A Mess of the Best Kind: Versace Henrik's Facebook

I'm currently writing an essay / blogpost thingy for school about how small-scale Finnish music artists utilize social media. I'm doing this, because I'm absolute garbage at self-promotion and making a fuzz about myself. This is not a good trait to have when you're a poor musician, who has to do his own promoting. That's why I'm looking into artists from my own genre and my own location: to get some tips on what to post and how often.

I want to take a break from writing that overly serious essay to appreciate the wonderful madness that is Versace Henrik's Facebook page.

By the way, I guess I forgot to mention my music project Mikko Pimeässä in my introduction. Well, you can find it on Facebook, and you can listen to my EP on SoundCloud, YouTube or Spotify. If you're into gloomy folk music that is!

Who is Versace Henrik?

To get a good idea of what Versace Henrik is about, all you have to do is take a look at his Instagram wall:

Ok, I'll elaborate a bit: Versace Henrik, or HENRIK!, is a Finnish artist, who came to prominence through rap mixtapes and EPs he uploaded on SoundCloud. Just about all of his rap has however disappeared from the web, and he has since ventured into other genres, like punk. He also just recently had an art exhibition in Helsinki.

What draws me to him is his energy, his DIY-ethos and the absolutely insane approach to what ever he does. Henrik is direct, adventurous and mad in the best kind of way. All of this is of course very evident in his Facebook page.

Some examples

Henrik's page is in Finnish, so I will try to offer rough translations. Since the posts are often nonsensical, so are my translations. Just a heads up!

Say you have a song coming up. How do you inform your followers?

You could post a nice picture and give them a date for when to expect the song to pop up. Or you could simply state:

"It coming! ! !!!! !!!!! !!!!!"

Perfect. When the song comes out, you of course want people to play it on their radio shows or something like that. Here's a great post to get people's attention:

hey alright? who wantsthat HURMOS! song for themselves, DJs put your fucking EMAILS TO THE COMMENTS! radio peeps too ;));););););););

Henrik also likes to approach his fans and get to know them:

what's your zodiac sign? mine's libra!

Another example of him sharing something personal:

I have once smelled worse than this.

You might think this is a bit nonsensical. However, you still haven't seen posts like these:

Fuck it's hard to play Runescape and Pokemon when you can't speak English yet.

The thing of today is: the BIC-lighter.

YES, ass tastes good after all.

Everyone's got money but me.

I'm a lego man.

Ruisrock smelt really bad, I also saw reino nordin in the backstage!

who's got a hangover?

I think you get the idea. What I like about Henrik's page is that he's not a afraid to show his persona honestly. I of course don't know him personally, but all of this seems very sincere and laid back. If there's a lesson for me to learn here, it's that I shouldn't take my online presence too seriously and just have fun with it.

Or as he puts it himself:

For real, it takes courage to be openly childish and even stupid in a world like ours.

Well said!

Here's a sketch of Henrik with some sweet gear: