 million. Some 13,000 fans packed the indoor arena used during the 2004 Olympic Games, from Goth supporters of Lordi to cowboy-hatted Germans supporting Texas Lightning. Some 3,000 police officers were on duty for the event.

NBC announced plans earlier this year to replicate the formula — a forerunner of "American Idol"-style talent contests — in the United States, with acts from different states competing for viewers' approval.

The European Broadcasting Union, which runs Eurovision, said it was in talks with NBC over rights. If successful, the American version could go ahead as early as this fall, said the group's director of television, Bjorn Erichsen.

Athens staged the event because Greece won last year in Kiev, Ukraine.

Lordi received a trophy shaped like an ancient Greek column, and the show opened with a garish musical number inspired, organizers said, by Greece's rich history, mythology and sparkling seas. The hosts — Greek pop singer Sakis Rouvas and "Access Hollywood" correspondent Maria Menounous — made their entrance by "flying" onto the set, which resembled an ancient theater.

Some of the acts, like Switzerland's Six4One, stuck to the classic Eurovision formula of catchy tunes and blandly uplifting lyrics, singing, "If we all give a little, we can make this world a home for everyone."

Ireland's Brian Kennedy offered a syrupy ballad entitled "Every song is a cry for love," while Bosnia's Hari Mata Hari said it hoped to bring people together with the love song "Lejla."

Some acts were more daring: Latvia's Cosmos perform a cappella on "I Hear Your Heart." Others were optimistic: "We are the Winners," by Lithuania's LT United, consists largely of the lyrics "We are the winners of Eurovision."

Yet Eurovision victory is no guarantee of fame.

Dion and ABBA went on to glory — as did Olivia Newton John, who lost to ABBA while competing for Britain in 1974. Other winners have sunk without trace, victims of the "curse of Eurovision."

Many of this year's competitors are big stars in their home region but little known elsewhere. Swedish diva Carola — a previous winner, in 1991 — has sold millions of records, while Lithuania's Andrius Mamontovas has performed for crowds of 60,000 in his homeland.

___

On the Net:

http://www.eurovision.tv

Finnish Heavy Metal Crisis

New York Times
April 24, 2006
Helsinki Journal
Finland Squirms as Its Latest Export Steps Into Spotlight
By DAN BILEFSKY


HELSINKI, Finland — They have eight-foot retractable latex Satan wings, sing hits like "Chainsaw Buffet" and blow up slabs of smoking meat on stage. So members of the band Lordi expected a reaction when they beat a crooner of love ballads to represent Finland at the Eurovision song contest in Athens, the competition that was the springboard for Abba and Celine Dion.

But the heavy-metal monster band did not imagine a national identity crisis.

First, Finnish religious leaders warned that the Freddy Krueger look-alikes could inspire Satanic worship. Then critics called for President Tarja Halonen to use her constitutional powers to veto the band and nominate a traditional Finnish folk singer instead. Rumors even circulated that Lordi members were agents sent by President Vladimir V. Putin to destabilize Finland before a Russian coup — an explanation for their refusal to take off their freakish masks in public.

The fury also spread in Greece, winner of last year's Eurovision and therefore the host of this year's contest, where an anti-Lordi movement called Hellenes urged the Finnish government "to say 'no' to this evil group." One young Finn calling himself Suomi (Finland in Finnish) wrote to a newspaper Web log saying, "If Lordi wins Eurovision, I am leaving the country."

The lead singer, Lordi — a former film student who goes by his real name, Tomi Putaansuu, when not wielding a blood-spurting electric chain saw — is philosophical about the uproar.

The affair, Mr. Putaansuu says, has exposed the insecurity of a young country whose peculiar language is spoken by only six million people worldwide and whose sense of identity has been dented by being part of the Swedish kingdom and the Russian empire until gaining independence in 1917. Most Finns, he adds, would rather be known for Santa Claus than heavily made-up monster mutants.

"In Finland, we have no Eiffel Tower, few real famous artists, it is freezing cold and we suffer from low self-esteem," said Mr. Putaansuu, who, as Lordi, has horns protruding from his forehead and sports long black fingernails.

As he stuck out his tongue menacingly, his red demon eyes glaring, Lordi was surrounded by Kita, an alien-man-beast predator who plays flame-spitting drums inside a cage; Awa, a blood-splattered ghost who howls backup vocals; Ox, a zombie bull who plays bass; and Amen, a mummy in a rubber loincloth who plays guitar.

Dragging on a cigarette, Mr. Putaansuu added, "Finns nearly choked on their cereal when they realized we were the face Finland would be showing to the world."

Often derided as a showcase of kitsch, Eurovision is one of the most watched television programs in the world. It pits pop groups from all over Europe and the Middle East against one another, with the winner decided by popular vote by more than 600 million viewers.

It is not the first time the contest, which began in 1956, has spawned discontent. Last year's Ukrainian entry song was rewritten after being deemed too political by government officials in Kiev because it celebrated the Orange Revolution. When Dana International, an Israeli transsexual, won in 1998 with her hit song "Diva," rabbis accused her of flouting the values of the Jewish state.

But not everyone in this Nordic country of five million views the monster squad as un-Finnish. Some Finns say that Lordi is right at home and that the band's use of flaming dragon-encrusted swords and exploding baby dolls expresses the warrior spirit of the Vikings.

Alex Nieminen, a Finnish ad executive, says the band harks back to the Hakkapeliittas, the legendary Finnish cavalry unit that fought as part of the Swedish army in the 17th century. He argues that the slasher film imitators embody Finnish self-assertion after decades of isolation.

"Lordi represents a rebellion by Finns who are saying, 'Hey we are not all the Nokia-wielding people the government would like you to think we are,' " Mr. Nieminen said.

On the eve of the vote, fans in ghoulish monster outfits held Lordi parties from Helsinki to Lapland and sent text messages urging everyone from grandmothers to young metal heads to "Change the face of Finland!" Lordi won the right to go to Athens with its Kiss-inspired anthem "Hard Rock Hallelujah" and its lyrics, "Wings on my back/I got horns on my head/my fangs are sharp/and my eyes are red."

The Finns' fascination for Lordi may reflect their eternal hope after coming in last at Eurovision eight times. Some Finns rank that humiliation with their nation's appeasement of the Soviet Union or losing in hockey to Sweden.

Finns blame their losing streak on the fact that contestants have typically sung in their mother tongue, a famously difficult Uralic language where words with three umlauts are not uncommon.

" 'Finland, zero points' has become a source of deep embarrassment in the nation's psyche," Ilkka Mattila, the country's leading music critic, said. "So Lordi's success must be understood as a vote by people who feel we have nothing to lose."

Finns are so uncomfortable with themselves, says Alexander Stubb, a Finnish member of the European Parliament, that when they meet someone for the first time, they stare at their own feet. Then, after 10 years of friendship, they stare at the other person's feet. But there is little risk that anyone, Finnish or otherwise, will stare at Lordi's furry platform demon boots, he adds, noting that Lordi could embarrass Finland when it takes over the European Union presidency in July.

Timo Soini, leader of "Ordinary Finns," a traditionalist political party from rural Finland, says Lordi has attracted criticism because Finns are so thin-skinned about how others perceive them. "Finns are suspicious when they see someone new come to play in their sandbox," Mr. Soini said. "And that is particularly the case when that someone looks like a monster."

While other boys in Lapland were playing hockey, Mr. Putaansuu played with his Barbie doll and began experimenting with makeup. In film school he became obsessed with horror films and the heavy metal bands Kiss and Twisted Sister. Like his fellow metal heads, Mr. Putaansuu hoped that transgression would sell big. But he says it took 10 years to get a record deal because Finnish labels were so turned off by the band's appearance.

Under their masks, the band members are quintessential Finns. Awa, the ghost, is a soft-spoken blond who wears glasses and studied classical music. Even Mr. Putaansuu, who wears a black leather jacket when not sporting serpent lapels, says his music is closer to gospel than Satan. After all, one of the band's hit songs is "The Devil Is a Loser."

"Even if we lose the contest, we have already won," Mr. Putaansuu said. "Many Finns would rather have sent someone boring and acceptable than to be represented by freaks like us."