The Oxford Handbook of Popular Music in the Nordic Countries 9780190603908, 0190603909

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

P OP U L A R M U SIC I N T H E N OR DIC C OU N T R I E S

The Oxford Handbook of

POPULAR MUSIC IN THE NORDIC COUNTRIES Edited by

FABIAN HOLT and

ANTTI-​V ILLE KÄRJÄ

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Holt, Fabian. | Kärjä, Antti-​Ville. Title: The Oxford handbook of popular music in the Nordic countries /​edited by Fabian Holt and Antti-​Ville Kärjä. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2017] | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016052899 | ISBN 9780190603908 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Popular music—​Scandinavia—​History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML3488 .O94 2017 | DDC 781.640948—​dc23 LC record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2016052899 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

Contents

List of Figures  List of Tables  Acknowledgments  List of Contributors 

vii ix xi xiii

Introduction: Music in a Globalizing Region  Fabian Holt

1

PA RT I   G E O G R A P H Y 1. Musical Borealism: Nordic Music and European History  Philip V. Bohlman

33

2. Nordic Modernity and the Structure of the Musical Landscape  Fabian Holt

57

3. Inclusive Popular Music Education?  Alexis A. Kallio and Lauri Väkevä

75

4. Roots, Routes, and Cosmopolitanism: David Lindley Meets Harding Hank  Hans Weisethaunet

91

5. From the Faroes to the World Stage  Joshua Green

111

6. Christian Metal and the Translocal North  Henna Jousmäki

131

7. Music and Landscape in Iceland  Tony Mitchell

145

8. Music and Environmentalism in Iceland  Nicola Dibben

163

vi   Contents

PA RT I I   H I S TORY 9. A Metahistorical Inquiry into Historiography of Nordic Popular Music  Antti-​Ville Kärjä

185

10. Echoes of the Colonial Past in Discourse on North Atlantic Popular Music  Kimberly Cannady

203

11. Swedish Prog Rock and the Search for a Timeless Utopia  Sverker Hyltén-​Cavallius and Lars Kaijser

219

12. Trajectories of Karelian Music After the Cold War  Pekka Suutari

237

13. Music in the Aftermath of the 2011 Utøya Massacre Jan Sverre Knudsen

257

14. Aspirations, Global Futures, and Lessons from Sámi Popular Music for the Twenty-​First Century  Tina K. Ramnarine

277

PA RT I I I   I DE N T I T Y 15. Masculinity, Race, and Transculturalism in a Norwegian Context  Stan Hawkins

295

16. Hip Hop as Public Pedagogy  Alexandra D’Urso

311

17. Urban Music and the Complex Identities of “New Nationals” in Scandinavia  Henrik Marstal

325

18. Rap, Reggae, and White Minoritization  Benjamin R. Teitelbaum

345

19. Sámi Festivals and Indigenous Sovereignty  Thomas R. Hilder

363

20. Digitally Mediated Identity in the Cases of Two Sámi Artists  Ann Werner

379

Name Index  Subject Index 

395 405

List of Figures

I.1 Outside the club Gamli Gaukurinn during Iceland Airwaves Music Festival, 2013. 

7

I.2 Panel discussion during Iceland Airwaves Music Festival, 2013. 

7

1.1 Norsk Folkemuseum at the time of the Eurovision Song Contest, Oslo 2010.  35 1.2 Roma street musicians at the time of the Eurovision Song Contest, Oslo 2010. 

36

1.3 Local wind band at the time of the Eurovision Song Contest, Oslo 2010. 

36

1.4 German buskers at the time of the Eurovision Song Contest, Oslo 2010. 

37

1.5 Norway’s Alexander Rybak at the press conference after the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest finale, Moscow 2009. 

37

1.6 Official Guide to the Eurovision Song Contest, Oslo 2010. 

38

2.1 Table with CDs at a record store in Reykjavík, November 2013. 

63

2.2 Copenhagen waterfront at the time of the Eurovision Song Contest, 2014. 

67

2.3 Lola Hammerich of Baby in Vain, in Reykjavík, November 2013. 

68

4.1 Jackson Browne and family visiting the home turfs of his great grandfather, in Prestvika, Nærøy, Norway, 2005. 

94

4.2 Hallvard Bjørgum a.k.a. Harding Hank: Oil painting by Johan Hermsen, Delft, Netherlands, based on photos of Hank Williams and Hallvard Bjørgum. 

100

4.3. Hallvard Bjørgum jamming in the kitchen with Rick Danko, Woodstock 1994.

101

5.1 Horses at Kirkjubøur, Faroe Islands, 2011. 

114

5.2 Trøllanes, Faroe Islands, 2011. 

122

7.1 Album cover for Valgeir Sigurðsson’s soundtrack to Draumlandið (Dreamland), 2009. 

152

8.1 Sigur Rós, at Snaefell, near Kárahnjúkar, Iceland, 2006. 

170

8.2 Graphic user interface for song selection in Björk’s Biophilia app, 2011. 

173

9.1 Relative page counts (Y axis) by decades (X axis) in Malmström 1996 (grey) and Jalkanen and Kurkela 2003 (black)

195

9.2 Relative page counts by decades in select U.S. accounts: Friedlander 1996 (black), Curtis 1987 (dashes), Covach 2007 (grey), and Garofalo 1997 (hyphens).

195

viii   List of Figures 9.3 Relative page counts by decades in select Nordic accounts: Brolinson and Larsen 1999 (black), Lilliestam 1998 (grey), Bruun et al. 1998 (black dash line), Aho and Taskinen 2003 (dotted line), and Gunni 2013 (grey dash line).

196

10.1 Mugison, with the male chorus Karlakórinn Þreystir in Reykjavík, 2012. 

213

13.1 Cover art for the single “Mitt Lille Land,” 1994. 

267

13.2 Cover art for the CD compilation “Mitt Lille Land,” 2011. 

268

15.1 Madcon, in Telenor Arena, Oslo. 

298

15.2 Jarle Bernhoft, in the performance of “Street Lights.” 

302

15.3 Shot of Lars Vaular and Sondre Lerche from the video “Øynene Lukket.” 

305

17.1 Adam Tensta posing on the front cover of the Swedish music magazine Gaffa in 2011. His traditional Swedish folk costume is a response to the use of a similar costume by politican Jimmie Åkesson of Sverigedemokraterna.  331 17.2 The official poster for Dansk Folkeparti’s national campaign in 2004–​2005 called ‘Frisk pust over landet’ (A breath of fresh air across the country). 

336

17.3 Outlandish‘s mock-​up of Dansk Folkepartis’ national campaign poster from 2004–2005 (see fig. 2) on the front cover of the Danish music magazine Gaffa in 2005. 

338

List of Tables

1.1 Typology of historiographies of Nordic Music beyond the nation. 

43

1.2 Five sites for the historiographies of Nordic popular music. 

47

9.1 List of subheadings in books on Nordic popular music.

191

Acknowledgments

We would like to express gratitude to the contributors to this handbook for their dedication and collaborative spirit between the years 2011 and 2016. This handbook was conceived, developed, and prepared as part of a bigger collaborative project. We would also like to thank the contributors for helping communicate their research via the project’s blog (www.nordpop.blogspot.dk/​). For excellent guidance throughout the process, we would like to thank Suzanne Ryan, editor in chief at Oxford University Press. With her critical questions, inspiration, and communication of highest scholarly standards at every stage in the process, Ryan contributed immensely to this project. We are most grateful for financial support from the Nordic Culture Fund and its encouragement for building a larger collaborative project with media and museum partners for the project. The early meetings with the Fund were helpful for creating a Nordic infrastructure for the research project and strengthening its connection with institutions in musical life. The financial support from the Fund made it possible to organize meetings for the contributors. The meetings were hosted by the Finnish Jazz and Pop Archive (currently known as Music Archive Finland), Roskilde University, the national broadcasting corporations of Denmark and Iceland, and the Nordic House in Reykjavík. The museum dimension of the project was managed by Lena Bruun and Jacob W. Madsen of the Danish Museum of Rock Music in Roskilde. Dissemination knowledge from the research project was originally planned to happen via the national broadcasting corporations around the region, coordinated by the Danish organization. When this plan failed, Jan Sneum, one of the most knowledgeable journalists on Nordic popular music, helped organize meetings with key network people, including Johannes Dybkjær-​Andersson, Anna Hildur, David Fricke, Grímur Atlason, and Ólafur Páll Gunnarsson. Sneum also generously shared wisdom acquired from a lifelong dedication to Nordic music. In addition, Fabian extends heartfelt gratitude to his family Anja, Dante, Louisa, and Victor, and to Denmark and Sweden for providing shelter from the Holocaust for his maternal grandparents, Manfred and Gerda Schloss. Without this shelter, we would not have been here today. Antti-​Ville dedicates his input to Alma, Onni, and Eino, and to Finland for ensuring that both the future and the past remain educating and exciting. Fabian Holt, Copenhagen and Berlin Antti-​Ville Kärjä, Helsinki February 2017

List of Contributors

Philip V. Bohlman is Ludwig Rosenberger Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago, and Honorary Professor at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover. His research and teaching range widely across the intersections of music in critical race and religious studies, folk music and popular music, and the histories of ethnomusicology and global aesthetics. He is the Artistic Director of the cabaret ensemble The New Budapest Orpheum Society, whose most recent album is As Dreams Fall Apart—​The Golden Age of Jewish Film Music, 1925–​ 1955 (Cedille Records, 2014). As the Franz Rosenzweig Professor at the University of Kassel in 2014, he completed his most recent book Wie könnten wir des Herrn Lied singen in fremdem Lande? (LIT Verlag). Kimberly Cannady is Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. Kimberly’s research focuses on historical and contemporary music making across the Nordic North Atlantic. She continues to conduct fieldwork in the region and has been a guest researcher at both the University of Iceland (2011–​2012) and the University of Copenhagen (2011), thanks to generous funding from the Fulbright Foundation, the American Scandinavian Foundation, the University of Washington, and Victoria University. In addition to her extensive work in Iceland and Denmark, Kimberly has conducted research in the Faroe Islands and with Greenlandic musicians in Denmark. Kimberly recently completed her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at the University of Washington in Seattle (2014), with a dissertation that examined relationships between music making and Icelandic nationalism from the early twentieth century through today. Nicola Dibben is Professor in Music, and Director of the Humanities Research Institute, at the University of Sheffield, UK. She has over 40 publications in the psychology of music and popular music studies, and is former editor of the academic journals Empirical Musicology Review and Popular Music. Publications include the co-authored Music and Mind in Everyday Life (2010) and Monograph Björk (2009), the latter of which lead to a collaboration on the artist’s multi-media app album, Biophilia (2011). Alexandra D’Urso received her doctorate from Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests concentrate on the potentials of pedagogical strategies for social change, both inside and outside formal sites of education. D’Urso has co-​ authored articles on education policy and the monograph Life Stories and Sociological Imagination: Music, Private Lives, and Public Identity in France and Sweden (2013). She is

xiv   List of Contributors currently is an educational development officer at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and co-​chairs a research network on hip hop studies in the Nordic countries. Joshua Green grew up in northwestern New Brunswick, Canada, near the small village of Plaster Rock. From a young age, he took an interest in guitar and has picked up mandolin along the way. He studied anthropology at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and did his master’s degree on popular music of the Faroe Islands in anthropology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta. His current doctoral research in ethnomusicology at Memorial University of Newfoundland focuses on the construction of Faroese musical identities and the relationship between Faroese popular music and socio-​cultural change in the islands. Stan Hawkins is Professor of Musicology at the University of Oslo and Adjunct Professor at the University of Agder. His research fields involve music analysis, popular musicology, gender theory, and cultural studies. From 2010 to 2014, he led a Norwegian state-​funded project called Popular Music and Gender in a Transcultural Context. He is author of Settling the Pop Score (2002), The British Pop Dandy (2009), and co-​author of Prince: The Making of a Pop Music Phenomenon (2011). His edited volumes include Music, Space and Place (2004), Essays on Sound and Vision (2007), Pop Music and Easy Listening (2011), and Critical Musicological Reflections (2012). He is also General Editor for the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series. Thomas R. Hilder is Postdoctoral Fellow in Musicology at the Grieg Academy—​ Department of Music, University of Bergen, with training in ethnomusicology at Royal Holloway, University of London (Ph.D., M.Mus.). Focusing on popular music repertories of northern Europe, his interdisciplinary research responds to current debates in postcolonial studies, digital media, gender theory, and transnationalism. He is author of Sámi Musical Performance and the Politics of Indigeneity in Northern Europe (2015). Fabian Holt is Visiting Professor of Popular Music Theory and History in the Department of Musicology and Media Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin. He is also Associate Professor at Roskilde University, where he teaches in the Department of Communication and Arts. Holt is a musicologist by training, with a Ph.D. (2002) in jazz and American cultural history. He was a postdoctoral fellow in ethnomusicology at The University of Chicago 2003–2004 and a visiting scholar at Columbia University 2011–2012. His publications include Genre in Popular Music (2007), Musical Performance and the Changing City (2013, co-​edited with Carsten Wergin), “Rock Clubs and Gentrification in New York City” (2014), “The Evolution of Corporate Sponsorship in Sensitive Cultural Spheres in the Early 21st Century” (2015), and “New Media, New Festival Worlds” (2016). Sverker Hyltén-​Cavallius is Associate Professor of Ethnology and a research archivist at the Swedish Performing Arts Agency. His current research focuses on Swedish popular music history and social media, and he has previously worked as Lecturer at the Universities of Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Södertörn. He is also a board member of

List of Contributors    xv the Swedish national section of the ICTM. His 2005 dissertation “Minnets spelrum” (A Margin for Memory) dealt with the role of music and collective memory in the formation of pensionerhood in Sweden. His most recent (2014) book Retrologier (Retrologies) is about the production and negotiation of history in transnational networks, focusing on Swedish progressive rock of the 1970s. Hyltén-​Cavallius’s publications include articles on popular music and memory, popular icons, memory and media, and futurist nostalgia in journals such as Popular Music, Ethnologia Scandinavica, and IASPM@ journal. Henna Jousmäki holds a Ph.D. at the University of Jyväskylä, Department of languages. In her thesis, she focused on the discursive construction of Christian metal music culture and identities online. She has published in journals such as Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, Journal of Multicultural Discourses and Discourse, and Context and Media. Lars Kaijser is Lecturer in the Departments of Ethnology, History of Religion, and Gender Studies at Stockholm University. His research focuses on middlemen working in the commercial, cultural, and voluntary sectors. His doctoral dissertation was on country shopkeepers and their work (1999). Furthermore, he has studied Beatles tourism in Liverpool, concert organizers in rural Sweden, and how different social networks organize and use 1970s Swedish music in today’s practices. Alexis A. Kallio is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Faculty of Music Education, Jazz, and Folk Music at the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts, Helsinki. Her interdisciplinary research explores themes of legitimization and exclusion in different arts education and cultural contexts. Her current project as part of the Artsequal Research Initiative is conducted together with Sámi communities, in seeking new ways to transform and democratize extracurricular arts education in Finland. Antti-​Ville Kärjä works as Academy Research Fellow at Music Archive Finland, with a research project titled Music, Multiculturality and Finland (2014–​2018). He is Adjunct Professor of Popular Music Studies at the University of Helsinki, and his fields of expertise include music and multiculturalism, historiography of popular music, and music in audiovisual media. He received his Ph.D. in 2005, and in 2009–​2011 he conducted a postdoctoral research project entitled Popular Music in Postcolonial Finland. From 2008 to 2013, he chaired the Nordic branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and currently is Chair of the Finnish Society for Ethnomusicology. He is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Perfect Beat and IASPM@journal. Jan Sverre Knudsen is Professor of Music at the Faculty of Education and International Studies, Oslo, and Akershus University College. His research and publications focus on the role of musical practices in immigrant communities, intercultural concert promotion in schools, and issues related to nationality and ethnicity in music education. Knudsen’s doctoral dissertation “Those that Fly without Wings” (2004) is an ethnomusicological study based on field research among Chilean immigrants in Norway.

xvi   List of Contributors His study of music, language, and performance in multiethnic hip hop groups in Oslo, 2008 to 2010, was part of the strategic research program CULCOM (cultural complexity) at Oslo University. Knudsen is the Norwegian coordinator for the Nordic network Researching Music Censorship. Henrik Marstal is a musician, a producer, and a writer. He is Associate Professor at the Rytmisk Musikkonservatorium in Copenhagen, Denmark. Marstal has published numerous books and articles on topics such as the history of electronic music, hit music, everyday listening, and Danish identity. His doctoral dissertation focused on aspects of Danish song traditions related to national agendas in the early twenty-​first century. Marstal has served as an advisor to the Nordic Culture Fund and is currently a member of the Danish Arts Foundation Committee for Music Project Funding. Tony Mitchell is Honorary Research Associate in Cultural Studies and Popular Music at the University of Technology, Sydney. He is the author of Dario Fo: People’s Court Jester (Methuen 1999)  and Popular Music and Local Identity:  Pop, Rock and Rap in Europe and Oceania (University of Leicester Press 1996), and is the editor of Global Noise: Rap and Hip hop outside the USA (Wesleyan 2001). He co-​edited Sounds of Then, Sounds of Now: Popular Music in Australia (Australian Clearing House for Youth Studies 2008), North Meets South: Popular Music in Aotearoa/​New Zealand (Perfect Beat 1994), and Home, Land and Sea: Situating Popular Music in Aotearoa New Zealand (Pearson Education 2011). He is currently co-​editing a book about Icelandic music. Tina K. Ramnarine is Professor of Music at Royal Holloway University of London. Her interdisciplinary research draws on social theory, performance, and multi-​sited ethnographic work. She has published widely on music in northern European, Caribbean, and Indian diasporic contexts, including the books Creating Their Own Space:  The Development of an Indian-​Caribbean Musical Tradition (University of West Indies Press, 2001), Ilmatar’s Inspirations: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Changing Soundscapes of Finnish Folk Music (Chicago University Press, 2003), Beautiful Cosmos: Performance and Belonging in the Caribbean Diaspora (Pluto Press, 2007), and the edited volumes Musical Performance in the Diaspora (Routledge, 2007) and Global Perspectives on Orchestras:  Essays on Collective Creativity and Social Agency (Oxford University Press, 2015). Pekka Suutari is Professor of Cultural Studies as part of the Karelian Institute, located at the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu. He studied ethnomusicology in Helsinki, Gothenburg, and Petrozavodsk. Suutari has worked in Joensuu, Finland, since 1995, first as a lecturer of musicology and since 2009 as Director of the Karelian Institute. His research interests include Finns in Sweden, Finnish popular music, and the music of Russian Karelia, as well as the music of other ethnic minority groups living in border regions. Suutari’s most recent project called Flexible Ethnicities:  Ethnic Processes in Petrozavodsk and the Republic of Karelia in the 2010s involves research colleagues at the Karelian Institute in Joensuu and the Institute of Language, Literature and History

List of Contributors    xvii within the Karelian Research Centre in Petrozavodsk, Russia (affiliated with the Russian Academy of Sciences). Benjamin R. Teitelbaum is Head of Nordic Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His scholarship focuses on musics of the Nordic countries and the role of music in anti-​immigrant, white nationalist, and neo-​Nazi activism around the globe. His 2013 dissertation won the Joukowsky Family Foundation Outstanding Dissertation Award at Brown University and the Applied Research Award from Germany’s Institute for the Study of Radical Movements. His first manuscript, Lions of the North: Sounds of the New Nordic Radical Nationalism, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Teitelbaum is also an active performer of Swedish folk music, and was the first non-​Swede to earn a performance degree in nyckelharpa. Lauri Väkevä is Professor in Music Education at Sibelius Academy of University of the Arts, Helsinki, Finland. After graduating as a music teacher from the University of Jyväskylä, and working as a music teacher, musician, and music journalist, he began his doctoral studies at University of Oulu, graduating as a Licentiate of Education in 1999 and as Doctor of Philosophy in 2004. A co-​author of three books, Väkevä has also published in the fields of music education, musicology, music history, and popular music studies. His main research interests cover Afro-​American music, popular music pedagogy and history, pragmatist philosophy, philosophy of music education, informal learning, and digital music culture. Aside from his academic career, his projects have included working as a musician, music journalist, general music teacher, and instrument teacher. Hans Weisethaunet is Professor at the Department of Musicology, the University of Oslo, Norway, where he teaches ethnomusicology, cultural theory, popular music, and jazz history. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Oslo, 1998. Weisethaunet served as associate professor at the Grieg Academy, University of Bergen from 1999 to 2005 when he joined the faculty at Oslo. He has published on music in Nepal, Trinidad, and New Orleans, and on topics such as music and nationalism, music historiography, sound, and popular music criticism. Ann Werner is Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at Södertörn University, Sweden. She is currently working on a research project called Music Use in the Online Media Age, together with three other scholars. The project aims to understand cultural change in Internet-​based music consumption in Sweden and Russia. Ann Werner’s research interests are within feminist cultural studies, and some of her previously published work includes “Emotions in Music Culture: The Circulation of Love” (2012) in Global Media Journal and “Sexy Shapes: Girls Negotiating Gender through Popular Music” (2013) in Journal of Girlhood Studies.

T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

P OP U L A R M U SIC I N  T H E N OR DIC C OU N T R I E S

I n t rodu ction Music in a Globalizing Region Fabian Holt

You are the Dancing Queen, young and sweet, only seventeen Dancing Queen, feel the beat from the tambourine, oh yeah. —​ABBA, “Dancing Queen” (1976) We are a blaze in the Northern sky The next thousand years are ours. —​Darkthrone, “A Blaze in the Northern Sky” (1992) The moon was laughing And said leave this dark cold place The rabbit is preparing something bad. —​Sóley, “Bad Dream” (2011) It wouldn’t be right for us to sing about our heritage in English. —​John Áki Egholm

The Nordic countries present a unique case of intensified globalization, and music is part of that process. From the fascination with the sweet melodies and discreet eroticism of Swedish pop stars, to the fascination with Nordic authenticity in Norwegian black metal and North Atlantic indie music, Nordic artists drawing from Anglo popular music idioms continue to open up new transnational horizons for people in the region. At the same time, Nordic popular music is shaping images of the region and driving cultural tourism. The interpretations of intensified musical and cultural globalization

2   Introduction in Nordic societies are also changing, as knowledge institutions are themselves transformed by globalization. This situation calls for a reference work that can serve as a guide for global readerships and do more than simply introduce and examine a number of developments in the region’s popular music. The present work is not only the first handbook on Nordic music; it also seeks to offer an exemplary collective account of popular music’s significance in processes of cultural globalization in transnational regions. With its specific historic, semantic, spatial, and technological dimensions, music is one of the key avenues for expressing the changing character and meanings of transnational cultural connections. Music is involved in new cultural geographies, in new forms of tourism, in new media worlds, and in responses to climate change, poverty, and terror. This introductory chapter begins by situating popular music broadly in Nordic history from a social science perspective before detailing musicological issues and introducing the chapters. The human experience of globalization is a complex one. Globalization involves increased mobility and connectivity, but it also involves increased socioeconomic complexity and anxiety about belonging. Large-​scale global economies and information systems have multiple implications at the micro level of individual lives. Music has its own ways of responding to such changes in the human condition. People continue to make music, just as they continue to fall in love and have children, even when they face serious challenges such as poverty, global warming, and extinction. Attention to such concerns prompts a renewed understanding of fundamental aspects of humanity and its potentials. The handbook is also invigorating in its accounts of the continued power of music to create values and mobilize aspirations for new cultural connections and futures in a diverse transnational region. The region spans thousands of miles, from Finland’s and Norway’s easterly borders with Russia through Scandinavia, to the sparsely populated North Atlantic areas of the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland in the west. While research on culture and globalization in the Nordic region has proliferated since the 1990s, music studies continues to be dominated by what has long been known as methodological nationalism in sociology (Martins 1974; Beck 2000). Conversations about transnational musical connections in the region have historically been framed by monolithic and mythical narratives of Nordic identity, emotional culture, and nature, energized by music’s powerful connection with space and the visual. These narratives have shaped the global trajectories of Sibelius, Björk, Jan Garbarek, and Efterklang, and in equally gendered images of Scandinavian and Nordic female artists, especially singers. They include Sissel Kyrkjebø and Eivør in different kinds of folk pop, Myrkur in black metal, and Saga in the international white power scene. The wide international appeal of these artists demonstrates that the idea of Nordic music is powerful in popular culture. It is so powerful it transcends the deeply rooted national structures in the region. This is not fully recognized in the existing literature, however. This handbook shows how scholars in the field respond differently to the challenge of Nordicness, from implicit rejections of the concept to analyses of its socially constructed nature. One might interpret the constructionist emphasis in many chapters and the

Introduction   3 relative absence of explicit attempts at formulating agendas for the region, not only as a reflection of the continued dominance of national cultures but also as an ambivalence and uncertainty among scholars about the region fueled by skepticism toward glorifying images of Nordicness. This is evident in writing about sensitive topics such as xenophobia and racism, which tend to be perceived as specialist topics. Another example is sexuality, which is almost absent in the literature on Nordic music and popular culture and therefore similarly points to a gap between scholars and their field of inquiry. There is no writing, for instance, about sexualized images of Nordic women in the local and global histories of the region’s music, even though it is widely known that there is a history of stereotypes evolving from the early legalization of porn in Scandinavia—​1969 in Denmark, 1971 in Sweden—​and the subsequent global export of commercial porn (Paasonen 2009, 587). These sexualized images still have power, not least in pop culture’s informal and ordinary spaces. This is evidenced, for instance, in the thousands of comments on the YouTube page of the Ace of Base video “All That She Wants,” of which the following is but one example: “I friggin’ LOVE this song, the harmonies, the bass line, and (duh) those lovely scandinavian (sp?) women” (All That She Wants 2016). There is little research on the relationship between music and sexuality in mediations of Scandinavian and Nordic identities in the history from ABBA to Zara Larsson. The latter represents a new pop culture configuration of female sexuality and feminism in Scandinavia that draws heavily on Anglo cultural forms and on new media dynamics of private and public, culture and commerce. In this perspective, Larsson’s English-language Twitter feed, her collaborations with Clean Bandit and Ty Dolla Sign, and her appearances at the opening ceremony of the Olympics and at Lollapalooza might actually be central to rather than existing outside of Nordic cultural history. Cultural unity is still a key priority in the Nordic Council, which has not yet adopted an explicit self-​reflexive agenda and has not distanced itself from essentialist ideas of Nordic identity.1 This view and its implied image of a white middle-​class subject is becoming harder to maintain, with daily media reports a growing Eastern European low-​wage workforce and new waves of migration following the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. In 2014, even Volvo, a legendary symbol of Swedish and Scandinavian identity, found an ambassador for a global campaign in Zlatan Ibrahimović, a soccer player known for his majestic appearance as a self-​confident, muscular, and tall man who proudly narrates his trajectory from an immigrant “ghetto” upbringing in the city of Malmo to international stardom (Ibrahimović 2014). In the Volvo television ads titled “Made by Sweden,” Ibrahimović recited the de facto national anthem “Du gamla, du fria” in a version produced by hit-​maker Max Martin, to heroic images of him driving and hunting in Swedish nature and scoring for Paris Saint-Germain FC (“Volvo XC70 feat. Zlatan—​Made by Sweden”). And Ikea, a similarly iconic Swedish-​Scandinavian corporation, has received positive attention in the region as a pioneer in hiring ethnic minority populations and redefining corporate rituals to include non-​Christian employees. In light of such examples, the idea that public institutions such as universities and the Nordic Council should support further research on Nordic cultural essence—​­epitomized by the notion of “the Nordic tone”—​is no longer simply a search for the Holy Grail but also an obsolete form of

4   Introduction ethnic self-​narration disguised as research. In a globalizing society of migrations, reborderings, and complex media circulations, scholars, too, need to look beyond self-​narration. This handbook does just that. It is based on a long-​term collaboration between scholars from around the world who met in person to discuss the project and their research at meetings in Helsinki, Roskilde, and Reykjavík during 2012 and 2013. A transnational region of such diverse and geographically distant societies could only come into being because of colonial expansion and regulation of territory. The Nordic region became an institutional reality with the creation of the Nordic Council in 1952, when Europe was still recovering from World War II. While the main purpose was economic, ideas about Scandinavia and of the wider Nordic area as regional entities have a long history. The imagination of the region’s location “north of ” Europe’s center has structured foundational narratives and takes on new dimensions with intensified globalization. This is demonstrated by the chapters introducing the idea of borealism in music studies as a particular form of exoticism (e.g., Chapter 1; Chapter 5; Chapter 7; and Chapter 10) and by the chapters exploring the association of ­particular genres with Nordicness (e.g., Chapter 6; Chapter 18). With the institutionalization of the Nordic region that happened with the creation of the Nordic Council, the word “Nordic” became inseparable from a history of institutional colonialism (Kurunmäki and Strang 2011; Keskinen et al. 2009), while also beginning a long journey toward inclusion in the forms of social justice and equality promised by the welfare state. Music has formed part of the equation in national institutions to create social order, with the international Nordic collaboration having a complementary function and secondary priority. With the populations in Greenland and Finland separated by thousands of miles, with separate national public spheres and individual national languages, it is not easy to build a strong sense of regional community in everyday life, not even with ongoing developments in digital communications. Demographic asymmetries prevail, moreover, with the North Atlantic areas representing only 5% of the 22 million Nordic citizens. Notably, none of the nation-​states has ceded sovereignty to the Nordic Council, which only has coordinating and advisory functions. By contrast, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden have ceded sovereignty to the European Union. Military collaboration is mainly happening through NATO, which has had no less than two former Scandinavian prime ministers as its general secretary since 2009. While Sweden and Finland are not members of NATO, all the Nordic countries entered an agreement with NATO in 2015 to strengthen their collaboration in response to Russia’s intervention in Ukraine (Bentzrød 2015). Globalization is an important context for understanding the significance of popular music in the Nordic countries today. The impacts of global media flows and economic formations are strongly felt in popular music and its continuing differentiations along the international dimensions of modernity. In many societies, music’s significance has declined in traditional rituals and evolved in popular culture rituals and in media practices. Music continues to enable and calibrate emotions, identities, and cultural geographies within capitalism and processes such as urbanization, globalization, and mediatization.

Introduction   5 The term “popular music” is not without its problems. It is embedded in histories of entrenched cultural hierarchies and is such a broad label that it often becomes reductive, implying a false sense of totality. The term had an important role in the development of popular music studies as an international discursive community, empowering it to create a space for popular music in academia but also to later become a technocratic arm of neoliberal higher education. This book challenges the reduction of popular music studies and the humanities more generally to a mere professional practice by exploring music’s potential to complicate ideology, voice difference, and challenge normative views of social worlds far beyond the sphere of music itself. As a piece of humanist scholarship, the book has both the freedom and the obligation to look beyond the popular narratives of journalism, fandom, and marketing. The absence of the word “popular” in the title of this chapter is the result of a conscious decision to welcome nonspecialist readers and to counter the compartmentalization of popular music in academic discourse and in social life more generally. Inspired by Latour’s critique of the discourses of differentiation and specialization in modernity (1993), one might say that modern societies have never had music, only music genres. The systemic logic of institutional and market structures is so strong that other orderings are easily ignored or perceived as anomalies. So ingrained has this systemic logic become that it is the dominant target for anti-​genre narratives that tend to ignore the basic cognitive dimensions of genre (Holt 2007, 1–​4). This handbook reflects the dominant conception of popular music with a small p in academic writing about Nordic music. The book does not give priority to the most popular music, to superstars, but, rather, emphasizes a different approach to popular culture. Focus is not on fan culture narratives of numbers, names, and individual biographies, but on situations in which music has significance as an art form and medium of complex and emerging responses to globalizing geographies, histories, and identities. The chapters feature a great deal of the micro-​and semi-​popular music that exists under the radar of mass media, instead circulating in small clubs, small festivals, and niche media. This makes sense to a great extent because there are not many superstars in the Nordic countries. Readers might be struck by the little attention given to stars of the pop evolutions in Stockholm (e.g., ABBA, Roxette, Max Martin, and Avicii) and Bergen (e.g., Kings of Convenience and Röyksopp), to A-​ha, Kaizers Orchestra, Tina Dico, Teitur, Mø, and Kygo, and to the countless national rock and pop stars and X Factor winners who are virtually unknown outside their own countries.2 Although the handbook’s aim is not to profile stars, which is already done well in journalism, it could have said more than it does about the region’s rock and pop mainstream artists and audiences. The reason for this is a lack of scholarly interest in popular music with a capital P. Despite continued efforts, I was unable to locate and commission high-​level research exploring the handbook’s globalization theme with a focus on insider perspectives within the popular culture mainstream, as represented by the most popular radio stations and festivals, in international perspective. The handbook thus reflects current expertise and interests in the field, while recognizing the asymmetries and gaps that became clear in the process. The situation begs for more expertise in communicating local and national cultures in translocal and international discourse and

6   Introduction for a rethinking of the broader relationship between musical scholarship and society. A necessary element in this process is reflexive collaboration with scholars outside the region and with local stakeholders outside the university. The latter was common in the pioneering popular music research community at Gothenburg University in the 1970s and 1980s under professor Jan Ling’s leadership (Tagg 1998). That community engaged broadly with interests in the wider community in a way that has since become rare. A weak connection with musical life has severe implications for the knowledge production and legitimacy of musical scholarship. To stimulate broad interaction with musical life in the region, my co-​editor and I organized two symposia and a conference in collaboration between contributors and representatives of nodal institutions—​specifically, national broadcasting corporations and popular music museums. The meetings between scholars, journalists, and curators showed that these occupational groups operate in relatively separate spheres. The scholar participants generally did not feel compelled to join in conversation with journalists and curators, appearing unimpressed by mass media journalism. The journalists and curators, on the other hand, had backstage conversations about scholars being too specialized and lacking more long-​term experience in the everyday arenas of musical culture. In sum, while the encounters were amicable and showed potential (Holt 2013), they also demonstrated a remarkable absence of dialogue and collaboration between these groups. This is not to say that the network meetings were not useful, as the contributors were informed about the developments at popular music museums, the Nordic Music Export office, and other local organizations. A specific challenge was the lack of interest in looking beyond national borders and into other Nordic countries among national broadcasting corporations. With help and inspiration from my co-​editor, I made several attempts in 2011 to enlist the support of managers of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation for a television and radio series that could disseminate research findings from this handbook. The manager responded by applying for funding for a television series titled The Sound of the North, which promised to explore “the Nordic tone” in the form of “an emotional road movie.” The application was submitted to the Nordic Film and TV Fund, which was created in 1990 to support the inter-​Nordic production and circulation of film and television. The application was rejected, however, and one of the managers suggested in a backstage conversation that he did not expect the fund to support a series on music in the Nordic region because it would not attract a large audience. The fund had just approved a television series on the story behind hit songs in the United States and the United Kingdom. So instead of exploring frontiers in the North, Scandinavian journalists were sent to London to report on music that has already received the most media attention in the world. This situation is the product of a localized form of neoliberalism in Nordic broadcasting corporations, which in the decades after World War II were perceived as vital cultural institutions but have now become harder to distinguish from commercial media. On a panel at the 2013 Iceland Airwaves Music Festival organized by the editors of this book (see figures I.1 and I.2), experienced industry professionals from around the region

Figure I.1  Outside the club Gamli Gaukurinn during Iceland Airwaves Music Festival, 2013

Figure I.2  Panel discussion during Iceland Airwaves Music Festival, 2013

8   Introduction all claimed that the national broadcasting corporations in the region privilege the most popular national and Anglophone pop music and with little done to facilitate the flow of music across national borders.

Deep Structures: The Nation-​State and the European Union To show how national structures of power play out in contemporary Nordic societies, I now turn to a conference in Copenhagen in 2012, organized by one of the wealthiest foundations in Denmark. Titled “The Philanthropic Voices of Civic Society,” the conference was organized by Real Dania (note the national name) to promote its agenda among the national elites, which on this occasion involved half of the parliament and the prime minister.3 The main keynote speaker was a saxophonist who also happened to be the former president of the United States. Everyone seemed excited to meet Bill Clinton. The carpet was pulled out from under their feet, however. Clinton began not with positive remarks on the local culture or nature, or by thanking the host. Rather, he began directly by thanking Denmark for its efforts during the war in former Yugoslavia. He continued to speak about worlds of serious crisis far from the lives of the conference attendees. Speaking at length about the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, for instance, he essentially shifted the conference’s perspective from the world of the philanthropist to worlds in humanitarian crisis. Clinton could have played into the event’s implicit celebration of Denmark’s self-​image as one of the world’s “giving” nations: the nations that help others with a few percent of their gross domestic product (GDP). He could also have turned to the positive images of social equality, free education, and free health care in Denmark and the Nordic countries. Clinton, however, did not participate in the event’s agenda of promoting national elites or in celebrity discourse. Instead, he appealed to a sense of moral responsibility in crisis situations that require transnational cooperation. Ultimately, the event would expose the provincialism of the national elite, its sense of privileged local space. Moreover, the event demonstrated the asymmetry between the national and the regional: this visit of a former world leader could only happen in a national context because the elites are not regionally structured. Notably, representatives of the Nordic Council were not invited to the event because priority was given to the most powerful institutional space—​the nation—​ and because the council has little influence and is therefore rarely even taken into consideration in big politics and business. Moreover, the Nordic Council is not involved in celebrations of contemporary popular music, such as the ceremonies of the Polar Music Prize and by:Larm’s Nordic Music Prize. Indeed, one might be fortunate enough to find a person on the street in any Nordic country who knows the name of the Nordic Council’s president or one of the recipients of the council’s music prize. The Nordic Council almost became obsolete in big politics in its formative stages because of the evolution of the European Union, which has the scale to respond more

Introduction   9 powerfully to the challenges of a globalizing world. The power asymmetry showed early on. For instance, international trade was a key motivation for creating the Nordic region, as stated in the official proposal from the Danish prime minister in 1952, but European-​level trade agreements were created in the same decade and took on great importance, making a Nordic trade union unneeded. Today, approximately 75% of new laws in a non-EU member state such as Norway are copied and pasted from the European Union.4 Non-​EU members regularly follow suit to make international business easier. For these reasons and because of skepticism of the Nordic Council’s culture prize ceremonies, a critical discussion of whether the Nordic Council had lost its relevance started in the fall of 2013. The debate was ignited by no less than the former Danish minister of Nordic cooperation. A few days ahead of the ceremony for the culture prizes she wrote an op-​ed about how the council had become “a coffee club” and “should be terminated” (Ellemann 2013). The critique was echoed a few days later in the coverage of the ceremony in a Norwegian newspaper, which claimed that the council was known to be bureaucratic and that the culture prices did nothing to advance cultural community in the Nordic region (Økland 2013). At a public debate about the region’s future a year before, an experienced editor at a Swedish newspaper suggested that “the vision of the Nordic region created after World War II” had been stale for decades.5 At the same time, the word “Nordic” has enjoyed unprecedented international success in consumer culture narratives (e.g., Gill 2012; see also Chapter 2). The present handbook looks at music in contexts of intensified globalization, and the Nordic Council plays a small role in those contexts. Consequently, the analyses are not framed around the region’s institutional history but, rather, around the intensification of more powerful transnational dynamics that are redefining this and other transnational regions around the world. Globalization intensifies transnational regional powers, as the compression of time and space expands and complicates national economies and territories (Genov 2012; Sassen 2006). Although the evolution of the European Union has eliminated the need for a Nordic trade union, it has not eliminated interest in the cultural dimension of the Nordic region or other smaller regions around Europe. If anything, the EU and other global forces are foregrounding the larger regional context of the individual nation-​states in Europe’s North. As with the Baltic countries, the Nordic countries exist on the fringe of Central Europe, with a periphery status. This is because of their existence in between the larger centers of European modernity and super powers farther away, particularly Russia and China in the east and the United States in the west.

Conceptual Organization of the Handbook This handbook is organized conceptually along three cultural dimensions—​­geography, history, and identity—​that serve to highlight core aspects of musical experience in

10   Introduction social life and therefore also of music’s significance in evolving transnational dynamics. The three dimensions are fundamental to the culture concept and therefore more general than music, but they have particular significance in music and can help broaden and develop the intellectual history of musical thought. In my argument here, musicology serves as a platform from which broader analytical narratives are developed. Readers looking for a quick overview of the chapters can skip this section and go straight to the next section, titled “A Road Map of the Handbook.” Should an account of cultural life in a region such as the Nordic be organized into chapters on individual countries? Genres? Time periods? Population groups? Each of these perspectives has been adopted, often in combination, but the study of music in transnational processes requires rethinking of narratives and exploration of new ones. Social change inevitable creates uncertainty and changes power relations between scholars with different kinds of expertise. In the early stages of preparing this handbook, the editors suggested a few general themes in an open call for chapter proposals in September 2011. The call helped identify current research interests, but it was not until the chapters were developed two years later that an analytical narrative could be developed to explain their contribution to the field. As one might expect, the call for proposals gained most traction in the area where Antti-​ Ville and I have roots. We have evolved from the strand of musicology that emerged in the 1990s when musicologists began integrating perspectives of anthropology, cultural studies, and popular music studies (Clayton, Herbert, and Middleton 2003). The term “cultural musicology” has been in circulation since the mid-​1970s, but the term has not become widely used.6 This handbook represents an evolution in this disciplinary formation. Many of the chapters analyze the cultural and social dimensions of musical practices and discourses, drawing inspiration from cultural and social theory for a contextualizing musicology. Few adopt a social science approach by analyzing music within broader social processes, framing the analysis by theories of society, economy, or geography, for instance. The above-​mentioned identification with a direction in music studies points to a space of possibilities and needs to be confronted with specific analytical tasks. In the following, I offer a narrative for approaching not only the handbook but also the study of musical life in a transnational region in a way that highlights disciplinary awareness of regional space and of music as an art form and cultural practice. The narrative combines a practical analytical progression (going from geography to history and identity) with a theoretical argument about music’s distinctiveness.

Nordic Popular Music Along Three Dimensions: Geography, History, and Identity It is in space, on a worldwide scale, that each idea of “value” acquires or loses its distinctiveness through the confrontation with the other values and ideas it encounters there. —​Lefebvre 1991, 416

Introduction   11 The first step in the analytical progression I suggest is analysis of the musical and cultural geography of the region. Such analysis can begin by identifying powerful spatial distinctions, narratives, and mappings through a wide range of methods, including ethnography. This operation will generate navigation tools and a basic road map of the region’s musical landscape and thus create a context for understanding individual issues, micro developments, and situations in which particular performances and experiences unfold. Although musicology and other areas of cultural research have always been territorial practices, it was not until the spatial turn in the late twentieth century that music’s distinctive relation with place and space was recognized as a conceptual challenge in music studies. Attention to the science of space, to geography, is only beginning to emerge. The term “musical geography” is relevant to this evolution, which is represented and developed in this handbook by chapters that generally draw from human geography and media studies, but take on particular forms such as urban encounters (Chapter 1), industry and market geography (Chapter 2), landscape and environmentalism (Chapter 7; Chapter 8; and Chapter 14), mobility of performers (Chapter 4; Chapter 12), circulation of vinyl records (Chapter 11), festival spaces (Chapter 19), and digital spaces (Chapter 20). The second step in the analytical progression can usefully be analysis of the historical dimension of music in the region—​t he music’s place within local and global histories and in the temporal dimensions of cultural consciousness. My argument, grounded in the history of musicology, is that history and space are fundamental dimensions of musical experience. A foundational rationale of musicology in the early twentieth century was to move beyond biographical history writing and develop more systematic and thus more scientific forms of writing, with the history of styles and genres dominating for several decades—​initially based on evolutionary ideas about styles growing and dying in processes analogous to organisms in nature (Dahlhaus 1977, 27). Musicological history writing was for most of the twentieth century shaped by interests in mapping, preserving, and interpreting musical pasts, manifest in archives and canons and hermeneutic analyses; and while those practices are still valuable, recent decades have seen the rise of interest in the politics and mediations of history. The advent of free online archives and streaming services integrated with social media changes the conventional dynamics and meanings of music history. These developments find a resonance in the handbook’s chapters on historiography (Chapter 1; Chapter 9); longitudinal perspectives on migration and circulation (Chapter 4); the postcolonial North Atlantic (Chapter 7; Chapter 5; Chapter 10); the aftermath of the cold war (Chapter 12); rock music revivalism and analog culture (Chapter 11); reterritorialization of genres (Chapter 6); publics (Chapter 13; Chapter 19); and survival (Chapter 14). By taking history seriously, this handbook provides a counterpoint to pop culture’s fascination with the here and now. Situating music within broader cultural histories helps illustrate how music is embedded in power relations and social changes that might

12   Introduction not be immediately apparent to all participants in the culture. The conceptual dimension, moreover, is emphasized because of its explanatory power to a wider range of topics than those covered in the handbook. A greater representation of mainstream pop, children and teens, digital culture, and issues of age and sexuality would have required emphasis on other conceptual dimensions, of course. The geographic and historical dimensions outlined here create a ground for the third and final step—​namely, analysis of music’s role in identity-​making—​involving forms of collective belonging, expression, and positioning. The interest in social and cultural identity that proliferated in the 1990s (Hall 1996, 1)  took inspiration from folklore studies and psychoanalysis. Music, however, has distinctive powers in the experience and production of identity through mediations between the aesthetic and the social in the particular form of popular songs, festivals, and televisual mediations that invoke collective affect and aesthetic meanings across a wide range of social spaces. Compared to sport, for instance, musical performance is often about identity, with melodies and performances as structured artistic articulations of life experiences in a diverse range of social situations. Song lyrics are commonly about being in a particular condition in a life-​story narrative, so in this sense songs are a form of aesthetic-​performative social commentary. Simon Frith has emphasized that music creates experiences involving both subjective and collective identity and the experience of self-​in-​process, reminding us that identity is a process not a thing, “a becoming not a being” (Frith 1996, 109). Interest in cultural identity was initially met with skepticism in musicology, in part because it consciously challenged conventional narratives of aesthetic autonomy. In this handbook, Ramnarine encourages us to look beyond identity and narrow, habitual conceptions of culture. She asks: “Should we be preoccupied with questions about identities in a world of cultural circulations and global challenges that speak to the survival of the human species?” One might also ask if developments such as empirical musicology, ecomusicology, and sound studies have moved on from the moment of cultural reflexivity, which had peaked in the early 2000s when Middleton asked: “Aren’t we all, to a greater or lesser extent, culturalists now?” (Middleton 2003, 3).7 Thinking about music and identity is still analytically relevant to many contemporary situations and it continues to evolve. New conceptions of identity have drawn inspiration from the affective turn and the idea of human flourishing media studies (Hesmondhalgh 2013). Knudsen’s chapter can be read in this context. Stan Hawkins’s chapter, on the other hand, exemplifies a maturation of thinking about popular music’s intimate relationship with gender, ethnicity, and nationalism. It is indicative of this handbook and the current state of music studies that the chapters in part three emphasize not Nordic self but alterity and difference. The chapters show how regional identity is generally experienced as a secondary dimension to national identity, but they also suggest its growing significance and potentials in globalization. Nordic identity is secondary in the sense that in everyday life around the Nordic countries citizens primarily identify with their country and not their region. Regional identification is more common in communication with people outside the region, and generally more

Introduction   13 so the farther away they are from the region, for the practical reason that the names and locations of countries within a distant region are already too detailed a geography for many people unfamiliar with that region. We only need to recall Franz Liszt’s famous response to Edvard Grieg in Rome in 1870. Upon hearing music by this icon of Norwegian romantic nationalism, Liszt commented: “This sounds so genuinely Swedish!” (Karlsson 1998).

Nordic Musical Thought? Having introduced the handbook’s approach, one might ask how this approach contributes to Nordic musical thought. Musicology in the Nordic countries has evolved from Austro-​Germanic and Anglo-​Saxon traditions, with a shift of emphasis toward the latter in the 1990s, by which time interest in the region had surged among scholars based in other parts of the world. Given this situation, it is advantageous to look beyond methodological localism and nationalism in the region and conceive the region’s music as an object of global scholarly interest. Dialogue between local insiders and scholars from around the world with outsider perspectives is vital in this global age. Such dialogues have shaped this handbook and will hopefully be developed further in the coming years, with more explicit reflexivity about how scholars navigate and construct local and international discourses on music and society. A model of excellence at the individual level can be found in American scholar Philip Bohlman’s book The Music of European Nationalism (Bohlman 2004). The book draws from decades of intense intellectual engagement with ethnomusicology—​within broader intellectual histories of music, history, and religion in the humanities—​and extensive multi-​sited field research around Europe since the 1980s. The result is one of the most insightful books on European music in history. Judging from its significance in several contributions here, Bohlman’s book has indeed changed how Europeans think about their own music. Thinking about the musical landscape of a transnational region can usefully draw from the situation in countries where music critics for centuries have contemplated their country’s cultural uniqueness in music. The experience in the United States, for instance, involves a history of writing about national identity in art music in relation to the Austro-​German tradition. This narrative started to change when Gilbert Chase and H. Wiley Hitchcock introduced folk and popular music into the scholarly map in the 1950s and 1960s, arguing for their centrality in locating uniquely American musical cultures. Crawford observes in his magisterial history of American music: “No recent historian has questioned the distinctiveness of America’s music, nor has any disputed Chase’s claim that in popular and folk traditions lie the wellspring of the nation’s truest creative achievements” (Crawford 2001, xi). The literatures on American music history make it clear that it is through discussions of such hard questions that a collective discourse can be developed and matured. Among the handbook’s most referenced scholars on narratives of Nordicness are Philip V. Bohlman, Nicola Dibben, Tina K. Ramnarine, Kristinn Schram, and Hans

14   Introduction Weisethaunet. They are pioneers in developing an international, English-​language discourse on the region’s cultural landscape as a unit of analysis, and they offer alternatives to the history of national romanticism in local language. However, I hope that the cultural musicology of this handbook does not adopt late twentieth-​century critiques of nationalism and essentialism so rigidly that is fails to recognize and support the region’s uniqueness and diversity in the way that it took decades for American historians to fully recognize folk and popular music. This handbook is not the first scholarly collaboration on music in the Nordic countries. There are two predecessors of sorts, the first being the 1997 Swedish-​language volume Musik i Norden (Music in the North). In his introduction, editor Greger Andersson presented the volume as the first collaborative Nordic music history (Andersson 1997, 12). Most of the contributors were historical musicologists. The idea for the volume was proposed at a conference in 1992 by German musicologist Heinrich W. Schwab, who had done research in the Nordic countries. The present handbook similarly began with an encouragement by two scholars looking at the region from the south, Goffredo Plastino and Franco Fabbri. Like the 1997 volume, this handbook draws attention to regional issues while recognizing the continued existence of national cultures. However, this handbook proposes a different model. First, it rejects the idea of offering an account of Nordic-​style music across the region, instead adopting a critical approach to unitary and normative Nordicness. The handbook, moreover, is not organized as a systematic coverage of all countries, genres, and time periods, but instead illustrates conceptual approaches to analyzing transnational dynamics. The organization of chapters is conceptual to foreground thinking about the region as a unit of analysis, as opposed to a theme in music history. Second, the handbook is conceived not in intra-​regional terms, but as wider transnational collaboration aimed at a global readership. In this, the handbook is the outcome of an internationalization process in Nordic musicology departments and its interactions with cultural studies and media studies. In the 2000s, communication in Nordic musicology migrated from national local-​language networks to the rapidly growing English-​language global digital networks of the discipline. This process was further sustained by a substantial increase in air travel since the 1990s, expanding the geographies of conference attendance, fieldwork, and employment. The process transformed the relation between scholars and their site of inquiry. The contributors to the present work were selected based on expertise on the topic, irrespective of nationality and place of residence. All contributors understand at least one Nordic language, and those who have not lived and worked in the region for many years bring invaluable perspectives to the conversation. So although there are limitations of an English-language volume emphasizing global collaboration, the advantages of this model outweigh the disadvantages at this point in history. In popular music studies, intra-​Nordic collaboration evolved in the 1990s, when interest in the field became more widespread across the region. The developments in that decade were shaped by interests in subcultures, fandom, and rock music among doctoral students and junior scholars born in the 1950s, for whom these arenas of

Introduction   15 cultural life had been an important part of their adolescence in the 1970s and 1980s. Several of them have since changed research interests and their contributions are somewhat ignored in current scholarship, which increases the risk of reinventing the wheel. The intra-​Nordic collaborations were generally funded by the Nordic Council, including a rock music research network from 1991 to 1995, and the first and so far only Nordic-​level Ph.D. course in popular music studies in 1997. From these and subsequent projects emerged two collective English-​language publications on popular music in the region: a special issue of the youth culture journal Young (Fornäs and Ihlemann 1999) and a book on rock music criticism (Lindberg et al. 2005). Rock criticism provides a prism for understanding broader issues in popular music culture, but the empirical and thematic framing of the special issue is more directly relevant and comparable to this handbook. The special issue of Young, titled “Place and Meaning in Nordic Popular Music,” is significant because it shows how thinking about Nordic popular music has changed, even as it focuses on genres and population groups that have since become mainstream in the field, including Viking metal, Icelandic indie rock, and immigrant hip hop. The editors Johan Fornäs and Lisbeth Ihlemann present the publication as one of many efforts in the field to overcome “the confines of Anglocentrism.” Anti-​Americanism was strong in Europe during the Vietnam War and in the political rock music movements of the 1970s and 1980s in Scandinavia, and the editors state that Anglocentrism has faded in the culture but less so in the literature. They further specified the target: “A strong tendency towards Anglocentrism [can be] found in the academic discourse on rock music” (Fornäs and Ihlemann 1999, 2). The four contributors to the special issue responded much like the contributors to this handbook: they explored popular music’s significance in local worlds and how the music mediates between local and transnational worlds. The first article by Viggo Vestel (1999) explores ethnic-​racial codifications of music genres in an Oslo ghetto. He shows how hip hop serves as a meeting ground for ethnic Norwegian youths and youths of immigrant parentage, with the former frequently moving on to metal music. The Viking figure appears in both genre contexts, but in very different cultural horizons. In metal, the Viking is embedded in white power nationalism and surrounded by images of dark Norwegian forests. Vestel interprets metal subculture as a counter-​ modernity and thus anticipates Teitelbaum’s argument in this handbook about whiteness from a self-​defined position outside the mainstream. The second article, by Odd Are Berkaak, explores fascination with American culture in the community around a hard rock band in an Oslo suburb. Berkaak (1999) mixes neighborhood perspectives with analysis of music-​making in a band context, but he also describes how the band’s American hard rock stardom fantasies led to a contract with a recording company in California and a stay in Los Angeles, where they “had the rock ‘n’ roll experience of their lives; walking on Sunset Strip and acting out all their fantasies of life in the fast lane” (1999, 30). In the third article, Gestur Guðmundsson explores the genealogy of Americo-​centrism in British rock criticism and how it shaped the localization of rock music in

16   Introduction the Nordic region. The article describes a foundational narrative in which rock music was created in the United States in the 1950s and spread from there to the rest of the world, while the United States continues to be a melting pot that absorbs developments around the world as “exotic spices” (Guðmundsson 1999, 45). What follows is a section on the social history of the Nordic region and the localization of rock music in the region. The early situation was framed by the belief that American rock was authentic and all Europeans could do was to copy the original (50). The trajectory of localization went through several steps, from attempts at exact imitation of individual recordings to imitation of performance styles, to the writing of original songs, and from the late 1960s in local language, to a situation in the 1970s when local-​language rock music gained a following in other Nordic countries and rock was recognized as an influencer on local languages. Guðmundsson’s key argument is that the dominance of American culture in the value system of rock music had the implication that Nordic music could only be recognized outside the region by its difference. Nordic artists could not achieve international success in rock music, but in pop (particularly Swedish and Norwegian) and in music framed by an exotic gaze (particularly North Atlantic). Guðmundsson’s main example of the latter is Björk and her ​identification with Icelandic nature. The fourth article by Eva Fock (1999) is about patterns in music consumption among youths of immigrant parentage. She nuances popular images of their culture and the racial-​ethnic codifications of genres, effectively challenging dichotomous conceptions of the relation between immigrants and mainstream society. Fock shows that the informants listen to diasporic music in family settings, to hip hop in peer spaces such as youth clubs, and to mainstream Danish-​American music for inclusion in mainstream society. Her analysis of music consumption patterns thus provides insight into a hybrid and contingent cultural experience that is interpreted differently across social spheres. The exploration of popular music in local Nordic contexts has continued since the publication of the Young special issue, as demonstrated by this handbook. One can no longer claim that popular music studies ignores local musical life in the Nordic countries. Does this explain why Anglocentrism is not being problematized much anymore? That is one reason. Another is that the penetration of Anglo culture has become naturalized. Mediatized urban Anglo practices continue to be a model of cosmopolitan identity in the globalization of the Nordic region, also in remote areas in the process of exploring global connectivity. For instance, when a group of young people in Greenland’s capital city of Nuuk claimed an identity for themselves vis-​à-​vis national culture in the early 2010s, they adopted the discourse of a popular music underground, using the English word underground (Otte 2015). Young Greenlanders drew inspiration from a history of mediatized narratives of cultural undergrounds in cities such as New York and London for mobilizing ideas about authenticity and cultural production. The Nuuk underground adopted DIY ethics and organized concerts that drew hundreds of people in a city of only 17,000 people. Anglo underground discourse flourished even in the absence of one of its constituting others, the corporate music industry. The Nuuk underground is a desired utopia parallel to the “Café Europe” trope in post-​socialist Eastern Europe

Introduction   17 (Drakulić 1996). Like so many other ideas about modernity and urbanism in the Nordic countries, the Nuuk underground articulates a power structure evolving from massive transatlantic consumption of Anglo popular culture, including not only music but also movies, news media, and social networking sites. While the Anglo orientation is not apparent to everyone, and therefore deserves ongoing critical attention, there has been a change in perception in the Nordic countries and in popular music studies. That is, Anglo culture is framed less in polarized terms; it is viewed less as the imperial force of complete cultural grey-​out. In cultural research, Anglo-​cosmopolitan discourse is becoming more widely recognized as an analytical modality through which Nordic-​ based scholars can engage in broader international dialogues about globalization and integrate outside perspectives in the analysis of Nordic culture. That logic is central to this handbook.

A Road Map of the Handbook Part One: Geography The eight chapters in this part set out to examine Nordic musical geographies from a variety of perspectives and analytical levels. The first three chapters have mapping functions. They explore myths, ideologies, and structures that shape evolving ideas about Nordic music and the region’s musical landscape. Philip V. Bohlman explores the dynamics of Nordic music in European history, arguing that the region’s location north of Europe’s center is a longue durée that parallels orientalist narratives of Asia as the East. To this end, Bohlman develops an original conception of borealism, drawing from his immense knowledge of European history and of orientalism. He presented his early ideas about borealism in a keynote lecture at the first meeting of the contributors in Helsinki in 2012, influencing several contributors with an original argument that can be read alongside Kristinn Schram’s pioneering study of borealism in folklore studies. Bohlman’s chapter encourages music scholars to look beyond the easy conception of borealism as an exotic gaze underpinned by ideology at the level of superstructure. His chapter highlights the historical, spatial, and experiential dimensions of borealism and creates a prism for reading the remaining chapters, while also asking tough questions for future research in the manner of a contemporary de Tocqueville: “How to include Greenland? How far to push the Nordic eastward into Russia? What about internal and external migration? Are popular music genres specific to linguistic and political affinities? Or can they be fully cosmopolitan?” In the following chapter, I offer a sociological analysis of major structural changes in the region’s popular music landscape. Drawing from sociological theory of modernity, the chapter explores the boundaries of dominant musical formations within the broader history of Nordic modernity, focusing on ongoing tensions between evolving

18   Introduction mainstream formations and their alternatives. The identification of a “mainstream,” for instance, is not only a matter of musical style or taste; it also involves interpretations of capitalism, nationalism, and mass media. Following this approach, I further suggest how the popular music landscape can be analyzed as evolutions within the region’s transition from a national to a more global modernity. The chapter focuses on the structural change in the unique position of Stockholm’s Anglo pop music industry in the 1970s to the current era characterized by a more decentralized transnational cultural geography, illustrated by the emergence of showcase festivals around the region and by the fascination with “exotic” alternatives to mainstream Anglo pop in geographic peripheries such as indie music in Iceland and black metal in Norway. The chapter argues that such niche alternatives are occurring within rather than outside the Anglo-​oriented Nordic modernity. The genealogy of this modernity is traced back to World War II and its implications for Nordic societies and their national popular cultures. The conclusion offers a critique of the consumer culture branding of the region within the new and more globalized Nordic modernity, which also involves popular music. Alexis A. Kallio and Lauri Väkevä’s chapter investigates the rationales for including popular music in Nordic schools, which are known to have been early to adopt popular music into their curricula. Why did this happen so early in the Nordic countries and is there anything specific about the way it played out culturally and politically in the region? The chapter lays out important information and identifies scenarios for possible interpretations through a comparative overview of approaches to popular music education in the Nordic countries. The analytical focus is on the rationales for including popular music. A dominant rationale has been that popular music has unique democratic potentials. Kallio and Vakevä bring nuance to the situation, arguing that popular music genres “are not necessarily democratic in and of themselves.” Popular music education policies can in fact be instruments of social exclusion. The analysis further strengthens the relevance of this by identifying situations in the classroom where conventional ideas about democracy in the Nordic countries are challenged by intensified globalization, and particularly by immigration. The United Nations reports that the number of forcibly displaced people has not been higher since World War II (War’s Human Costs: UNHCR Global Trends 2013). The millions of Syrians arriving Europe in 2015, surviving the most dangerous and inhumane conditions on their escape route, created pressure on European ideals of tolerance and human rights, with nationalist extremists setting refugee centers on fire at night and social democratic parties losing many voters to right-​wing populist parties. Educational and cultural institutions can play a significant role in this situation, and Nordic institutions are yet to fully include the region’s new immigrant populations and emerging cosmopolitanism. The fourth and fifth chapters share an interest in musicians traveling across and beyond the Nordic region, experiencing long-​distance connections and networked transnational mobility. The chapters illustrate general insights in human geography into

Introduction   19 how space is socially produced and complicated by mobilities, media communications, and markets. Hans Weisethaunet explores transnational connections and mobilities of Norwegian musicians within a long history of migration to the United States and evolving transnational media spheres of world music. The chapter contributes to contemporary thinking about the continued desire for cultural belonging and its conditions in the process of globalization. Epistemologies of routes gained ground in the 1990s, challenging centered and static notions of culture. Weisethaunet, however, does more than simply apply old theory to new examples. He analyzes experiences of circulation, mobility, and belonging, highlighting affordances and dynamics particular to music. The analysis evolves around The Hellbillies, one of Norway’s most popular bands since the early 1990s, and David Lindley’s collaboration with Harding Hank (the alter ago of Hallvard Bjørgum). Joshua Green’s chapter explores music in the context of evolving transnational dynamics in the Faroe Islands, focusing on the tourism boom and on connections with the global music industry. Similar to the situation in Iceland a decade earlier, music became part of an evolving tourism economy in the early 2010s, shaped by exotic views of the North Atlantic. Drawing from Urry’s concept of the tourist gaze, the chapter shows how Faroese bands work as producers of difference within an international system of industry and institutions, including the Nordic Council. The analytical focus is on transnational mobility and industry networks of popular music and its performers. Green shows that Faroese bands engage with these transnational flows and with exoticism in the international marketing of their music. His core case study is the doom metal band Hamferd, whose career evolved out of participation in international events, particularly festivals and competitions. The sixth chapter by Henna Jousmäki offers further insight into the relationship between music and cultural geography and into one of the region’s other vibrant metal cultures. The production of Nordicness in metal has evolved since the early 1990s, particularly in black metal in Norway but also in Christian metal, which is the focus of Jousmäki’s chapter. Her analysis contributes to the existing literature an understanding of how notions of locality are changing in the process of the music’s circulation in global social media services, most notably YouTube. The argument is that the geography of this religious youth pop culture is expanded by the media evolution, while a distinct sense of origin remains. Indeed, non-​Nordic audiences are celebrating the region as a space of authentic Christian metal. In light of past media evolutions, the analysis highlights YouTube’s affordances, especially user production, sharing, and interaction. The chapter begins by positioning translocality as the main concept for analyzing the evolving spatial dynamics. Also preparing the ground for the analysis is a brief history of Christian metal from its beginnings in the United States in the 1980s to the development of a distinctive association with the Nordic region. The case studies are YouTube publics of the Finnish band Scandinavian Metal Praise and the Australian band Horde, illustrating how youth participation in the music’s transnational social

20   Introduction media space redefines not only the music’s geography but also its national and religious associations. In the seventh and eight chapters, Tony Mitchell and Nicola Dibben bring the discussion of geography to issues of the natural environment. Both chapters are about Iceland, reflecting the international interest in Icelandic indie music and its relationship with landscape in particular. As anyone who has visited Iceland will know, the natural environment is strongly felt because of the visceral impact of the scenery of volcanoes and ice and its pre-​modern origins, contrasting the more nondescript landscapes in large parts of Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and other parts of the world where the landscape is flat and used for industrial farming or covered by the same species of trees. The Icelandic landscape, however, is a complex cultural and political construct, as both chapters demonstrate. Mitchell reminds us that landscape has multiple dimensions, including national identity, ecology, and cultural imagination. His chapter brings much nuance to the constant representation of Icelandic music through landscape, seascape, and icescape, drawing from longitudinal field research and interdisciplinary cultural research on landscape. The analysis involves discussions of perspectives on landscape in the 2010 volume Conversations with Landscape and of key musical figures in Iceland such as Jón Leif, Sigur Rós, Björk, Andri Snær Magnason, and Valgeir Sigurðsson. The main examples are two Icelandic films: The 2009 documentary Draumlandið (Dreamland) about the Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Project and its environmental impact, and the 2003 feature film Nói albínói (Noi the Albino). Dibben’s chapter ends part one on a serious note: the chapter can be read as a scholarly response to environmental degradation in Iceland. In recognizing the scope of the crises, she questions the conventional wisdom in musical geography and offers a new vision for music’s potential in transnational futures. The chapter begins with an argument for eco-​cosmopolitanism as an alternative to place-​centered approaches to the analysis of contemporary spatial experiences. Dibben suggests that music can create “a sense of place” but also “a sense of planet,” helping people see themselves as part of a global biosphere. The analysis includes a discussion of musical activism in response to the Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Project and offers two case studies, illustrating topophilic and biophilic conceptions of the national environment. The first case study is the 2007 documentary Heima (Homeland) about a free, unannounced concert tour by Sigur Rós and the second is Björk’s 2011 album Biophilia (Dibben was involved in making the sophisticated digital concept for the album).

Part Two: History This second part highlights the historical dynamics of contemporary Nordic popular music through analyses of such processes as national canon formation and revivalism. Part two begins with a method piece on national framings of popular music history in the Nordic countries. The following chapters explore the multiple functions of the

Introduction   21 past in contemporary culture, involving mediations of North Atlantic colonial history, the cold war, and the return of national canons in moments of crisis as a psychological mechanism in a globalizing world. As in the first section, the final chapter ends on an eschatological note concerning global warming. Antti-​Ville Kärjä opens up ­chapter 9 with an example of tensions between ideas of national culture and cultural diversity. While this theme is addressed in earlier chapters, Kärjä examines how it plays out in the discourse that shapes the entire handbook, namely popular music historiography in the Nordic countries. He offers a comparative analysis of how the history of popular music in the time period 1955 to 1990 has been written in the Nordic countries, illustrating the dominance of rock music. The analysis represents the handbook’s most explicit illustration of methodological nationalism and complements Bohlman’s chapter by bringing in perspectives from New Historicism, interpreting their relevance to a wide array of local-​language popular music research. Kärjä draws from extensive experience in local research networks, including his tenure as chair of the Nordic branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) from 2008 to 2013. The centerpieces of Kärjä’s analysis are two musicological histories, one on Finland and one on Sweden, both published around 2000, introducing them here to English-​language readers for the first time. Kimberly Cannady’s chapter brings a postcolonial perspective to the study of popular music in Iceland and the North Atlantic. The argument is that the fascination with Icelandic culture and nature, in which popular music plays a key role, evolves from a sense of “discovery” in the 1980s in Anglophone media that echoes a longer colonial history. The fascination with the present is grounded in the familiar myth of an isolated culture and nature untouched by modernity. Iceland’s authenticity is thus inseparable from the country’s mythical status as a deep freeze for Old Norse heritage and its location at the margins of Scandinavian modernity. Cannady demonstrates her postcolonial argument through her analysis of the evolution of the “discovery” motif in international media and in Icelandic record shops, festivals, and tourism marketing. Along the way, she opens up the way for a more nuanced understanding of the North Atlantic, looking beyond late twentieth-​century dichotomies. Chapters 11 and 12 examine two popular music revivals that illustrate different transnational cultural geographies in the region. Sverker Hyltén-​Cavallius and Lars Kaijser write about the revival of Swedish progressive rock, which was a countercultural DIY movement and Scandinavia’s first-​generation independent rock music industry. The analysis brings nuance to my argument about popular music’s role in mediating ambiguities about mass media and capitalism in Nordic modernity. The chapter focuses on the revival of the psychedelic style called “flumprog,” which originated in Stockholm’s underground scene of the 1960s. In the late 1980s, this music started to experience a revival within a global sphere of Anglophone DIY culture, involving North America, Europe, and Asia. The prog rock revival is not limited to Scandinavian prog rock; it also involves a broader international landscape of progressive rock in the 1970s, including German kraut and English folk prog. Inspired by

22   Introduction postmodern historiography, like Kärjä, the chapter introduces an analytical approach that explores how people make sense of fragments of the past in particular sites of transnational flows. The analytical method involves ethnography of fragments—​ recordings, photos, and decorations—​in record stores, for instance. The authors propose the concept of retrologies to account for how these constellations work to create utopian timeless spaces that suggest a particular form of historical and spatial consciousness in contemporary popular culture and a new arena for the transformation of this particular Swedish scene. Pekka Suutari’s chapter tells the story of a local revival in the Finnish-​Russian border region of Karelia. Although the revival had a local focus, it is shaped by broader geopolitics in Eastern Europe. The revival of interest in Karelian music happened in response to the Karelian experience during the cold war, and the careers of Karelian musicians illustrate this history. During the cold war, Karelians were subjected to territorial divisions and harsh assimilation policies. Neither the Karelians remaining in Russia nor the 500,000 who had escaped to Finland could officially voice their Karelian identity. Karelians born in Soviet after 1940 could only dream of seeing Finland, and this desire was expressed powerfully in music. After the cold war, new stores of Karelian culture emerged under the influence of developments across the Nordic and Baltic regions. Perestroika created a scenario for Karelians in both countries to express their sense of belonging in new ways, and music once again became a medium for this. Suutari draws on fieldwork in the Karelian town of Petrozavodsk since 1992, and uses two bands from there as focal points for uncovering key aspects of the cultural imagination of Karelians across Finnish and Russian borders, but also the wider international trajectories into Central Europe, Scandinavia, and the United States. He tells the story of the only rock band in the world that sings in Karelian, and he explores connections between aesthetics and politics in protests against Soviet and Russian politics. One of the bands, Myllärit, has enjoyed international success; and Suutari documents how its music has been perceived differently around the world, from concerns about the loss of authenticity in the Petrozavodsk folk music community to fascination with their hippie-​like appearance in the United States. Chapter 13 by Jan Sverre Knudsen is a micro-​level analysis of the music performed at the memorial ceremony following the 2011 Utøya massacre, where national extremist Anders Breivik killed seventy-​seven people, most of them young delegates at a summer camp of the Social Democratic Party. These summer camps are a proud tradition in Scandinavian countries, but the massacre had strong international dimensions. Breivik was a member of the nationalist Progress Party from 1999 to 2004, before he got into in international white power online networks, using the cyber name “andersnordic,” and claiming white power star Saga his favorite artist (Seierstad 2015; Teitelbaum 2014). In Euro-​America, the roots of ethnic-​racial violence at home are frequently repressed. Events of extreme violence are commonly reduced to a narrative of the individual madman or “the lone wolf ” and thus isolated from the nation (Merrill and Hoffman 2015, 1). Mourning ceremonies accordingly take the form of emotional nationalism appealing to strength in the national character and celebrating

Introduction   23 the humanist values of the nation. If we think that national extremism is not dangerous in Scandinavia, however, we have learned nothing from the Breivik massacre. Following an introductory discussion of theory of music, emotion, and nationhood, Knudsen takes us deep into such a moment of emotional nationalism, just one month after the attack, offering a detailed and rounded description of the repertoire, production, and performances at the ceremony. Knudsen argues that the ceremony was not only retrospective but also expressed desires to rebuild national community and tolerance. Like part one, part two ends with a concern for the environment voiced by a prominent British music scholar. Tina K. Ramnarine conducts case studies of three Sámi musicians, focusing on their aspirations for collective rights, cultural distinctiveness, and self-​determination. She situates these musicians in broad contexts of a still unfolding history. “In contrast to the perceptions of early twentieth-​century researchers, who believed vocal genres like joik were disappearing traditions, music has become one of the most important elements in stories of Sámi cultural survival in the twenty-​first century,” writes Ramnarine. Her life-​long interest in Sámi music leads to a critical anthropological perspective transcending conventional thinking about musicology and cultural history. Ramnarine is deeply affected by the experience of climate change and the role that music plays in valuing nature and imagining alternatives to dominant power regimes. Facing threats to global survival, historians might well focus less on understanding situations and developments in the past and give more priority to questions about how the past speaks to us and what it teaches us about survival. Such survivalist approaches to music history are likely to become more common in the future.

Part Three: Identity The third part examines music’s role in the experience of belonging in Nordic societies. Traditionally, belonging was framed in national terms, but intensified globalization has created new spatial dynamics, with a wider range of place identities that are layered and digitally mediated. It is less clear what nationhood and regional identity mean, and it increasingly involves diasporic people. Two arenas of cultural struggle are examined. The first is multiculturalism in urban Scandinavia; the other is the transnational mediation of Sámi culture. Chapters 15 through 18 examine issues of multiculturalism in similar situations, focusing on popular music among younger people of immigrant parentage. The case studies present examples of music’s significance in processes of assimilation and integration, paralleling earlier moments in history. The large migrations from Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century, and later on during World War II, for instance, brought new populations to areas such as Scandinavia (and many more to the United States). Many of these immigrants lived in distinct micro societies with their own language, cultural institutions, and markets for literature and music. This history is largely

24   Introduction absent in contemporary discourse on immigrants, however, and that raises questions about how informed the integration policies are and how well they are able to deal with the challenges of ghettoization, ethnocentricism, and racism. This is where a deeper understanding of the situation becomes relevant, as demonstrated by the scholarly approaches in these chapters. In ­chapter  15, Stan Hawkins explores transcultural perspectives on popular music aesthetics and gender in Norway through case studies of male celebrities born around 1980: the duo Madcon, Jarle Bernthoft, Lars Vaular, and Sondre Lerche. The analysis highlights both direct and subtle meanings of their music in a variety of performance contexts that are illustrative of dynamics in urban Scandinavia more generally. A particular theme is the practice of self-​fashioning a persona in the realm of entertainment. Conceptually, the chapter draws from Bakhtin, Eyerman, Frith, and other influential voices in the literature of cultural performance and identity. The discussion sheds light on fundamental issues in popular music aesthetics, while also demonstrating how musicology can offer a unique cultural critique of pop culture that may appear to be “only entertainment,” but in fact powerfully mediates ideology. Hawkins also points to the implications for the performers in pop culture’s spectacle and reminds us that the fantasy of escapism from everyday life is just that—​a fantasy. Although the chapter material is from Norway, many of the situations have striking parallels in Denmark and Sweden that deserve a similar critical reading, and the theorization has relevance far beyond Northern Europe. In ­chapter 16, Alexandra D’Urso offers a different perspective on musicians in ethnic minority populations in Scandinavia. She adopts the concept of public pedagogy from Paul Giroux to show how musicians are using hip hop as a medium of informal education and activism outside formal educational institutions and hegemonic national media publics. A  contribution to the literatures on hip hop and identity politics in Scandinavia, the chapter begins by voicing concerns about growing xenophobia and racism in Scandinavia, before introducing the concept of public pedagogy in the context of hip hop history and situating it in the context of Scandinavian politics of ethnicity and race. The analysis focuses on representations of identity in the music of Adam Tensta and Eboi as a form of anti-​racist public pedagogy, arguing that these two musicians have confronted right-​wing populism and deconstructed Nordic notions of otherness in their music. Moreover, the two artists have situated themselves as pedagogues and catalysts of social change. Henrik Marstal’s chapter contributes to the emerging literature on musicians of immigrant parentage, analyzing significant moments in the careers of four artists: Adam Tensta from Sweden, Carpe Diem from Norway, and Natasja and Outlandish from Denmark. They have all encountered the hegemony of unparalleled whiteness as a signature of national identity, even though race officially does not exist. (Teitelbaum unpacks this paradox of race in the Nordic countries in c­ hapter 18.) A familiar implication of such racial structuring of society is the racial coding of genres, which has been a common practice in media and culture industries for centuries. Marstal observes

Introduction   25 that immigrant populations of color have become established in “black genres,” especially African American genres, and he accounts for the artists’ responses to hegemonic national ideologies. Given the white ethnic-​racial hegemony in Scandinavia, we should not be surprised that they have all voiced criticisms and advocated for trans-​or multicultural conceptions of nationhood. Marstal analyzes significant political moments in the careers of the four artists and how they interact with local Scandinavian histories of freedom and democracy, for instance. Interestingly, Marstal proposes the idea of “new nationals” for these new and more multicultural conceptions of nationhood across Scandinavia. Chapter 18 by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum examines the significance of music in the history of radical white nationalism in the Nordic countries, grounding the analysis in a pioneering conceptualization of music and race in the region. The disciplinary ground is ethnomusicology and race studies. The specific focus of the chapter is a transformation in the 2000s in how nationalist activists look at the relation between their ideological dogmas and music. For decades, the consensus was that the music had to be white. Teitelbaum’s research reveals how young activists started to challenge this norm, introducing genres such as hip hop and reggae. The movement also developed a strong interest in female performers in traditional female roles as victims who depend on men to protect them (Teitelbaum 2014). The chapter contributes to the literature on white power music by looking beyond the conventional focus on how the music supports activism to instead examine racial constructions through music. Teitelbaum’s argument is that the introduction of rap and reggae involved a new conception of Nordic whiteness that is modeled not on nostalgia but on the expressive and discursive forms of Western nonwhite groups. This involves a white self-​minoritization. His analysis shows that the activists are divided and ambivalent. They generally commit to the category of white music even as their understanding of that category changes. The case studies include the rappers Zyklon Boom and Juice from Sweden, which is a center in the global white power sphere. Another conceptual aspect of broad relevance is Teitelbaum’s critique of the universal association of rap and reggae with blackness in the literature on hip hop. He argues that music does not bear an inherent racial character. Thomas R. Hilder’s chapter is a contribution to the literatures on Sámi cultural history, Nordic postcolonial studies, and music festivals. Drawing inspiration from social theory, the chapter explores the proliferation of festivals as local and transnational Sámi publics in the Nordic region. The argument is that festivals help foster a sense of transnational self-​determination for indigenous Sámi futures at three levels: the local, the Nordic, and the global. In showing how resistance to nation-​states is performed and how sovereignty is enabled in festivals, Hilder highlights the significance of the Sámi not only to nuance accounts of Nordic popular music but also for reconsidering broader political issues of transnationalism and globalization in the Nordic countries today. His main case studies are the Kautokeino Easter Festival and the Riddu Riđđu festival, but the analysis also brings in several other festivals to

26   Introduction further illustrate how these festivals are sites of both resistance and imaginings of other futures. Chapter 20 by Ann Werner explores identity issues in another important avenue of mediation in contemporary culture. That avenue is commercial digital streaming services, which have grown steadily in the 2010s and now constitute the dominant form of music consumption in the Nordic countries, with 9.4 million users and thus about 60 % of all Internet users in 2015 (Polaris Nordic Music Survey 2016). YouTube, Spotify, and Apple’s iTunes are the most popular services. The industry has registered a number of significant changes, including an increase in the consumption of music from outside the region, particularly Anglophone pop music. But is commercial streaming also changing the ways in which Nordic artists are marketed to consumers? Werner’s chapter offers an alternative to the dominant trend in music industry studies by focusing on issues of ethnicity, race, and gender. She conducts case studies of two female Sámi artists and their representation on Spotify, taking various aspects of the service into account, including the interface and the algorithm-​based recommendations. Her argument, informed by feminist cultural studies, is that in the process of making the music of these female artists available to global audiences, the industry continues a long tradition of reinforcing stereotypes of ethnicity, indigeneity, and femininity. Their marketing is dominated by romanticized images of women and nature, implying an inherent connection between the two. Thus, this commercial streaming service is not only making the music available to global audiences; it is also selling images of authentic otherness within an unequal capitalist global media system.

Conclusion If we look at Nordic societies from a social science perspective on macro-​level geopolitical forces, as the first part of this introductory chapter did, the two dominant institutional formations are national and European. These formations are articulated through national spheres of politics, business, and media on the one side and the European Union on the other. Other formations are important, too, including the global—​articulated through transnational corporations, NATO, and the United Nations, for instance—​and the regional, the Nordic, articulated mainly through the Nordic Council. If we look at the cultural spheres in the Nordic countries from a humanistic perspective, however, as we did in the second half of this chapter, we find a more nuanced picture of life in the region and of intensifying globalization. Popular music is a key avenue for understanding this process. Popular music mediates complex and evolving geographies in the early twenty-​first century. Through culture, and especially through forms of popular culture such as popular music, Nordic populations produce and experience geographies, histories, and identities. In popular music, for instance, many people find alternatives to dominant images of identity and engage in negotiations between the ordinary and the fantasy, past and future, self and other. Popular music also foregrounds and shapes the

Introduction   27 meanings of gender, ethnicity, and race in Nordic societies. But those signifying practices are nonetheless shaped by dominant economic and political structures; the alternatives are precisely alternatives to dominant structures, and they can challenge and transform them but not exist independently of them, which is to say outside the sphere of power. The research represented in the handbook above all illustrates the diversity of the Nordic cultural sphere and its popular music. Indeed, the region’s popular music highlights evolutions and tensions in Nordic modernity rather than showing one main trend toward either nationalism or globalism. Popular music continues to be used as a medium of cultural nationalism, while also opening up new transnational and postcolonial futures. Another continuing trend is the fascination with American popular music, which has long been particularly strong in Scandinavia. However, all the chapters show how popular music is a medium of globalization, in that it challenges localisms and creates new senses of place. The chapters also show that although there are many different representations of Nordicness, there is a cross-​cutting trend to represent Nordicness in exotic terms, filtered through images of nature, colonial histories, and the region’s status as a European periphery. The research in this handbook shows that music’s relation with the region’s nature is rich and reveals a multitude of experiences of the natural environment, of space, and of climate change. The myth of borealism originates in Central Europe, but it has now become a commercial discourse in which Nordic musicians participate to respond to global consumer needs for authenticity “elsewhere,” especially musicians operating in areas where the music economy has evolved into a tourism economy. The racial dimension of Nordicness is most often implicit, but whiteness dominates all formations of Nordicness, even when its cultural articulation is unstable and changing, as Teitelbaum demonstrates. As much as the chapters offer analytical framings and authoritative accounts of important developments, they also open up new avenues of research and have a shared recognition of music’s social agency, and therefore its power to shape the future. Several chapters offer cultural critiques, for instance, that are concerned less with revisionism than with the power of musicians and their music to engender change and making transnational connections. That impulse is most explicit perhaps in the chapters dealing with multiculturalism, environmentalism, and the music industry. Such perspectives motivate further research and hold the potential for music studies to strengthen its contribution to conversations about musical and cultural life in globalization. The challenges to future research are not only matters of epistemology but also of social capital to respond to global change, identifying new agendas, mobilizing new networks, and communicating their relevance. For scholars in the Nordic countries and in many other countries around the world, a particular challenge is to mature collaboration with scholars in the broader international community of English-​language scholarship. While linguistic and geographic frameworks are not neutral filters, it is important to focus on the analytical challenge in growing discourses that integrate the local and the translocal in terms of both culture and language, to overcome the dichotomy of local-​language localism and English-​language cosmopolitanism. A deep

28   Introduction understanding of a culture still requires knowledge of its language, but globalization expands the opportunity for many cultures to enter a process of self-​recognition through broader international collaborations.

Notes I would like to express gratitude to Antti-​Ville Kärjä, Francesco Lapenta, Nicola Dibben, and Stan Hawkins for their comments on an earlier draft of this introduction. 1. This view is primarily based on research I did on one of the Nordic Council’s major culture projects in 2012. The research involved interviews with prominent members of the organization and its representatives in national parliaments. Furthermore, in 2013, for instance, the council took interest in the idea of creating a Nordic anthem to unite all Nordic populations in song. The project was presented at a symposium at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen in November 2013. The result was performed in the concert hall of the Danish National Media Corporation in Copenhagen on November 1, 2016 and on a dedicated website (“Nordisk Hymne”). 2. An exhaustive list of national stars with limited international attention is beyond the scope of this chapter, but the following examples from Denmark, Finland, and Sweden illustrate the point. Danish icons include Røde Mor, Kim Larsen and Gasolin, Schu-​bi-​dua, Jodle Birge, Gnags, TV2, Thomas Helmig, Lene Siel, LOC, Medina, and Rasmus Seebach in Denmark; Finnish icons include Eppu Normaali, Kake Randelin, Katri Helena, Kirka, Nightwish, Children of Bodom, Amorphis, Apocalyptica, Lordi, and Jari Sillanpää; Swedish icons include Sven-​Ingvars, Vikingarna, Carola Häggkvist, Mikael Wiehe, Björn Afzelius, and Ulf Lundell. 3. Real Dania’s president described the audience as “the seven hundred most powerful people in the country.” I had not worked with the foundation but participated in media interviews about an arena construction project funded in part by Real Dania. 4. This assessment was made by Marlene Wind, a professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen, at a public meeting about the state of the Nordic region in Copenhagen, January 31, 2012. Wind has argued publicly for a stronger European Union and is therefore not neutral, but she is one of the most experienced Danish scholars on the European Union. 5. Heidi Avellan, January 31, 2012. Avellan is political editor at Sydsvenskan. 6. The term “cultural musicology” has been used in many different contexts, but the book that introduced it to musicology internationally was Kerman’s Contemplating Music, which became a major influence on the self-​reflexive musicology of the 1990s (e.g., Cook and Everist 1999). However, the term was first proposed by Gilbert Chase in a 1976 paper in which he made the following statement: “I favor the idea of an ‘ethnomusicology’ of Western music; but I do not favor the terminology” (quoted from Kerman 1985, 169).The term appeared many times over in the 1990s, but Middleton hints at a reason for its limited success in the following observation: “A tendency towards increasing concern with ‘culture’ has been manifested in music scholarship for some time, and in a variety of ways. It would be too much to say that the various trajectories are converging, let alone that all will crystallize into a single field of ‘cultural musicology.’ ” (Middleton 2003, 1). 7. Musicology has always been interdisciplinary, but there was a shift in the late twentieth century with the cultural and interpretative turn in the humanities and social sciences that involved a declining status of technical areas and disciplinary technique such as acoustics,

Introduction   29 linguistics, and transcriptions (e.g., Adler 1919; Dahlhaus et al. 1988; Merriam 1964; Nettl 1983). The technical rationale is vague if not absent in “the cultural study of music” narrative of the 1990s.

References Adler, G. 1919. Methode der Musikgeschichte. Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel. “All That She Wants.” Official Music Video. YouTube, October 16, 2010. At www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=d73tiBBzvFM. Andersson, G., ed. 1997. Musik i Norden. Trelleborg: Kungl. Musikaliska akademien. Beck, U. 2000. What Is Globalization? Cambridge: Polity Press. Bentzrød, S. 2015. “Russian Aggression:  Nordic States Extend Their Military Cooperation.” Aftenposten, April 9, 2015. At www.aftenposten.no/​nyheter/​uriks/​Russian-​aggression-​ Nordic-states-​extend-​their-​military-​cooperation-​7975109.html. Berkaak, O. 1999. “Entangled Dreams and Twisted Memories: Order and Disruption in Local Music Making.” Young 7(2): 25–​42. Bohlman, P. 2004. The Music of European Nationalism: Cultural Identity and Modern History. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-​CLIO. Clayton, M., T. Herbert, and R. Middleton, eds. 2003. The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge. Cook, N. and M. Everist 1999. Rethinking Music. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Crawford, R. 2001. America’s Musical Life: A History. New York and London: W.W. Norton. Dahlhaus, C. 1977. Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte. Musikverlag Hans Gerig: Köln. Drakulić, S. 1996. Café Europe: Life after Communism. New York: Penguin. Ellemann, K. 2013. “Ellemann:  Nedlæg Nordisk Råd og Nordisk Ministerråd.” Berlingske Tidende, October 25, 2013. At www.b.dk/​kommentarer/​ellemann-​nedlaeg-​nordisk-​raad​og-​nordisk-​ministerraad. Fock, E. 1999. “With the Background in the Foreground: Music Among Young Danes with Immigrant Backgrounds.” Young 7(2): 62–​77. Fornäs, J., and L. Ihlemann. 1999. “Theme Issue: Place and Meaning in Nordic Popular Music.” Young 7(2): 2–​3. Frith, S. 1996. “Music and Identity.” In Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. S. Hall and P. du Gay, 108–​127. London: Sage. Genov, N. 2012. Global Trends and Regional Development. New York: Routledge. Gill, A. 2012. “Nordic Exposure.” Vanity Fair, August 2012, 42–​43. Guðmundsson 1999. “To Find Your Voice in a Foreign Language: Authenticity and Reflexivity in the Anglocentric World of Rock.” Young 7(2): 43–​61. Hall, S. 1996. “Introduction: Who Needs Identity?” In Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. S. Hall and P. du Gay, 1–​17. London: Sage. Hesmondhalgh, D. 2013. Why Music Matters. Chichester, UK and Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell. Holt, F. 2007. Genre in Popular Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holt, F. 2013. “Museums for Pop and Rock Music in the Nordic Region and Beyond A Report and Conversation with our Project Partner, Denmark’s Rock Museum.” Nordic Popular Music. At http://​nordpop.blogspot.dk/​2014/​01/​pop-​musics-​exhibition-​spaces-​building.html. Ibrahimović, Z. 2014. I am Zlatan: My Story On and Off the Field. New York: Random House.

30   Introduction Karlsson, H. 1998. “From the Top of the Globe.” Nordic Sounds 17(1): 18–​22. At http://​dvm.nu/​ periodical/​ns/​ns_​1998/​ns_​1998_​01/​from-​the-​top-​of-​the-​globe/​. Kerman, J. 1985. Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Keskinen, S., S. Tuori, S. Irni, and D. Mulinari, eds. 2009. Complying with Colonialism: Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Kurunmäki, H., and J. Strang 2011. Rhetorics of Nordic Democracy. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Lindberg, U., G. Guðmundsson, M. Michelsen, and H. Weisethaunet. 2005. Rock Criticism from the Beginning: Amusers, Bruisers, and Cool-​Headed Cruisers. New York: Peter Lang. Lund, K., and K. Benediktsson, eds. 2010. Conversations with Landscape. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Martins, H. 1974. “Time and Theory in Sociology.” In Approaches to Sociology, ed. J. Rex, 246–​294. London: Routledge. Merriam, A. 1964. The Anthropology of Music. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Merrill, H., and L. Hoffman. 2015. Spaces of Danger: Culture and Power in the Everyday. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Middleton, R. 2003. Introduction. In The Cultural Study of Music, ed. M. Clayton, T. Herbert, and R. Middleton, 1–​15. New York: Routledge. Middleton, R. 2006. Voicing the Popular: On the Subjects of Popular Music. New York: Routledge. Nettl, B. 1983. The Study of Ethnomusicology:  Twenty-​ Nine Issues and Concepts. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. “Nordisk Hymne.” At http://​www.nordiskhymne.org/​. Otte, A. 2015. “Nuuk Underground:  Musical Change and Cosmopolitan Nationalism in Greenland.” Popular Music 34(1): 113–​133. Økland, I. 2013. “Danmark er det egentlige Norden,” Aftenposten, October 30, 2013. At http://​www.aftenposten.no/​meninger/​kommentar/​Danmark-​er-​det-​egentlige-​Norden-​ 105167b.html. Paasonen, S. 2009. “Healthy Sex and Pop Porn:  Pornography, Feminism and the Finnish Context.” Sexualities 12(5): 586–​604. “Polaris Nordic Music Survey: Streaming Music Is Mainstream in the Nordic Countries.” Koda.dk, February 24, 2016. At www.koda.dk/​eng/​about-​koda/​press-​releases/​polaris-​ nordic-​digital-​music-​survey-​streaming-​music-​is-​mainstream-​in-​the-​nordics/​. Sassen, S. 2006. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Seierstad, Å. 2015. One of Us: the Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. Tagg, P. 1998. “The Götenborg Connection:  Lessons in the History and Politics of Popular Music Education.” Popular Music 17(2): 219–​242. Teitelbaum, B. 2014. “Saga’s Sorrow:  Feminities of Despair in the Music of Radical White Nationalism.” Ethnomusicology 58(3): 405–​430. Vestel, V. 1999. “Breakdance, Red Eyed Penguins, Vikings, Grunge, and Straight Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Construction of Place in Rudenga, East Side Oslo.” Young 7(2): 4–​24. “War’s Human Costs: UNHCR Global Trends 2013.” The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 2014. Geneva:  United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. At http://​www.unhcr.org/​5399a14f9.html.

Pa rt  I

GEOGRAPHY

Chapter 1

Mu sical B ore a l i sm Nordic Music and European History Philip V. Bohlman

In memoriam: Marian B. Wilkie, whose light shone so richly with the colors of the North How pleasant it finally is to see a people in its naked simplicity, the happiness with which it was born, and all of nature in its most basic creative potential… . One can be free of all the rules and traditions that bind one in a yoke and place a wall around the human heart. All this requires but a moment of open revelation! —​Johann Gottfried Herder, “Nordic Songs,” Book 4 of Alte Volkslieder (1774)

With his small book on “Nordic Songs” (Nordische Lieder), Johann Gottfried Herder believed he had reached the final moment in his lifelong project of writing the history of humanity. The “moment of open revelation” would be proclaimed at the border to the North, and we would recognize it because the music of the North had also become that of Herder’s eighteenth-​century world, in which the light of the Enlightenment increasingly shone upon the North and its music. The revelation with which Herder would open the vast regions of Nordic light and sound to the European imagination would remain elusive. The promise of such ambitious historical claims notwithstanding, the claims remained inchoate. The manuscript of Alte Volkslieder (Ancient Folk Songs), most of which dates from 1774, was never published, and it was most likely never completed (for a modern translation, see Herder and Bohlman 2017, 26–​43). Many songs from this first-​ever project devoted to world music—​the term “folk song”

34   Geography had never before been used as a title; indeed, Herder had coined it only the year before, in 1773—​found their way into later publications, especially the two-​year project called Volkslieder (1778–​79). Throughout this chapter, Nordic song forms along the multiple borders that shape the history of musical borealism. As it was for Herder, Nordic song is not one thing—​a genre, a repertory, a regional or national practice—​but, rather, it acquires its meaning because it enters historical narratives that serve the various ways in which the music of the North both is and is not part of European history and the networks of music referred to as “popular.” The boreal in music is both dependent upon and independent from European history. It is the paradox of musical borealism and the ways it opens new possibilities for understanding the history of Nordic music that this chapter seeks to approach more fully. In the historiography of Nordic popular music that lies at the core of this chapter, historical moments form a typology of musical borealism that connects time and place across the vast landscape of Nordic popular music. Historically and historiographically, the chapter moves between and among different chronotopes of Nordic music’s historical moments, and in so doing its temporal shifts give the typology various and contrasting registers. Music at these moments represents the image and identity of the North in many ways, but it is when they are together and interconnected that it provides the historical discourses I call “musical borealism.” It is together and interconnected, moreover, that the many moments of musical borealism constitute the ethnographic present of Nordic popular music and translate it as history. As a concept, borealism appears surprisingly rarely in the academic literature on the North. Kristinn Schram (2011, 9) notes that, even in the very few instances borealism makes a brief appearance, usually in political science and postcolonial studies, it is used “tentatively and dismissively.” When it appears in a title—​for example, Acta borealia: The Nordic Journal of Circumpolar Societies—​it does so imprecisely, as the background for place rather than its foreground of discourse. Schram’s own work on borealism as representation and identity is a welcome impulse for the generation of new theories and their application. In ways both similar to and different from those in this chapter, Schram examines the representation and performance of borealism “in both contemporary and daily life focusing on their practice within intricate power-​relations and translational folkloric encounters,” particularly in Iceland (Schram 2011, 4). Whereas he emphasizes the local and its reconstitution of the North through performance against the modern context of the nation, the musical moments in this chapter offer the possibility of expanding the presence of the North historically, turning to music for the ways it conjoins the everyday and the boreal longue durée. The moments of musical borealism move between the everyday and the nation, the former timeless in our experience of it, the latter historical in our reckoning of the impact of the past on the present. It is crucial to my theorization of an intellectual history of Nordic popular music in this chapter that I explore the persistent social formations of popular music that create agency and movement between the everyday and the nation.

Musical Borealism   35

Moments musicaux in the Ethnographic Present I search for the first moment in this chapter by returning to a day in the recent history of Nordic popular music when, in fact, it became the reason for gathering the nations of Europe in Oslo for the 55th annual Eurovision Song Contest: May 29, 2010 (see ­figures 1.1–​1.6). At the distance of almost seven years, we might ask how we enter the everyday and its timeless sense of music’s intimacy on a day marked as the high point in the annual cycle of European song. Readers might calibrate the everyday and the nation

Figure 1.1  Norsk Folkemuseum at the time of the Eurovision Song Contest, Oslo 2010

Figure 1.2  Roma street musicians at the time of the Eurovision Song Contest, Oslo 2010

Figure 1.3  Local wind band at the time of the Eurovision Song Contest, Oslo 2010

Figure 1.4  German buskers at the time of the Eurovision Song Contest, Oslo 2010

Figure 1.5  Norway’s Alexander Rybak at the press conference after the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest finale, Moscow 2009

38   Geography

Figure 1.6  Official Guide to the Eurovision Song Contest, Oslo 2010

in different ways, but as an ethnomusicologist I draw upon my customary conceit of ethnography—​made increasingly intimate, personally and culturally, and therefore critical—​so that scholars (not least among them scholars of popular music) can enter and participate in the experiences of the everyday. I shift ethnographic registers to the

Musical Borealism   39 everyday of the past so that I might share several moments musicaux from my fieldwork at the Oslo Eurovision Song Contest, through which I navigate the time and space existing between the timeless past and the historical present of Nordic popular music in the everyday and the nation. The music of the everyday and the nation converge as a grand moment musical of Nordic popular music. I locate this moment in the everyday because the closer I move to it and experience it, the more its similarities emerge. The musicians use music to enter a public sphere, exposing the private. Histories and geographies overlap and intersect. The Carpathian border regions of Eastern Europe from which the Romani musicians came to perform in Norway (figure 1.2) are proximate to the Belarus lands from which Alexander Rybak, the 2009 ESC winner, and his family came as immigrants to Norway (figure 1.5). The folk dancers and fiddlers at the Norwegian National Open Air Museum (Norsk Folkemuseum; figure 1.1) claim bodily authenticity in the same ways as the Frikar Dance Company and fiddlers opening the 55th annual Eurovision Song Contest. The local wind band from Oslo (figure 1.3) may have traveled the farthest from their everyday world to perform at the Eurovision Song Contest in their backyard. Their performance on the evening of the Grand Finale was unlike any other, for it had to cross no boundaries whatsoever to transform unself-​conscious local authenticity for the international audience passing by. These musical images celebrating the North at the 55th Eurovision Song Contest may represent shared everyday worlds, but they spill over onto the nation, just as the nations of Europe penetrate the space of Nordic popular music. They enter the imagery of the nation through those who came from elsewhere to witness the Oslo Eurovision as a context for international competition. They made the journey to the North, physically or virtually through the broadcasts of the European Broadcasting Union, to witness the popular music in perhaps its most historically consistent nationalist setting. National musical boundaries are both buttressed and breached. The past is museumized at the Norsk Folkemuseum; the present is performed as myth a few kilometers away at the Arena in which the Grand Finale is mediated for hundreds of millions of television viewers far beyond Scandinavia (figure 1.5). Separating the everyday from the nation in the social formation of Nordic popular music—​once upon a time, det var en gang—​ proves impossible and unnecessary.

Borealism’s Moment of Modernity Borealism became modern in eighteenth-​century Europe, a child of the Enlightenment born of ancient ancestors. Claiming the North for European civilization was not the only journey to its peripheries that guided Enlightenment intellectuals and ideologues in the eighteenth century. Larry Wolff (1994) describes the “inventing of Eastern Europe” by charting a “map of civilization on the mind of the Enlightenment”; Edward Said (1978) similarly traces the rise of European orientalism to the confluence of intellectual

40   Geography currents in the Enlightenment. It is, however, in the rise of borealism that Europe’s foundational mythical pasts were sutured together to draw them from the peripheries and forge a future history that would become as modern as it was European. Borealism became modern through the discovery of the self in the otherness of the North. Boreal modernity emerged from this discovery because of an Enlightenment moment formed at the convergence of four processes. The first of these processes—​narrating a Nordic longue durée—​had been well under way, or at least was imagined to have been so, long before it accelerated during the eighteenth century. The pursuit of narratives from the distant past is evident in the linkage of myth from other parts of Europe to the myths of the Nordic regions: common ancestry accrues to the epic tales of the Nibelungen and the Edda, and to Homer and Ossian are attributed a common spirit of ancient myth making (see, e.g., Herder’s essay, “Homer und Ossian,” in Herder 1998; for an English translation, see Herder and Bohlman 2017, 172–​85). Through appropriation and anthology, the great epics of Europe’s North achieved a new fullness in the eighteenth century. The second of the processes—​the encounter with the indigeneity of circumpolar peoples—​was critical because of the ways it added new dimensions to Europe, hence freeing it from a historiography of advancing civilizations from the South that rescued it from the people without history in the North and East. The third process emerged at the intersection of the first two: the teleological gap between myth and history is closed, and from this common terrain the boreal emerges as, at once, both ancient and modern. The Nordic and the European enter into a common selfness that is modulated through related dialectics of otherness. A fourth process of discovery was necessary to find the link between the Nordic and the European, a link that would fully realize borealism’s Enlightenment modernity, and that process lay in the formation of musical genre: the discovery of folk song in Europe’s North. For Johann Gottfried Herder, that discovery began in 1769, when he embarked on a sea journey from Riga, where he was the pastor at the German cathedral, across the Baltic and North seas, before landing in France and eventually making his way to Strasbourg and eventually to Weimar. The sea journey proved to be an epiphany, which in turn would provide the opening toward a moment of revelation that Herder sought through his “Nordic Songs.” In the unpublished journal he kept on the 1769 journey across the seas of the North, Herder wrote: And so it was that I became a philosopher on the ship, albeit a philosopher who had learned his lessons badly, with no books and instruments drawn from nature. Had I only known what kind of perspective one had while sitting under the ship’s mast on the expanse of the ocean, philosophizing about the skies, the sun, the stars, the moon, the air, the wind, the sea, rain, streams, fish, and the seafloor. (Herder 1976, 13–​14; see also Herder and Bohlman 2017, 268)

Though he had grown up in the Baltic world, Nordic traditions lay just beyond the reach of the familiar books and instruments he acquired as a student of Kant at the University of Königsberg. On his journey of discovery, he acquired an entirely new set of tools to

Musical Borealism   41 sound the world of the North. These were the tools with which he wove the chronotopes of borealism into European history. In particular, he created a lyrical language of the North that owed its images to the sight and sound of nature, increasingly the force that localizes the boreal. Of the epic traditions of the northern and western islands of Scotland, whose Nordic history was essential for Enlightenment thinkers, Herder wrote: “In their earthly realms they bear witness only to saddening deserts, the spread of extinction across the places they once occupied; they hear the sounds that dissipate and become evermore silent (Herder 1998, 82; see also Herder and Bohlman 2017, 181). The natural world of the North increasingly appeared as a defining feature of indigenous music, which in turn was crucial to the revelation of the boreal in that music. Among the Sámi songs in his Volkslieder volumes we find the following, called simply “To the Reindeer/​Ans Rennthier” (Herder 1990, 193–​194; see also Herder and Bohlman 2017, 82): Kulnasaz, reindeer, dear reindeer, Let’s hasten our pace. Let’s fly, and we’ll soon reach our goal! The marshes are a long way away, And they have almost no song left.

Just as nature and indigenous song converge, so too does folk song become European; and at this point of convergence, borealism is endowed with a more capacious meaning, affording it a new place in the moment of modernity.

Nordic Nationalism and Modernity Reconsidered Nordic and Scandinavian music—​popular, folk, traditional, and even classical—​have long exhibited the conditions attributable to the paradox of modernity. The historiography of Nordic music assumes different forms that suggest a persistent idea of the Nordic as retreating from European modernity. Already in early medieval Europe, the epic and heroic songs of the Edda (the Edda Songs, the Nordic myths that parallel the Germanic Nibelungenlieder) pass from oral to written tradition by reinterpreting Nordic history’s teleology in Europe as modern. The earliest Edda are those with most direct indebtedness to Germanic myth, especially the Nibelungenlieder. Those at greatest distance are the variants inscribed in the oral traditions of Iceland and Greenland. The distance displayed by the Nordic grows as history passes to myth, retreating from Europe into the farthest reaches of the North. The classicization of Nordic musical tradition—​Scandinavian, Baltic, circumpolar indigeneity—​similarly becomes a retreat from modernity (see Chatterjee 1993 on classicization as modern).

42   Geography The North of Europe produces and reproduces itself by creating distance between its individualism and distinctiveness, and Europe itself. The Nordic resistance to the European Council, the European Union, and the eurozone are modern political forms of this distancing. The Nordic resistance to the euro similarly symbolizes the insistent retention of a political economy that occupies the periphery, rather than the center, of Europe. The retreat to the traditional and the indigenous is a cultural form of the same acts of distinction and distance. Right-​wing politics and left-​wing politics both distinguish a North that engages with European nationalism by distance and distinction. And yet, as the chapters in this book demonstrate, the tension between the popular Nordic and the national Nordic is inexorable. Drawing upon Peter Davidson’s (2005) writings on the “idea of North,” Kristinn Schram (2011, 8) relates the tension unleashed by the paradox of modernity to the history of the north as a concept “full of extremes.” The North is at once hostile because of the conditions of its winter, the inhospitable months of darkness and cold, but such conditions contrast with the warmth and hospitality of those who live in the North. The extremes are co-​dependent on borealism; an abundant cultural space, forged from nature, accommodates them both (see also Berland 2009). “From savage dystopia to enlightened utopia, the pendulum has swung back and forth between the civilized and the wild” (Schram 2011, 8). Schram’s pendulum, I want to suggest, could also be reconfigured as yet another mixed metaphor—​time’s arrow—​thus recalibrating the timeless dystopia and utopia in a historiography of borealism itself. In this chapter, I examine the inexorable tension in the boreal paradox of modernity as a process and product of discourses about Nordic popular culture. History and historical narrative produce concepts of the Nordic that form along the border of an ever-​ shifting wall between modernism and modernity. In Nordic modernism we witness the production of affective culture, not least that of popular music. And we witness Nordic musical modernity in the production of the national and the transnational. As I turn to historiography in this chapter, I ask the questions: Does Nordic popular music actually produce the nation and nationalism? Does it buttress or undermine the boundaries of transnationalism? To what extent does the production of nationalism actually emerge from other processes, yielding other social formations? For example, does it come from folk, traditional, and indigenous musics that are local? Or is it from regional musical practices, especially those that map the regions of the North? As the present chapter unfolds, I  look at five historiographic patterns of and sites for Nordic music, tracing the tension between the popular and the national, and mapping these on the everyday and the nation. Before turning to the five sites, however, I want to make it clear that I interpret history and historiography—​the discourses that constitute historical thought and thus shape the writing of history—​in complex and contradictory forms. History and counter-​history form contrapuntally within time, made and unmade by music in its popular social formations at many and diverse moments.

Musical Borealism   43 Table 1.1 Typology of Historiographies of Nordic Music Beyond the Nation 1. Nordic music inextricable from its sense of place 2. Linguistic practices and musical dialects • Local, regional, national, and pan-​Scandinavian linguistic influences • The movement between oral and written tradition

3. Emigration and encounter • The spread of Nordic culture to the North and West (Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, and

beyond) • The classicization of Nordic folk music (e.g., hardingfele in America)

4. Colonial and postcolonial • Border regions and national myth (e.g., Kalevala) • Indigeneity

5. Modern and postmodern • Nordic musics in diaspora (e.g., North America) • Nordic jazz reconfiguring cosmopolitan aesthetics

6. Globalization and indigenization • Making the global Scandinavian (“the politics of home” in Fabian Holt’s sense; see Holt 2016) • Nordic rock music (e.g., Scandinavian metal)

The typology of this historiographic counterpoint contains the categories in table 1.1.

Geographies of Musical Borealism The North is a place both realized and imagined through music. The geographies of borealism, too, are both real and imaginary. They coalesce around images and identities. They provide buttresses that separate self from other, hence functioning both to include and to exclude. Like other forms of regional identity, borealism generates some forms that extol the grandeur of the North, that make it a region with which its residents have deeply felt affinities. Other forms of regional identity isolate the North from other regions, claiming the exclusive rights to the ownership of history. Regionalism, also like nationalism, attracts both love and hatred; it can be ideologically positive or negative. Even at their greatest extreme, when they seem to generate the most radical differences, the geographies of borealism that map music onto the North account for variation and difference. I turn briefly to four of these geographies of the North to open the possibilities of reading its many forms in musical borealism.

44   Geography

The Natural North The images and sounds of nature pervade the musics of the North and chart the landscapes across which musical practices stretch. Nature assumes different forms in musical practice, dependent on historical moment, cultural or social affinity, ethnicity, nationality, genre, and repertory. Nature may be sounded through a set of romantic compositional practices in the symphonies of Jean Sibelius or through onomatopoeia in Inuit throat-​games or in the joiking of Sámi, but its presence serves to render each of these sonically Nordic. It was nature that drew early anthropologists and ethnomusicologists to the music of indigenous peoples, with the compass of sound turned unequivocally toward the northern shores of the polar seas (cf. Diamond 2013 and Fox 2013, both of which trace the historiographic patterns of North American indigenous music to the epistemologies of nature). The sounds of the natural North may well differ from one repertory or style to another, but they are recognizable. Listeners who want to hear the North expect to hear it, and they are seldom disappointed.

Ontologies of Indigeneity Indigenous peoples live in all parts of the circumpolar North that are habitable by humans, and their cultures provide perhaps the single most unifying force for borealism. Searching to discover and explain this unity has been one of the most important and contested processes of modernity and postmodernity. Early travelers to the North, whether to northern Scandinavia or northern Canada, used trade and religious missions to encounter and convert indigenous peoples, introducing an often-​violent history of colonization. Anthropologists and ethnomusicologists in more recent years have sought the boundaries of indigenous musics to determine the ways those boundaries encompass the national or the Nordic. Indigenous boundaries take precedence over national boundaries in music, allowing scholars to study Sámi musical traditions across northern Europe, and Inuit traditions in the flow of traditions between Canada and Greenland. The ontologies of indigenous music bear powerful witness to the paradox of modernity, for they highlight the contingencies of Nordic cosmopolitanism while also resisting them.

Music Without History One of the most consistent representational narratives of the national historical museums of the North is their organized exhibits along two separate paths, which originate in different places but converge as the nation becomes fully formed by modernity. The first of these paths traces the culture of the nation, the increasing transformation of folklore into statelore, of oral folk music into the literate traditions of Nordic classical music. The second path meanders from prehistoric settlements through indigenous polities,

Musical Borealism   45 usually organized by means of food production and language group, to the diversity and multiculturalism of the modern nation-​state; Greenland occupies its own wing in Copenhagen, the Sámi their urbanized communities in Helsinki. The first path follows a straight course, teleologically moving toward national culture. The second takes a circuitous route, with history grafted onto it in fragments—​those representations of a pre-​ national culture that survived. History finds its way into musical borealism along both straight and circuitous paths. Because they do not run parallel to each, but rather prescribe different events and the actors who create those events, these paths lead historians in ways that are often contradictory. The great epics enter the North by following both paths. According to literary history, the Edda reached Scandinavia from the Germanic lands of the South; Elias Lönnrot (1802–​1884) sought the cantos of the Finnish Kalevala in the Karelian borderlands in the northeast of Finland, the crossroads of indigenous peoples and the Russian empire. As history—​national history and music history—​ musical borealism redirects the timeless so that it will accommodate the transformation of the past to a usable ideological commodity in the future. Music makes the timeless timely in the North.

The Transnational North If all musics are national in one way or another (see the case I make in Bohlman 2011), the discourses from which musical borealism springs reflect the uneasiness of containing the North as national entities. The political definitions of what the Nordic and the North contain are unsure at best, almost always raising questions about where such designations and others, from Scandinavia to the circumpolar regions, begin and end. In the conferences and discussions that led to the present volume, there have been persistent questions about how to expand the scope to include as much of the North as possible. How to include Greenland? How far to push the Nordic eastward into Russia? What about internal and external migration? A Nordic diaspora? Are popular music genres specific to linguistic and political affinities? Or, can they be fully cosmopolitan? Such questions are not merely rhetorical; rather, they illustrate the ways in which musical borealism represents the transnational flow of music and musicians. Transnational popular music is evident in the most local and culturally intimate repertories—​for example, the use of dialect in Sámi hip hop, even when the listeners capable of understanding the lyrics live in only a few villages (see Chapters 14 and 19). Nordic popular music practices are notable because they so effectively map all these geographies of musical borealism onto contemporary repertories. As local as indigenous sounds may be, they quickly find a significant place in global popular music. Epics may survive in the oral traditions of a few specialists, but they draw attention to the borders between myth and history. In the twenty-​first century, Nordic popular music reflects an expanding landscape, on which the cosmopolitan is made intimate by the musical borealism that connects the nations of the North.

46   Geography

Historiographies of Musical Borealism The five sites along which musical borealism forms make theoretically explicit the coordinates of a historical social formation that is implicit in the chapters of the present volume—​namely, that “the Nordic” reflects geographies that depend on Europe. “The North,” in contrast, extends across the circumpolar regions that include Europe, but also extend globally to Russia, Asia, and North America. Historically linking the Nordic are the encounters, past and present, with Europeans from the South. The cultural regions and popular music of the North, however, are linked by indigeneity and the historical mobility between East and West. Nordic peoples and histories—​ from the writings of the Roman Tacitus, to the Enlightenment’s Herder, to musical scholars engaging with popular music—​are both distinct from and dependent upon Europe’s position to the south. The movements of indigenous peoples across the northern oceans suggest other kinds of mobility and responses to nationalism. Borealism as I employ it here, therefore, reflects the uses of concepts such as orientalism to refer to the world made eastern in the wake of the Age of Discovery, globally as in the critical literary theories of Edward Said (e.g., 1979), and regionally in Europe, as in the historical theory of Larry Wolff (1994). More recent configurations and metaphors of European region, such as Timothy Snyder’s (2010) naming of East Central Europe in the early twentieth century as “bloodlands,” are also suggestive of the ways in which empire and violence shape the North. These could not be more evident in the rise of music on the Scandinavian Right, which seeks to claim the Nordic as a region that becomes a bastion against foreignness (see Chapter 18 and Teitelbaum 2017). Since at least the movement of the people from the South, to use Tacitus’s description, and the tribes from the East moved into Europe’s North, there have been widespread claims that European cultures and peoples were shaped by the geographic centrality of Europe: Europe occupied the middle of the world. Notions of the West unfold as a discourse history from St. James and St. Patrick to the Cold War and the European monetary crisis. In the historical and cultural discourses of the Mediterranean’s betweenness, Europe’s position in the North forms a border with one part of the world strecthing into boreal regions. I have taken one more liberty in my decision to employ borealism as a concept applicable to the music historiography of the North—​namely, its evocation of the more global coordinates of light. The aurora borealis enlightens Europe’s North much as the rising sun of the Orient reflects upon its East, the global region from which the sun rises. I now turn to five sites of Nordic popular music that might throw light on a historiography of musical borealism that I hope illuminate the social formations of Nordic popular music in time and place. These sites unfold historically as shown in table 1.2.

Musical Borealism   47 Table 1.2 Five Sites for the Historiographies of Nordic Popular Music 1. Nordic Myth (textual base = Edda) 2. Nordic Folk/​Popular (textual base = Herder’s writings on “nordische Völker” and the idea of the North in his formation of an Enlightenment concept of popular/​folk music) 3. Nordic Global (textual base = Scandinavia in the Eurovision Song Contest) 4. Nordic Ultra-​Nation (textual base = right-​wing uses of the North) 5. Non-​Nordic Nordic (textual base = indigenous musics in resistance and the “New North”)

Nordic Myth—​The Edda The search for beginnings leads to the epic and heroic songs of the Edda, especially the “Older Edda,” which presumably arose in the fourth century of the Common Era, the “Heroic Age,” when the Germanic peoples of Europe confronted the migrations from Asia and the East. The common historical tale is that the Heroic Age concluded with the movement of Germanic peoples into Scandinavia in the fifth century, with steady expansion toward the north and the west, to Iceland, Greenland, and beyond, until the early Middle Ages, when the singers and scribes of the Edda fully chronicled the myth of the Nordic past in song. The people have listened to the betrayal, that the men gathered In assembly once exacted, those who were the most meager of all; They carried on in secret conversation, awful things happened later To them and also to the sons of Gjuki, who had been betrayed. (Krause 2001, 207)

So begins the first strophe the Greenland variant of the “Song of Atli” (“Atlakvi∂a” in Grœnlenzka), fully formed from the hemistiches of written transmission formalized in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries at the farthest reaches of Nordic song. With the written canon in place, the transmission of the Edda returned to myth or, rather, retreated from history as early modern borealism began to take shape. Increasingly, an interface between the folk and the popular heightened the paradox of the Edda—​for

48   Geography example, the practice of uncoupling the heroic songs from Germanic oral epic, especially the Nibelungen songs. Scholars of the Edda no longer dispute the historical basis of the Edda, particularly that “at their core they document real historical events and refer back to real people” (Krause 2001, 284). The real people and historical events, however, were pushed from their own age and place—​the fourth century in the Middle Rhine and northern Italy—​into a timeless North. And there they came to exemplify a people united against the invasion of Central Europe from the East and South. The common song genres, forms, and structures in the Edda provide linguistic and structural maps of the transition from ancient to modern Europe. They introduce the agents necessary for the production of popular modernity (e.g., Snorri Sturluson in The Edda of Snorri Sturluson, ca. 1220–​1225). The more closely we read the Edda, or listen to versions recorded from oral tradition, especially from Icelandic epic singers, the more we see the ways in which the paradox of coeval myth and history establishes the foundations of a historiography that comes to represent other social formations for Nordic music: Nordic myth depends on European history; it articulates a politics at once conservative and radical, settling upon the North as a place distinct from the South and the East—​entering history through the tension of oral and written traditions that cannot be disentangled and through the production of the popular, not least because of the ways new languages emerge (e.g., Icelandic), charting the path for early Nordic popular music to enter modernity.

Nordic Folk/​Popular—​Johann Gottfried Herder It is hardly surprising that, with their metaphorical fascination with the light of European and universal history, Enlightenment thinkers turned to the North much as they did to the Orient. For the lumières, borealism shed new light on ways of connecting past and present in the least explored of Europe’s boundary regions. Whereas I might have drawn upon any number of Enlightenment thinkers to examine the engagement with the North, I turn in this chapter to focus briefly on Johann Gottfried Herder, for whom both the “nordische Völker,” “Nation,” and “Volkslied” were to fill the full range of his own philosophical spectrum, and then to shine beyond throughout the nineteenth century and the age of nationalism. Herder engaged the North and its musical traditions in three distinctive areas of his vast array of writings. The first of these I might call “autobiographical” largely because of the special role he assigned to Baltic folk song, which he probably experienced in his youth in the Lithuanian–​East Prussian border regions and the initial years of his career as a pastor in Riga. Baltic songs, which Herder encountered ethnographically, enjoy pride of place in his seminal volumes of folk song, Volkslieder (1778–​79), which contained the first sustained application of the term “folk song” to a body of songs, thereby canonizing the term. The discourse of the folk song in Herder’s Volkslieder begins with a series of Nachrichten (observations, here) on Estonian songs, followed by Latvian songs:

Musical Borealism   49 On Estonian Songs As I traveled about during the harvest time and met workers in the field, I heard a rather wild song sung by many of them as a work song. I learned from a pastor that it was an old pagan song without rhyme, of which one could not disabuse the workers. In Kelch’s Liefländische Historia there is an example of a love song called “Jörru, Jörru” [George], a rather common name, which appears here as a title that leads some scholars to claim as proof that these people are descended from Jerusalem. The song goes something like this: Jörru, Jörru, darf ich kommen? George, George, may I come? Not today, my love. If you had only come yesterday, Today, there are others with me. (Herder 1990, 292; see also Herder and Bohlman 2017, 62–​63)

Herder’s second engagement with Nordic music was ethnographic, taking place during his journey as he departed from his post in Riga in 1769, with the goal of reaching Europe. The encounter with folk music from the North was also a journey to nature, the site of nature and the natural in music. Deeply influenced by and influential on the philosophy of language (Sprachphilosophie) throughout his life, Herder sought to show the ways in which song became an extension of the ways in which thought formed of experience provided the natural basis of music. In no other part of Europe was the potential to express the human response to nature so intimate and powerful than in the North. In the remarkable field notes he kept during the journey, Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769 (Journal of My Journey in 1769), published only posthumously by his son, Emil, in 1846, Herder marvels at the North as he passes slowly across the Baltic and North seas, hearing the sounds echoing from the nature along its shores: O, soul, what will become of you when you depart this world? The narrow, firm, bounded center has disappeared as you flutter about in the air and swim upon the sea. The world disappears before you; it’s disappeared from underneath you! What a new way of thinking! (Herder 1976, 12; see also Herder and Bohlman 2017, 261)

Significantly for the impact of Herder’s larger historical and philosophical projects—​ and for twenty-​first-​century assessments of the North in Enlightenment thought—​his third engagement was historiographic, hence a transformation of the musical objects of folk songs into a system of historical thought that led him to locate the “Nordic peoples” at the northern boundaries of European history. Music, in extraordinary ways, became the most profoundly affective language of those boundaries. We witness this musical and philosophical engagement with language again as Herder opens the fourth chapter, dedicated to the Nordic peoples, of Über die Wirkung der Dichtkunst auf die Sitten der

50   Geography Völker in alten und neuen Zeiten (On the Impact of Poesy on the Customs of Peoples in Ancient and Modern Times): Once again, we arrive at one of the most critical areas of poesy, what its impact is, how it creates lived experiences. All Nordic peoples, just as formerly the waves of the sea, as the icebergs and whales moved across the sea, had songs, indeed, songs in which the lives of their ancestors lived, as did their own deeds, their courage and heart. Thus, they moved toward the South, and nothing could stand in their way: They fought with their songs as if they were swords. We began to engage these Nordic songs ourselves, those which transformed the fate of Europe, as well as those places in which we now live ourselves. (Herder 1994, 184–​185; italics in the original)

As he lays the very foundations for folk song as a Nationaldichtkunst (national lyric) in the 1770s, Herder thus asks us to think of the history of the North as musical in almost every way. He does so, moreover, by connecting the many parts of a Nordic music powerfully mustered to make, not just chronicle, history.

Nordic Global—​Scandinavia in the Eurovision Song Contest His marvel at the musicality that empowered the Nordic peoples notwithstanding, Herder stopped short of untethering the North from Europe. The connection to Europe may have been tenuous, even for the essentialized soul in which Nordic folk music resonated, but it was no less so than the ambivalence that often accrues to connections between Nordic popular music and Europe. In search of tenuous connections, I jump historically by a century and a half and return to the site evoked by the figures at the opening of this chapter, the Eurovision Song Contest. We might well understand the distinctive presence of Scandinavia in the Eurovision as the product of modern myths. According to those myths, it might well be the case that northern countries never quite fit the East-​West geography of the Eurovision. From its outset in 1956 at the height of the Cold War, the Eurovision provided a political and cultural battleground between East and West in Europe. The participation of the North, at least in the minds of many Northern Europeans, has historically been different, albeit significant, because of historical paradox. The Nordic paradox arises from the intersection of at least four conditions. First, Nordic entries have quite remarkably sustained a capacity to lose the Eurovision while nobly suffering ignominy. In Nul Points, a collection of life stories from the Eurovision’s biggest losers, in which Scandinavians figure more than entries from any other region, Tim Moore describes the capacity for suffering ignominy thus: “It was different … in the contest’s early years. During the sixties all Scandinavians felt as … uncertain outsiders, newly emerged from harsh rural poverty. They had to bury their old rivalries and band together, support each other” (Moore 2006, 51).

Musical Borealism   51 The second paradox is already implicit in Moore’s comments: Scandinavian bloc voting. Whether the accusations of Nordic fraternalism against the backdrop of family squabbles are valid or not—​anyone who watches the voting knows they are valid—​ they broaden our understanding of paradox. Third, politics do enter Scandinavian Eurovision songs, but when they do, they are often northern politics. The various engagements with Sámi political and national rights are surely the most striking case—​ for example, in 1980, when Mattis Hætta and Sverre Kjelsberg combined Norwegian folk music with Sámi joiking in Norway’s Eurovision entry, “Saamiid Aednan.” Fourth, perhaps the ultimate paradox, Nordic entries have enjoyed some of the most spectacular successes in Eurovision history. In 2010, Alexander Rybak’s victory margin for “Fairytale” was greater—​far greater—​than for any other winning song. In 2006, Lordi’s “Hard Rock Hallelujah” broke through the barriers that had excluded many of the most global rock styles from the Eurovision, at the same time making the case to the rest of the world that there were Finnish and Scandinavian dialects of heavy metal. In the years leading to the publication of the present volume, Nordic entries often proved to be unbeatable. In 2012, the Swedish entry, Loreen’s “Euphoria,” was a spectacular success, with a tally of votes that outstripped even Alexander Rybak’s “Fairytale.” One year later, in 2013, when the Eurovision took place in Malmö, Sweden, less than an hour from Copenhagen, it was Denmark’s turn to win, with Emilie de Forest’s “Only Teardrops.” The musical borealism of recent Eurovision competitions seemed at first to have reached a hiatus in 2014, with the victory of Austria’s Conchita Wurst, but only momentarily, for Sweden’s Måns Zelmerlöw’s “Heroes” was victorious in a popular music Cold War confrontation with Russia, bringing the Eurovision back the North again in 2016 (see Bohlman 2015). Historically, the most spectacular Eurovision success, finally, belongs to Scandinavia, the song voted most popular in the first half-​century of Eurovision history: ABBA’s “Waterloo” in 1974. Who could disagree with the historical consensus of the vox populi that narrates the history of modern Europe through its engagement with the Eurovision Song Contest (see Björnberg 2013)? By 2013, if for only a half-​decade, Nordic popular music was transforming the Eurovision, reconfiguring its global geography as “Europa borealis” (Tragaki and Bohlman 2013).

Nordic Ultra-​Nation—​Right-​Wing Uses of the North Musical moments assume many different forms, proliferating as historical meaning accrues to and transforms myth. In search of the many musical moments that constitute the historiography of Nordic popular music, we also embark upon the ethnographic present. Perhaps it is by chance, perhaps it is because the ethnographic present I now enter is shaped too by the historical moment in which the present volume takes shape—​that is, during one of the most global moments of right-​wing popular music across Europe, 2012 to 2014, and beyond to the present-day. This ethnographic moment entered, and continues to unfold, in the historiography of Nordic popular music with disturbing force. It was on March 31, 2012, that the European Defence League organized

52   Geography an anti-​Islam rally in Aarhus, Denmark, on the eve of the trial of Anders Behring Breivik in Norway, reviving again the various myths of European identity, continent-​wide and in the North, that have entered the narratives of the present from the past in various ways. Turning to the Internet to find the narratives of right-​wing movements in Scandinavia, we can witness the ways these myths, disturbing above all because of their relentless reproduction of Europe’s historical longue durée, entered the everyday of spring 2012. In the globally circulating videos produced in spring 2012, music documented the ethnographic present of the Aarhus anti-​Islam rally in complex and contradictory ways. The orientalized soundtracks of anti-​Islam videos contrasted with the metal-​driven soundtracks of many other videos produced for and circulated on March 31, 2012 (cf. Chapter 18 and Teitelbaum 2017). Their orientalist soundscape notwithstanding, the Internet videos contained several markers of a historicizing borealism, not least strikingly similar visual references to the aurora borealis. Musical and visual references are local and global, and they draw upon myth no less than history. The question of Anders Breivik’s contact with the European Defence League, and his preparation of a musical playlist from European Defence League sources prior to his July 2011 murders, remains open—​but was critical to the summer 2012 trial based on the proof or denial of sanity. The ultra-​nationalist, right-​wing musical message the Aarhus videos are meant to convey is clear, not because of a single historical narrative but, rather, because of the ways the vox populi sought to mobilize the present. So sweeping it is as polity and ontology that musical borealism affords all willing to embrace its power to represent the North an opportunity to apply it to their cause.

Non-​Nordic Nordic—​Indigenous Musics in Resistance and the “New North” It is with the potential for the popular to mobilize that I reach the final social formation in the historiography of Nordic popular music toward which I  have moved in this chapter, the “non-​Nordic Nordic,” which I might also describe as the music of the “New North.” On March 31, 2012, the response of the New North to the Aarhus rally was already palpable, above all in the counter-​narratives taking shape in alternative rallies. Various organizations staged counter-​rallies; among the most notable were Projekt Antifa in Denmark and Unite against Fascism and Hope not Hate, from the United Kingdom. These groups, which outnumbered the European Defence League in Aarhus, aimed explicitly to stem the spread of an anti-​Islam rally through the conflation of anti-​ immigration politics and the ongoing European economic crisis. The response, especially from the Danish Left, was substantial, at least in coverage of the international media to which I had access. Perhaps most heartening for this volume and its reflections upon the present and future of Nordic popular music was coverage of Denmark’s response in Al-​Jazeera, which closed its news analysis on April 13, 2012, with an account of the organization of a concert to protest the anti-​Islam rally by Aarhus city officials,

Musical Borealism   53 who explained that “the concert was organized because ‘Aarhus does not want to be associated with extremist groups’ that represent ‘everything we want to distance ourselves from’ ” (European Far Right 2012, 3). The potential for distinguishing the strands of a “New Nordic Popular Music” impressively runs through all the chapters in this volume. Some grow from older strands of musical borealism, but far more important, they begin to shape a new critical discourse on the music of the North. It would be my hope that a discourse on non-​Nordic Nordic popular music might intersect with some of these social formations for a “New Europeanness” that I have attempted describe in recent writings—​above all, the two editions of a monograph on music, nationalism, and the New Europe (Bohlman 2011, 206–​ 258). Among the social formations that are particularly appropriate for understanding a “New Borealism” might be the new indigeneity, the international media competition, the music of religion and religious revival, the new folk musics, the new cosmopolitanism, and the new regionalism. Even as I reflect again on these processes, I wonder whether they are new at all when applied to musical borealism. Perhaps their newness is only a matter of perspective, of paradox. Perhaps their presence in the twenty-​first century has less to do with transformations of the North and more to do with the ways in which the North sheds its light across a global popular music.

In Lieu of a Conclusion: Nordic Music Beyond Nationalism? I have sketched the taxonomies, ontologies, and typologies of musical borealism in the tables and examples that crisscross this chapter, with the hope that such categories, drawn from a European music history of the present (Garton Ash 2000), might suggest steps toward a more comprehensive historiography for Nordic popular music. I should also like to think such categories challenge us to pose a new set of questions that reflect the social formations of spaces opened by a new vox populi in the North. Is there a historical longue durée for Nordic popular music that contains more complex musical genres and social formations than heretofore included? How do we detach the constructions of musical borealism from myths of Nordic indigeneity and rethink them as historical narrative? Is the Nordic always nationalistic? What would it mean for any music to exist in a space beyond nationalism? For Nordic music? Can popular music be purged of history? History and historiography have assumed multiple forms in this chapter, just as they have responded to different types of social formation in the North. The history and historiography of Nordic popular music, accordingly, might well begin to occupy a different space—​indeed, that space in the subtitle for this section, opened by the preposition beyond. It is the space “beyond” opened by Nordic popular music that reflects and realizes diversity, critically and urgently challenging us to search for a commonality that not

54   Geography only grows from difference but also gives voice to the vox populi, through the capacious eloquence of popular music, to transcend difference itself.

Note All translations in the chapter are those of the author unless otherwise indicated.

References Berland, J. 2009. North of Empire:  Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Björnberg, Alf. 2013. “Invincible Heroes: The Musical Construction of National and European Identities in Swedish Eurovision Song.” In Empire of Song:  Europe and Nation in the Eurovision Song Contest, ed. D. Tragaki, 203–​219. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. Bohlman, P. V. 2011. Focus: Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Bohlman, P. V. 2015. “Tales of Two Europes:  Sameness and Difference at the Eurovision Song Contest 2015 Vienna.” OUPBlog, At http://​blog.oup.com/​2015/​06/​eurovision-​song-​ contest-​2015-​vienna-​two-​europes. Chatterjee, P. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davidson, P. 2005. The Idea of North. London: Reaktion. Diamond, B. 2013. “Native American Ways of (Music) History.” In The Cambridge History of World Music, ed. P. V. Bohlman, 155–​179. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. “European Far Right To Stage Anti-​Islam Rally.” 2012. Al-​Jazeera, March 31, 2012. At www. aljazeera.com/​news/​europe/​2012/​03/​201233185146471961.html. Fox, A. 2013. “Repatriation as Reanimation through Reciprocity.” In The Cambridge History of World Music, ed. P. V. Bohlman, 522–​554. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garton Ash, T. 2000. History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the 1990s. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Herder, J. G. 1778–​ 79. Volkslieder. 2 vols, published as one. Leipzig:  Weygandsche Buchhandlung. Herder, J. G. 1976. Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769: Historisch-​kritische Ausgabe, ed. K. Mommsen. Stuttgart: Reclam. Herder, J. G. 1990 [1778]. Volkslieder, Übertragungen, Dichtungen. Vol. 3: Johann Gottfried Herder Werke, ed. U. Gaier. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Herder, J. G. 1994. Schriften zu Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst und Altertum, 1774–​1787. Vol. 4: Johann Gottfried Herder Werke, eds. J. Brummack and M. Bollacher. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Herder, J. G. 1998 [1794]. “Homer und Ossian.” In Johann Gottfried Herder Werke, ed. Hans Dietrich Irmscher, 8: 71–​87. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Herder, J. G., and P. V. Bohlman. 2017. Song Loves the Masses: Herder on Music and Nationalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Holt, F. 2016. “Jazz and the Politics of Home in Scandinavia.” In Jazz Worlds/​World Jazz, ed. P. V. Bohlman and G. Plastino, 51–​88. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kraus, A., ed. and trans. 2001. Die Heldenlieder der Älteren Edda. Stuttgart: Reclam.

Musical Borealism   55 Moore, T. 2006. Nul Points. London: Jonathan Cape. Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Schram, K. 2011. “Borealism: Folkloristic Perspectives on Transnational Performances and the Exoticism of the North.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Edinburgh. Snyder, T. 2010. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books. Teitelbaum, B. R. 2017. Lions of the North:  Sounds of the New Nordic Radical Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Tragaki, D., and P. V. Bohlman. 2013. “Europa Borealis: Reflections on the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest Malmö.” OUPBlog. At http://​blog.oup.com/​2013/​05/​europa-​borealis. Wolff, L. 1994. Inventing Eastern Europe:  The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Chapter 2

N ordic Mode rni t y a nd the Struct u re of the Musical L a nd s c a pe Fabian Holt

How are the transnational dynamics of regional Nordic cultural space changing in the early twenty-​first century? More specifically, how can evolving global dynamics be registered in the Nordic landscape of popular music—​a cultural form that is essentially a product of modernity and globalization? This chapter is a response to that question. It develops and illustrates an analytical narrative for examining a newly dominant structure in the Nordic popular music landscape as a particular moment in a longer history of popular music and Nordic modernity. Given its centrality to the study of popular culture and modern societies, the sociology of modernity, and specifically of its cultural dimensions, will serve as a disciplinary ground (e.g., Hall and Gieben 1992; Lash and Lury 2007; Castells 2000; Berland 2009). The purpose is not to map music onto a large-​scale theory of society but, rather, to create a discursive ground from which aspects such as mainstream pop and the music industry can be studied as forces shaping the cultural landscape and its internal differentiations. The perspectives of the industry and of mainstream sensibilities are often perceived as the negative Other in parts of the culture and in music studies with a humanistic rationale, and my aim instead is to provide an argument for the continued relevance of substantive arguments, of arguments about cultural value, while recognizing that cultural and social dynamics are relational and therefore they necessitate thinking about structural relations. In short, the differentiations and dialects between mainstream and alternative modernities are essential to understanding cultural life in modern Nordic societies. From this sociological perspective, the chapter offers a critical review of dominant approaches to Nordic music, and particularly how their otherwise sympathetic engagement in ideas about identity limits the exploration of a broader range of app­roaches to studying music and culture with a transnational regional perspective. My critique of identity-​driven approaches is the first step in making a case for the chapter’s analytical

58   Geography focus on popular music within the dialectics of Nordic modernity—​specifically, the relationship between popular music’s power in sustaining mainstream norms and sensibilities, and the power of other kinds of popular music within histories of alternative modernities. These alternative modernities generally narrate opposition to mass culture, markets, and the nation-​state in such a way that their framing within these forces of modernity is obscured. The analytical approach is applied to the examination of a dominant structure in the current Nordic popular music landscape and its distinctness from earlier situations. The narrative of the main analytical section that follows, then, is that the Nordic popular music landscape has changed from an era of national corporate dominance—​ with Stockholm as the main industry center and its unparalleled success in producing global stars based on white Anglophone mainstream rock and pop models—​to a more decentralized and networked regional landscape of small-​scale production. In the latter, many artists blend into a transatlantic sphere of popular forms of Anglophone indie rock and pop, with its global niche markets and shared urban-​international—​if not cosmopolitan—​imaginary. In understanding how the Nordic music landscape in the contemporary era of Sigur Rós and Teitur differs from the era of ABBA and Roxette, it is useful to consider how the dominance of one or more music-​industry geographies at any given time sustains certain aesthetics, ideologies, and career trajectories. This way, knowledge of industry geography becomes relevant to cultural and historical analysis, and vice versa. This will be illustrated by the particular Nordic history of the independent rock music sector. Its evolution from a culture of independence from mass culture and capitalism to a culture of micro-​capitalism mirrors the global trajectory of indie rock, but the way it has played out in relation to national broadcasting corporations and music export strategies has specific Nordic implications. Moreover, while evolutions in new media and communication technologies such as those of the past two decades have had similar implications globally, there are particular Nordic histories of how social hierarchies and places have changed within new media evolutions and the transition to neoliberalism. The conclusion of the chapter looks at the emergence of a new neoliberal narrative of Nordic culture—​of Nordic cool—​in the arenas of lifestyle journalism and marketing, arguing that voices in the mainstream media and society are finding appeal in a new story of the region to boost its global recognition and tourism economy via culture, not the least via the perceived authenticity of micro-​popular indie musicians.

A Critique of Identity-​Driven Approaches Although a diverse range of disciplines contribute to research on music in the Nordic countries, the discourse on Nordic popular music is dominated by narratives of

Nordic Modernity and the Musical Landscape    59 identity. The Nordic region is the product of interests in economic and cultural integration, and narratives of what is culturally significant in a region always involve notions of identity. In humanist music studies, particularly musicology, the challenge has historically been first to search and construct a regional identity and later to deconstruct it. Much less attention has been paid to the question of whether a region’s musical life can be studied from perspectives other than identity. I argue that identity is important, but that regional musical life can and should be studied from other perspectives—​not just from related categories such as affect and solidarity but also from structural categories such as similarities in cultural change and evolutions in music genres, industries, and markets. How do we make sense of the region’s most popular artists of the past fifty years—​artists such as ABBA, Roxette, A-​ha, Aqua, and Avicii, whom many critics and scholars have been quick to dismiss in the belief that these artists have little localness? In the first wave of popular music studies in the Nordic region during the 1970s, scholars were quick to dismiss what was perceived to be commercial Anglophone mainstream pop. Since then, even participants in the independent music sector have recognized the role of ABBA, for instance, in paving the way for Björk and other artists to come out of the Nordic region. The recognition is yet to come for the arts-​and identity-​driven discourse of musicology.1 In the following, I introduce two approaches and types of research interests in the kinds of humanist music studies that have come to dominate the discourse on Nordic popular music. The first approach is to construct a field of music with a perceived Nordic musical identity—​a Nordic sound or tone, a Nordic-​style music, so to speak. The other approach is in part a critique of this history, aiming to recognize the music of ethnic and indigenous groups that have been excluded from dominant national canons. Both approaches narrow the scope of Nordic popular music and ignore the widespread fascination with Anglophone music genres and a desire to master international Anglophone musical expressions and to use them as templates for more or less localized expressions. More attention to the fascination with Anglophone popular culture in Nordic life will help create a more holistic view of the region’s musical landscape. It is ultimately reductive to conceive this landscape in terms of music that either claims or challenges dominant Nordic identities. Within the region, “Nordic music” is still associated with music that expresses a regional cultural identity, but much popular music in the region does not neatly fall into the categories of national or regional identity. Nordic jazz scholars have recognized the fascination with American music, but their work has received little attention in the broader field of popular music studies (Wiedemann 1985; Fornäs 2004; Arvidsson 2011). Their studies of localization processes such as “Americanization” and “modernization,” for instance, would be relevant to develop comparatively at the regional level. In some cases, this reveals previously overlooked connections across national borders in the region and highlights how regional images have been produced differently at the national level, with different implications. Studying places in the region comparatively is vital to

60   Geography countering the localism hidden in studies of a single place.2 With the surge of interest in the concept of identity in the 1990s (Hall 1996, 1), writings about music in the Nordic region have become more self-​reflexive about identity, but still have a strong interest in identity.

Nordic-​Style Music “Nordic-​style music” is my term for the idea that Nordic music is music that signifies Nordicness. In everyday life, the idea has historically governs a longing for a shared essence. Nordic-​style music, moreover, is not only the product of a desire for aesthetic Nordicness, but also for social selves and mythical origins through the transcendental powers of music. Ideas of musical Nordicness owe a great deal to Norse mythology and to nineteenth-​century national romanticism. The romanticist style of idealizing the region’s emotional character—​typically sentimental, with folk materials, and in historic rural and urban settings—​can still be found in the region’s popular culture and has powerful appeal to the exotic gaze on Europe’s North. Nordic-​style music exist in a number of variations. One is the female performance of innocence, happiness, and perceived purity in idyllic summer or winter scenery, as illustrated at various moments in the careers of artists such as Alice Babs, ABBA, Lisa Ekdahl, and Sissel Kjyrkebø. A second variation is the introverted, melancholic, and soul-​searching meditation accompanied by cloudy or dark, deserted, and cold nature, cultivated in ballad traditions, Nordic-​language Protestant psalms, and Jan Garbarek and other jazz-​influenced artists on the German EDM recording label and small Oslo labels, but also cultivated by rock artists such as Sigur Rós, Röyksopp, Emiliana Torrini, Samaris, and the melancholic pop and tango music t­raditions in Finland. A third variation is music inspired by Norse mythology such as Norwegian black metal and the forms of Nordic-​style music in the world music of the 1980s onwards. The latter frequently involves the use of synthesizers and includes such diverse artists as Jan Garbarek, Eivør Pálsdóttir, and the somewhat generic sounds on compilations such as The Rough Guide to the Music of Scandinavia of 2012. More traditional forms are represented by the acoustic sounds of Harald Haugaard, Dreamer’s Circus, and Lena Willemark, for instance. Finally, there are modernist and cosmopolitan forms of Nordic-​style music characterized by critical engagements with contemporary Nordic life and self-​celebratory Nordic claims to equality and environmentalism; this can be found in the music of Björk and The Knife. In addition to musicological writing on the Nordic region (e.g., Andersson 1998 and 2001; Smith 2002; White and Christensen 2002), the discourse on Nordic-​style music is sustained by the Nordic institutional government, the Nordic Council, via the journal Nordic Sounds (begun in 1982) and the council’s music prize.

Nordic Modernity and the Musical Landscape    61

Music of Minority Populations A distinctly critical approach to unitary images of Nordicness in the cultural mainstream emerges from Anglo-​American ethnomusicology, which is represented in this handbook by foremost scholars in the field. Ethnomusicological approaches are characterized by an interest in music marked by ethnic-​racial difference and particularly music in communities of minority populations, such as indigenous people, immigrants, and people with immigrant parentage. In local Nordic popular culture, these populations are commonly referred to as “ethnic populations” and their music as “ethnic music,” although there are more voices calling attention to their history and social conditions and consequently for more reflexivity and empathy in the language of difference. Academic interest in minority perspectives has roots in critiques of colonialism and in critiques of modernity. Ethnomusicologists tend to concentrate on micro communities in the Nordic region, while addressing issues of broad relevance to Nordic society and musical life as a whole (e.g., Lundberg, Malm, and Ronström 2003). Nordic-​style and ethnomusicological approaches share a focus on identity and a search for authentic origins outside of Nordic modernity. This pursuit is important, as it has the potential for offering utopian thinking about different futures (e.g., Chapter 14), but it needs to be complemented by perspectives within the dominant value systems of Nordic modernity. If not, there is risk of negating normality in modernity.

Popular Music and Nordic Modernity Foundational arguments in popular music studies have been grounded in processes of cultural modernity (Ferris and Hart 1982; Dyer 1979; Frith 1981; Erlmann 1999; Manuel 1990, 1993). These processes include urbanization, mediatization, and commercialization, as well as more specific processes such as the erosion of rural dialects and non-​ English languages; fluid social groupings around lifestyle and consumer culture; migration and global communications; and reflexive identities. Popular music genres have become shared “schemes” or “languages” for creating experiences of belonging and difference around the globe. Popular music, moreover, continues to mediate transitions from local and national traditions to more fluid and fragmented transnational media spheres. To illustrate how thinking about music and geography can be situated in modernity, let us consider the telegraphic construction of space as a distinctly modern phenomenon. That is, space in modernity is produced via long-​distance technologies. In

62   Geography this sense, space has become teletopographic. Drawing from communication theory, Berland (2009) has explored this perspective in a study of how powerful classes in Canada used media and transportation technologies to transform vast landscapes into modern Canadian society. A similar process occurred in the Nordic region when the dominant classes in urban Scandinavia colonized its North Atlantic territories. The structure continues to this day, as capital cities invest in cultural flagships such as opera houses, arenas, festivals, and other pop culture events that attract tourists and stimulate population growth, at the same time as rural areas are experiencing population decline. On a regional level, the North Atlantic areas continue to be framed in terms of natural resources and tourism, while their voice is frequently underrepresented and misrepresented in Scandinavian conversations about the region’s nature and culture. Said the Swedish minister of culture in her inaugural speech at a promotional event for Nordic culture in Washington, D.C. in 2013: “We may now cluster in our modern, digital cities, but our souls reach out for the open spaces and purities of nature where our hearts belong” (Liljeroth 2013). Although the teletopographic construction of space is a constant in modernity, the specific technologies have changed dramatically. When popular music started to be circulated via sound recordings in the early twentieth century, distribution via physical (brick-​and-​mortar) stores or mail-​order suppliers could take weeks. Musicians traveled long distances by train and boat to perform or record. Today, much recorded music is instantly accessible to any online user; the spatial flows of music and musicians are much faster. However, the contemporary media landscape is not a completely even playing field. There is a division, for instance, between a large number of micro producers and a few big corporations, particularly Universal Music and Spotify. Ninety percent of the recorded music that circulates in the Nordic region is now licensed or owned by two major recording companies that have bought every mid-​size independent label except Playground Music and Cosmos Music Group.3 Moreover, audiences travel longer for live music and consume more live music from longer distances (Holt 2016). A new era of popular culture events and music tourism was accelerated by the arrival of cheap airlines such as Ryanair and Easyjet in the 1990s. The growth of Iceland as a destination of music tourism can be interpreted as a discovery of its rich musical culture—​with a remarkable emphasis on musical performance in everyday life and in schools—​accelerated by cheap flights with Iceland Air, the airline’s sponsoring of the Iceland Airwaves Music Festival, and the fascination with Iceland as a remote and exotic destination in influential American and British music media (see ­figure 2.1). By comparison, a return ticket from Scandinavia to Greenland costs about five times as much as a ticket to Iceland, making it virtually impossible for Greenland to attract thousands of younger middle-​class audiences to a festival there. The following two sections illustrate in more detail some aspects of Nordic modernity, focusing on two evolutions. The first is the change in Anglo-​style pop music with a global market and how it has amplified alternative modernities in popular music by applying a more distinct local identity. The second is the transition to a more transnational Nordic modernity, illustrated by showcase music festivals since the 1990s.

Nordic Modernity and the Musical Landscape    63

Figure 2.1  Table with CDs at a record store in Reykjavík, November 2013

Anglo-​American Pop Music in Postwar Swedish Society Nordic popular music was fundamentally shaped by the evolution in Sweden of Anglo-​ style pop music, which made Sweden the center of the region’s industry and defined professional and commercial standards. Sweden’s ability to produce a string of international rock and pop stars is exceptional for the Nordic countries, as well as for many other small European countries. A big part of the equation was the cultural environment and industry network, as this form of cultural production is contingent to more than creative individuals. Sweden could hardly have excelled internationally in white Anglo-​style pop music to the extent it did if American middle-​class popular culture had not formed a cultural mainstream in Swedish society for decades. Sweden’s international pop music successes can be understood in the context of World War II. The country suffered less than the Nordic countries that had been occupied by Germany. Cultural critic Göran Rosenberg has highlighted important aspects of the emotional culture in post-​war Sweden in his book about his father (2013). Rosenberg finds that Sweden was “busy with its own success” and “took pride in being a rational, forward-​looking country.” To his father, a Holocaust survivor, the positivity was so strong it had negative effects and ultimately contributed to his suicide. One of the channels of Swedish emotional culture at the time was popular swing and cool jazz, characterized by happy rhythms and lush sounds, respectively. The 1950s was

64   Geography Stockholm’s golden age of jazz, envied by its neighboring Scandinavian jazz communities. The Stockholm scene drew attention from American musicians such as Stan Getz who worked with local musicians for years. The first form of Nordic-​style jazz with international appeal emerged in Stockholm during this era. This music was characterized by the use of Swedish folk song repertoires, but also by urban American middle-​class aesthetics of cool and pop culture sentiments. The music was lyrical and had a certain level of sophistication, but within an overall light and mellow emotional atmosphere, which explains the long-​term cross-​over successes of Jan Johansson’s 1964 album Jazz på svenska (transl. Jazz in Swedish) and its use as background or mood music around Scandinavia. The Swedish music industry’s global successes from ABBA onward in the 1970s arose from the combination of such urban American sensibilities, specifically in pop and rock music, with local European traditions of folk-​oriented popular song, including the sentimental forms known as schlager music. After all, ABBA had its international breakthrough by performing “Waterloo” at the 1974 European Song Contest, and the band brought schlager elements to middle-​ class rock and pop music audiences, much to the dismay of the rock elites who were skeptical of disco, too. The more general lessons from this history can be drawn from analysis of the relationship between postwar affluence, optimism, the mastery of Anglo aesthetics, and music industry developments. The mastery of Anglo popular styles in Sweden indicates that the country’s orientation toward Western super powers in the divisive Cold War era happened at the levels of politics and culture. The wider circulation of Anglo popular culture forms in continental Europe also indicate that the media products of American culture industries resonated with fundamental emotional and cognitive schemes and identity constructions transcending specific national and regional situations. The history of rock music in the 1970s can be written as a series of reactions to the popular music that was commonly identified by rock fans as “commercial music” at the time, including the Anglo-​style pop of ABBA or national schlager. An oppositional stance was adopted in political rock music and the region’s own invention of the label “rhythmic music,” which was characterized by a fascination with jazz and popular music in the African American diaspora. The political rock movement created the first generation of independent record labels in the Nordic region, as musicians wanted control over the means of production and independence from the pop music industry.4 The politicization of popular music forms was not only a matter of identity and ideology in immediate cultural spheres of the everyday. At this moment in history, popular music and culture was strongly associated with more general processes and tensions in modernity, with the rise of social movements that articulated alternatives to consumer culture, corporate capitalism, and bourgeois cultural hierarchies. Opposition to consumer culture continued into the 1980s, but faded drastically in the 1990s with neoliberalism. Punk subcultures started losing ground in city centers (Holt 2013), and consumerization and industrialization have since transformed popular music festivals. The sponsorship budgets have never been higher, and the programming is more focused on international touring stars and competing with arena concerts. In 2013, for instance,

Nordic Modernity and the Musical Landscape    65 pop star Rihanna was a headliner at the Roskilde Festival, which is the Scandinavian equivalent of England’s Glastonbury Festival.

The Post-​1990s Transnational Landscape of Indie Music In the mid-​2010s, popular forms of indie rock and pop music have gained a wider and stronger presence in the Nordic region. Indeed, indie music constitutes a new development in the region’s musical culture, again largely adopted from white urban American models, but also adapted to social and technological structural changes occurring both the United States and in the Nordic region. Moreover, indie has become a medium of new pop culture sensibilities and forms of Nordicness, thus paralleling the function of cool jazz in the 1950s. Indie music is itself a case of globalization; it gained momentum in the Nordic region in the 2000s as a result of its cultural cache in New York, particularly Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The term “indie” originally referred to independent recording companies, which had a formative role in the evolution of many popular music genres, from jazz to rock, soul, EDM, and beyond. A now classic history of rock and roll states: “The overwhelming majority of both the best (musically and artistically and the most successful (commercially) rock ‘n’ roll records were produced by independent companies” (Gillett 1983, 67). This history gives the indie labels a cultural cachet vis-​à-​vis the corporate industry. When the term “indie rock” gained use in the late 1980s, it was associated with punk-​ derived rock sounds and with local distribution via college radio stations and mail-​ ordering of vinyl records. In the 1990s, indie rock scenes in cities such as Seattle and Chicago received national attention (Holt 2007). A  complex mainstreaming process ensued, as successful indie artists began to work for major recording companies and corporate sponsors. By the 2000s, indie rock was further popularized internationally via online magazines such as Pitchfork.com and Stereogum. Though these publications are now part of a semi-​corporate industry, they still offer alternatives to baby boomer rock stars (Holt 2014). Today, indie music is generally associated with a variety of rock and pop music, with diverse forms of subdued middle-​class coolness and urbanism, with artists who write their own songs and do not aspire to mass culture formulae. This internationalization of indie music has become a template for Nordic artists and audiences, as suggested above. The emphasis on original material allows Nordic musicians to grow their own music as a niche within this broader international culture, with similar developments in Latin America (Garland 2014). This rise in indie music in the Nordic countries coincides with an intensification of industry and state-​funded efforts to grow and exhibit national talent for international audiences. With the weakened power of major record labels and their Anglo-American superstars, Nordic networks are mobilizing structures that differ from the initial efforts of the Scandinavian independent music industry in the 1970s. In the 1970s, independent music was embedded in the leftwing political movement and motivated by a desire to

66   Geography give musicians control over the means of production.5 Today’s indie music networks are much less political. Rather, they generally perceive indie as a business model and encourage individual entrepreneurship, thus mirroring neoliberalism. Moreover, indie now involves professional ambitions and mainstream ideologies of labor and economic rationality. Says one of the most experienced Swedish industry professionals, Petri Lundén: All the Nordic countries are becoming more and more professional. It’s gone from the happy-​go-​lucky music fans who signed a band and released records to professionals even on the smallest labels. Maybe my insight is extreme because I’m the co-​chair of a Norwegian organization called Phonophile. We are the biggest independent music aggregator in the Nordic countries. The people we serve are the indies. If we look at an indie release back then, it was like “Oh I like this band and I got some money from my mother.” Today, I’m amazed how good they are. Now they are all aiming for a global market because they can. A big part of this evolution is that in some countries 50% of the workforce in record companies has been cut over the past ten years or so, and they still have knowledge of music industry, so many of them naturally become managers.6

Since the early 2000s, the Roskilde Festival has presented countless upcoming artists for a couple of days before the regular programming with established artists starts. There are other initiatives and business strategies in Denmark that also promote indie artists. But a regional trend is the showcase festival. The showcase event originated as a way of exhibiting a large number of upcoming artists to talent buyers in the music industry, and it evolved into a festival with real-​life club environment open to more fans (see ­figure 2.2). Since the early 1990s, such festivals have mushroomed in Northern Europe, as shown here:

Festival Name

Country

Years

Music and Media Finland

Finland

1989–​

Popkomm Festival

Germany

1989–​2010

Spot

Denmark

1994–​

Eurosonic

Netherlands

1996–​

By:Larm

Norway

1998–​

Iceland Airwaves

Iceland

1999–​

G! Festival

Faroe Islands

2002–​

Reperbahn

Germany

2006–​

Tallin Music Week

Estonia

2009–​

Nordic Modernity and the Musical Landscape    67

Figure 2.2  Copenhagen waterfront at the time of the Eurovision Song Contest, 2014

These showcase festivals are strategic forms of internationalization in national rock music networks outside Sweden. They have all contributed to a growing self-​confidence in the country and have opened up the national network to a wider international industry, primarily centered on indie music. Ultimately, these festivals can be seen as vehicles for the creative economy policies that has come to dominate around Europe. In those policies, grassroots and independent production are not alternatives to the market but in fact breeding grounds for the market; their purpose is economic. This ideological context helps explain why in the mid-​2010s the term indie started to be replaced by the terms talent and “vækstlag” (“growth layer”). Christian Ulf-​Hansen is one of the industry professionals involved in this development. Having worked in the corporate British and American music industries, Ulf-​ Hansen started searching for talent in the Nordic region in the 1980s and has since been managing artists such as Tobias Fröberg, Helgi Jónsson, and now Teitur. Ulf-​Hansen explains: When I first came to Denmark twenty-​some years ago, there was very little infrastructure. The labels were very local. There were few managers and a lot of them were bookers who pretended to be a manager who had never done anything outside of Scandinavia. There was also a slight lack of belief. When I told some the artists “You are great! You’re fucking amazing! I think you could …” they didn’t believe it. In Teitur’s case, no one from the Faroe Islands had ever done anything outside of the Faroe Islands. I sort of proved that if you are talented and have the mindset, then

68   Geography you are able to do it. But when I started working with Teitur everyone was like “Oh no, why would you do that?!” Slowly, the “belief-​system” changed with the Internet, cheap airlines, showcase festivals, and music export agencies, and a new generation of music supervisors in the television, movie, and advertising industry. More Scandinavian bands are touring internationally, and cool Nordic music appears in TV commercials and series such as Friends and Grey’s Anatomy.7

Ulf-​Hansen belongs to a circle of non-​Nordic professionals who work to get Nordic artists into other markets. London in particular has been a global gateway for indie music artists such as Sigúr Ros, Tina Dico, and Teitur; and London has played a particularly big role in the growing international trajectory of the Icelandic indie music especially.8 The Iceland Airwaves Music Festival has grown incredibly and now presents some of the most trending, upcoming artists from North America and Europe. Internationalization has been boosted by music export agencies and national rock music associations, involving Ulf-​Hansen and other well-​connected professionals. When Ulf-​Hansen attended the Spot Festival as the first non-​Nordic professional, all the panels were in Danish, so he encouraged the organizers to offer panels in English as well. Moreover, Ulf-​Hansen brought people from his London network, and these London professionals have learned when to promote the Nordic origin of the artists and when not to mention it.

Figure 2.3  Lola Hammerich of Baby in Vain, in Reykjavík, November 2013

Nordic Modernity and the Musical Landscape    69 Nordic music has gained a reputation for being “quality music,” says Ulf-​Hansen and others, but they generally look for music that can be presented simply as rock music or as indie music. They avoid identifying Nordic indie music with the label world music, describing it as a “low-​expectation category.”9This illustrates how much Nordic artists in this area are blending with the transatlantic indie music mainstream. Artists such as Efterklang, Teitur, and Tina Dico are touring in more than twenty countries and live in different countries, typically with affection for cosmopolitan cities such as Berlin; yet they do not abandoning their homeland, yet another sign of the open-​ended, integrative cultural climate of indie music. The artists in this area have international ambitions and they need to tour widely to make a living, but their goal is not to become British or American (see ­figure 2.3).

Conclusion: A Critique of Nordic Cool The word cool started to appear more frequently in association with Nordic indie music in the early 2010s, signaling a new moment in Nordic modernity. Modernity theory has potential for an incisive analysis and critique of this development. This chapter has noted the difference between the polarized climate in the 1970s and the neoliberal climate since the 1990s characterized by economic rationales for popularized forms of indie music and Nordicness as an export commodity. The declining power of the corporate recording industry and rise of micro production across the region is another striking change. In a political economy perspective, one might say that the apparent freedom from the corporate industry system of the past is replaced by the more individualized responsibility of the artist for self-​production and self-​ promotion, and compliance with the growing economy of corporate sponsorship. In the current popular music economy, Nordicness is adopted into mainstream sensibilities, not as a counter-​modernity, in the form of mild flavors added to Anglo idioms for boosting desires for recognition and inclusion in the transatlantic Anglo modernity. Mastery of Anglo idioms used to be associated with the Stockholm pop music industry but is now mastered more around the region, in Iceland and more recently with the optimism in Denmark about the successes of Tina Dico, Mø, and Lucas Graham, for instance. Thus, Anglo idioms have become more naturalized and are easier to reconcile with ideas about local identity. In short, the broader transition from a national to a transnational Nordic modernity has created an economy that rewards a wider international orientation through the mastery of Anglo idioms with an individual and regional flavor. The discourse of Nordic cool has been promoted by the Nordic Council and by the media to capitalize on this internationalization.10 While the economic rationale for public funding of nation and region branding obvious, the discourse of Nordic cool has evolved into more than that: some of the Nordic Council’s campaign activities do not just promote the region but also a desired self-​image of the Scandinavian

70   Geography urban middle classes. This is illustrated by the Nordic Council’s one-​hour marketing movie Cool Nordic, for instance, which promotes a unitary, sugar-​coated narrative for the region. Another problem with the Nordic cool discourse is that it celebrates normative images of the white and affluent North without recognizing the less privileged in the region or the Global South. This can hardly be interpreted as any other than a break with the glorified models of humanity and social democracy that the region has prided itself with for half a century. Moreover, the discourse on Nordic cool excludes cultural expressions in the region that are perceived to lack smooth elegance, control, and sophistication. The musical forms privileged by the culture of Nordic cool are classical music, “elevated” folk music, and middle-​class popular music with its appeal to a romantic ideal of beauty. The reference to “cool” shifts the horizon from traditional cultural nationalism to modern urban popular culture. Routinely excluded from Nordic cool are metal music, national-​language sentimental pop music, and any other music that does not have a contemporary sound. National rock heroes of the 1970s and 1980s are rarely included. Modernity theory, however, helps contextualize such interpretations of narratives and texts. First, popular music exists within a market and a consumer culture; those are intrinsic elements of a popular music culture and they deserve to be analyzed on their own terms. Second, from a pragmatic perspective, the Nordic cool narrative is used differently and it can serve cultural and economic interests at the same time. For instance, Nordic Music Export uses it discreetly for its London showcase and festival, not to promote a corporate brand or image of exotic world music. In fact, Nordic Music Export emphasizes the reality of the natural environment: the cold winter. And the Nordic cool narrative helps bring Nordic music to international audiences, according to the director of Nordic Music Export.11 Nordic cool is also not the only narrative of internationalization. It helps countries that do not have the same international power as Sweden, but the Swedish industry with the most global reach do not use it much, as Jonas Sjöström, the CEO of the independent label Playground Music explained: js:  The concept of Nordic is still a grey area. It’s more specific to the type of music. If you say “Swedish metal” or “Norwegian black metal,” yes, but music in general no. You have to be more specific. Author:  Nordic brand marketing is not something you do much? js:  Well, we’d do it if we thought it was thought it was beneficial. But it is sort of… . If we talk to an Australian or an American or a German, it doesn’t strike me as anything that they would use as a concept. If the customers don’t want to use it, we don’t use it. It has happened, but mainly it’s other more specific things such as Swedish songwriters, Norwegian black metal, and Finland has always produced good hard rock bands.12

Such complexity of labeling is endemic to the contemporary media landscape. Sjöström’s insights support the idea that the popular music landscape has changed.

Nordic Modernity and the Musical Landscape    71 Swedish industry people generally recognize that the Swedish music landscape has changed, and that Sweden, too, has moved more into popular niche markets. Nearly every major Swedish artist today has his or her own recording company. The new forms of production and distribution are transforming the popular music landscape in the Nordic region, but they are also shaping transnational sensibilities.

Notes I would like to express gratitude to Francesco Lapenta, Johan Fornäs, and Jonas Bjälesjö for comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. I extend special gratitude to my informants. 1. In 1984, prominent Swedish music scholars wrote that ABBA’s music “has nothing to do with their country of origin” (Wallis and Malm 1984, xiii). The entire production apparatus was in Stockholm and it had lasting impact on the region’s popular music industry. Major recording companies used Stockholm as their regional center, and Nordic Music Export was developed from there in the 2000s (Anna Hildur, conversation with author, November 30, 2013). Studies of ABBA have focused on the meanings of individual songs or the industry history, for instance, but not the music’s place in local or regional culture (e.g., Carlsson and Liliestam 1979; Tagg 1979, 1991; Burnett 1992). The Swedish international pop tradition is absent from scholarly accounts of the region’s music. Swedish artists such as Max Martin, Avicii, and the Swedish House Mafia have significant global success in this field, and the culture is popular across the Nordic countries at rock festivals, the Summerburst festival in Stockholm, and many other pop culture events. 2. I  have detailed this strategy of internationalization in a research field a bit further in another publication (Holt with Wergin 2013, 3). 3. Jonas Sjöström, president of Playground Music, conversation with author, November 11, 2013; Christian Falk-​Winland, marketing manager of Cosmos, e-​mail to author, March 26, 2014. 4. Jonas Sjöström, interview with author. 5. Ibid. 6. Petri Lundén, conversation with author, November 12, 2013. 7. Christian Ulf-​Hansen, conversation with author, September 18, 2013. 8. Anna Hildur, conversation with author, November 1, 2013. 9. Christian Ulf-​Hansen, conversation with author, September 18, 2013. 10. “Nordic Cool TV on MHz”; Adams 2013; see also “Royal Medal for NORDIC COOL” 2013. 11. Anna Hildur, conversation with author. 12. Jonas Sjöström, interview with author.

References Andersson, G., ed. 1998. Musik i Norden. Kungl. Stockholm: Akademiens skriftserie. Andersson, G., ed. 2001. Musikgeschichte Nordeuropas: Dänemark, Finnland, Island, Norwegen. Stuttgart: Metzler. Arvidsson, A. 2011. Jazzen väg inom svenskt musikliv. Möklinta: Gidluns förlag.

72   Geography Berland, J. 2009. North of Empire:  Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Burnett, R. 1992. “Dressed for Success:  Sweden from ABBA to Roxette.” Popular Music 11(2): 141–​150. Carlsson, A., and L. Liliestam. 1979. “The Name of the Game.” NORDICOM -​Nytt Sverige 84(2–​3): 245–​260. Castells, M. 2000. The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Dyer, R. 1979. “In Defense of Disco.” Gay Left 8: 20–​23. Erlmann, V. 1999. Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fornäs, J. 2004. Moderna människor: Folkhemmet och jazzen. Stockholm: Nordstedt. Ferris, W., and M. Hart, eds. 1982. Folk Music and Modern Sound. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Frith, S. 1981. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock. New York: Pantheon. Garland, S. 2014. Music, Affect, Labor, and Value: Late Capitalism and the (Mis)Production of Indie Music in Chile and Brazil. Unpublished dissertation. Columbia University. Gillett, C. 1983 [1970]. The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll, rev. ed. New York: Pantheon. Hall, S. 1996. “Introduction:  Who Needs ‘Identity’?” In Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. S. Hall and P. du Gay, 1–​17. London: Sage. Hall, S., and B. Gieben, eds. 1992. Formations of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Holt, F. 2014. “Rock Music and Gentrification in New  York City:  The Case of the Bowery Presents.” IASPM@Journal 4(1): 21–​41. Holt, F. 2016. “New Media, New Festival Worlds: Rethinking Cultural Events and Televisuality Through YouTube and the Tomorrowland Music Festival.” In Music and the Broadcast Experience: Performance, Production, and Audiences, ed. C. Baade and J. Deaville, 275–​292. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Lash, S., and C. Lury. 2007. Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things. Oxford: Polity. Lundberg, D., K. Malm, and O. Ronström. 2003. Music, Media, Multiculture. Stockholm: Centre for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research. Manuel, P. 1990. Popular Musics of the Non-​Western World: An Introductory Survey. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Manuel, P. 1993. Cassette Culture:  Popular Music and Technology in North India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Slater, D. 2011. “Marketing as Monstrosity:  The Impossible Place between Culture and Economy.” In Inside Marketing:  Practices, Ideologies, Devices, ed. by Zwick and J. Cayla, 23–​41. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, F. K. 2002. Nordic Art Music: From the Middle-​Ages to the Third Millennium. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Rosenberg, G. 2013. “Göran Rosenberg:  We Are All on Our Road from Auschwitz.” Video interview. Louisana Channel. At http://​channel.louisiana.dk/​video/​g%C3%B6ran-rosenberg -road-​auschwitz. Tagg, P. 1979. “Kojak: 50 Seconds of Television Music: Toward the Analysis of Affect in Popular Music.” Gothenburg: Skrifter från Musikvetenskapliga Institutionen 2. Tagg, P. 1991. Fernando the Flute:  Analysis of Musical Meaning in an ABBA Mega-​Hit. Liverpool: Institute of Popular Music, University of Liverpool.

Nordic Modernity and the Musical Landscape    73 Tagg, P. 1998. “The Gothenburg Connection: Lessons in the History and Politics of Popular Music Education and Research.” Popular Music 17(2): 219–​242. Wallis, R., and K. Malm. 1984. Big Sounds from Small Peoples. New York: Pendragon. Weisethaunet, H. 2010. “Historiography and Complexities: Why is Music ‘National’?” Popular Music History 2(2): 169–​199. White, J., and J. Christensen, eds. 2002. New Music of the Nordic Countries. New  York: Pendragon. Yúdice, G. 2003. The Expediency of Culture:  Uses of Culture in the Global Era. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Chapter 3

Inclu sive P opu l a r Music Educ at i on? Alexis A. Kallio and Lauri Väkevä

Music education in the Nordic countries is notable for its relatively early inclusion of popular music genres. Widely equipped with instruments such as guitars and drum kits, and focused on hands-​on approaches to music making, Nordic classrooms serve as models for many nations where this process is still in its early stages (Allsup 2011). This growing body of research on popular music in school contexts includes studies of the music’s potentials in fostering social inclusion and democratic participation through cooperative and child-​centered learning (Westerlund 2006; Väkevä and Westerlund 2007). This chapter looks at the processes by which popular music has been legitimized in Nordic schools, paying special attention to challenges to democracy that arise through intensifying globalization. Assuming that popular music is not necessarily democratic in and of itself, this chapter addresses the following research question: In what ways do Nordic popular music education policies and practices articulate and manifest social exclusion? The argument put forth is that the political and ideological agendas underpinning popular music education policies and practices warrant critical attention, particularly as the demographic composition of Nordic societies changes with increasing migration. No longer able to rely on a consensus with regard to which popular music students identify with and call their “own,” new challenges arise for teachers and policymakers in considering which—​or, rather, whose—​popular musics facilitate inclusion and provide opportunities for democratic participation. The chapter begins with an account of how popular music has been legitimized in Nordic schooling policies from the 1960s to the present. An introductory overview of these developments is followed by a discussion of these justificatory discourses. Based on an analysis of national curriculum texts and interviews conducted with individual music teachers, the second section examines the changing role of national identity in relation to increasing multiculturalism and diversity. The third section focuses particularly on the role of popular music in fostering democracy in the classroom, and in

76   Geography Nordic societies more broadly. The concluding section puts these findings into perspective, arguing for a systemic view of the political factors that frame teaching strategies, through the illustration of teachers’ repertoire selection processes.

The Legitimatization of Popular Music in Nordic Countries Analyzing national curricular documents, this section illustrates how popular music was introduced to Nordic music education and how its educational relevance has been justified. Special attention is paid to the changing role of national identity in relation to conceptions of multiculturalism and democracy. By addressing issues of exclusion and legitimization, this section also draws attention to the power relations and politics behind Nordic popular music pedagogy.

Introducing Popular Music to Nordic Schools Despite a growing number of Nordic publications attending to the complexities of popular music pedagogy in school contexts (see, e.g., Folkestad 2006; Westerlund 2006; Georgii-​Hemming and Westvall 2010), there has not been a comprehensive mapping of the history of Nordic popular music pedagogy since the late 1980s (Paynter 1987). This means that the evolution of the field has to be largely traced through national-​level guiding documents and local-​level descriptions regarding how these directives have been enacted. This subsection attends to curricular texts that describe (and prescribe) state-​ level policies, revealing the rationales for popular music pedagogy at the macro level of educational discourse. With the possible exception of Denmark and Iceland (see the discussion later), popular music was largely introduced to Nordic classrooms in the 1970s. For instance, in 1969, the Swedish comprehensive school curricula encouraged music educators to teach “teenage music” by placing emphasis on “creative activities” and on “music and sound from the pupils’ own environment” (quoted in Tagg 1982, 232–​233). Popular music and pedagogies were first taught to teachers through the Swedish training program SÄMUS, established in 1971, at a time when there was no systematic popular music teacher training in other countries. At present, popular music is taught both in public schools and in other educational institutions such as cultural schools (extracurricular municipal art schools) around Sweden. The prevalence of popular music education has been associated both with the success of Swedish popular music industry (Johansson 2010) and the alleged exclusion of other genres in musical classrooms (Georgii-​Hemming and Westvall 2010; Westvall 2014).

Inclusive Popular Music Education    77 Similarly, in Finland, popular music was introduced to schools at the turn of the 1970s as part of the first comprehensive school curriculum (POPS 70). This curriculum asserted that music pedagogy should “embark from an analysis of the society and the musical environment of its youth” (quoted in Muukkonen 2010, 71).1 Popular music has been firmly established over the last forty years as a major part of teaching repertoire in Finnish schools and as part of tertiary music teacher education (Westerlund 2006).2 In 1974, “jazz and pop” were established as legitimate styles to be taught in Norwegian comprehensive schools (Jørgensen 2001, 112). Since then, popular repertoire appeared frequently as part of songbooks published for Norwegian classroom teaching—​as was also the case in Sweden and Finland (Olsen 2012). Popular music has remained an integral part of Norwegian music education in subsequent decades, usually under the rubric of rytmisk musikk (rhythmic music). While the official introduction of popular music to the Danish school curriculum occurred in the 1970s, the history of popular music pedagogy in Denmark is somewhat different from that of other countries. It has been argued that popular repertoire featured as part of Danish educational system as early as the late 1930s in the form of rytmisk musikpædagogik [literally, “rhythmic music pedagogy”]. According to Pedersen (2011, 9–​10), this term was coined “to legitimize the didactically qualified educational content of [jazz] … and to avoid what was associated with [it], especially by its opponents.” Today rytmisk musik is used as a label for all music that derives from Afro-​ diasporic traditions. “Rhythmic music pedagogy” is taught in Danish schools and music institutions, and the term has also been appropriated in other Nordic countries (e.g., Sweden; Björnberg 1993; Norway; Bakken Hauge and Christopherson 2000, 3, 19–​27; Finland; Väkevä and Kurkela 2012). Iceland has been a relative latecomer to Nordic popular music education, and popular musics have “only recently begun to be taught in the general music classroom.” At present, popular styles and genres remain as “either a small part of the music curriculum or an elective for a few interested students in the grades 8–​9.”3 However, as a means to fulfill professional demands, a professional training institution for “rhythmic music” (Tónlistarskóli FIH) was established in Reykjavik in 1980. Other Nordic  countries had established similar institutions during the 1970s (Björnberg 1998, 227).

Discourses on Legitimization In the Nordic countries, the legitimization of popular music as content for music lessons has primarily taken place in accordance with beliefs that it promotes democratic participation. These arguments have been justified from a number of angles. First, attributed to its ubiquity, popular music has been regarded as an accessible medium for learning music in school contexts (Björnberg 1993). In addition, the

78   Geography widespread appeal of popular music among Nordic youth has led to an assumption that such music offers students access to “real” or “authentic” musical experiences when adopted in the classroom (Westerlund 2006; see also Green 2008). Aligning with these arguments, popular music has been seen as a particularly inclusive musical medium, fostering “cooperative learning” and the development of a “child-​centered curricula” (Allsup 2003, 27). It has been also argued that these views have placed popular music in opposition to the rigid power structures associated with the master–​apprenticeship tradition of Western art music (Westerlund 2006). Moreover, it has been suggested that popular music education enhances critical understandings of mediated culture (Tagg 1982). As Björnberg (1993, 70) states, “since the socially determined meanings mediated by various types of popular music are often used with a more or less explicitly manipulatory purpose … music education should try to provide the student with the means to interpret these meanings in order to be able to form a conscious judgement of the messages being communicated.” Perhaps least common of justifications for popular music as a democratizing medium are those arguing for the music’s aesthetic merits, building upon a notion that popular genres and styles can afford experiences that cannot be gained from other kinds of music. Björnberg (1993, 70) maintains that the “effects of this aesthetic argument on music educational policy with regard to popular music seem to have been stronger in Denmark than in most other countries.” A unifying premise underlying these assumptions seems to be that popular music can be understood as a more or less homogenous cultural field, shared and liked principally by the young. However, there are several problems implied by this notion. In addition to an unfounded agreement that popular music equates to “youth music,” the premise is questionable given that few researchers have turned their attention to what kinds of popular music have actually been taught in Nordic classrooms so far, and to what effect. It has been suggested that the popular music genres and styles studied in Nordic schools may not necessarily represent all the musical genres and styles that students identify with and enjoy outside school settings (Georgii-​ Hemming and Westvall 2010; Kallio 2015a, 2015b; Väkevä 2010). As mentioned with reference to understandings of popular music as a unified cultural form, discussing all popular music in terms of “Anglo-​American guitar based music” may lead to an overly simplified conception of the pedagogical aspects of popular music in general, negating important sociological, cultural, and ethnic issues and reducing popular music instruction to “garage band” practices typical to the rock idiom (which, of course, in itself, is not homogenous) (Green 2001, 12; Allsup 2009, 9). The discourse is made all the more complex, taking into consideration that the established justifications for popular music in education may no longer hold firm in contemporary Nordic culture, which is increasingly characterized by instability, impermanence, constant transformation, and glocalization (see, e.g., Kjeldgaard and Askegaard 2006). Students’ experiences of popular culture may thus be entirely different from those offered in school environments.

Inclusive Popular Music Education    79

Nationalism and Intensifying Globalization A central principle guiding Nordic educational and cultural policies has been that of national identity (Antikainen 2006, 230). For decades, Nordic educational and cultural institutions have served the formation of modern nation-​states (Duelund 2003, 22–​25, 479). Despite nods to globalization and technological change (e.g., Curriculum for the Upper Secondary School 2013, 5), the rhetoric of Nordic educational and cultural policies is still, at least partly, based on nationalist significations that legitimize certain educational and cultural ideas, ideals, and practices over others (see Kallio and Partti 2013). Traces of nationalism in music education programs have become the targets of critical debate in recent decades, especially concerning the emphasis on patriotic ideals in educational contexts. Hebert and Kertz-​Welzel (2012, xiii) note that, “while patriotism in … [music] education might have been reasonable for emerging nations … as a functional device for the establishment of their national identity, it still plays a significant role today when it may no longer be as necessary.” Even if Nordic curricula are no longer written with explicit patriotic overtones, the role of music in forming and affirming a national cultural identity can still be seen to be reflected in national-​level policies, as part of the “knowledge [that is] … sanctioned to be taught to others” (Wright 2012, 26). For instance, the Swedish national curriculum directs music educators to teach specific “national” repertoires, “including the national anthem and some of the most common psalms, as well as insights into Swedish and Nordic traditions in children’s songs” (Curriculum for the Compulsory School 2011, 96). This situation in Sweden is by no means unique, and is mirrored in the curricula and practices of other Nordic countries (see, e.g., Music Subject Curriculum 2011, 1; Fælles Mål 2009, 3). Such nationalist cultural goals are also evident in classroom practice. An example can be found in Finnish secondary school teachers’ own reflections on the rationales for selecting certain repertoire over others, in interviews conducted by the first author of this chapter.4 One of the teachers interviewed was working in a Swedish-​speaking school in Finland. Swedish-​speaking Finns are a linguistic minority in Finland that maintains a strong cultural identity—​partly, as seen here, through popular music. When asked what popular repertoire she selected, the teacher noted that one of the textbooks she used often was a collection of Swedish-language popular songs because, “[in this school] we clearly have the values that are Finnish-​Swedish, and the songs for us, but also [to ensure that] the Finnish speaking Finns know that we have these songs.5 Another teacher, from a Finnish-​speaking comprehensive school, expressed a similar importance of promoting cultural knowledge of Finnish speaking Finns: “It’s our culture, you need to know it. You have to know how to sing ‘Maamme’ [Finnish national anthem] when it’s needed to sing it. Raise your feelings of the fatherland, know where your roots are!”6

80   Geography Such essentialist notions of Finnish (or any Nordic) culture can be seen as increasingly problematic as the implications of global mobility and immigration are experienced locally (see Kallio 2015b). Student populations in Nordic countries are increasingly diverse, raising new and varied feelings about national belonging. A tension has thus been established between discourses of national identity and cultural difference (Allsup 2010; Hebert and Kertz-​Welzel 2012; Kallio and Partti 2013). The emphasis on the need to build a cohesive national identity is not to suggest that Nordic curricula or teachers do not respond to increasing recognitions of multiculturalism. Whereas these societies were once thought of as relatively homogenous, they are now increasingly recognized as multicultural—​and by implication, “multimusical” (Reimer 1993). Moreover, the Nordic countries have long been home to ethnic minorities like the Sámi, the Romani, and Jewish communities, who each have their own living musical traditions. First-​and second-​generation immigrants from other nations have also introduced considerable variety to the Nordic cultural map (Karlsen and Westerlund 2010, 225). Partly owing to such intensifying demographic change, Nordic educational policies have moved from reductionist to inclusive models, increasingly emphasizing diversity and pluralism at the national level. Subsequently, Nordic educational institutions can be seen as sites where cultural values are negotiated, “where [for example] music is seen not as a monolithic idea or practice, but as filled with conflicting values and perspectives” (Bresler 1998, 1). This seems to be reflected in the national curricular texts in the form of a directive to focus simultaneously on local and international repertoire. For instance, the Danish national curriculum states that “[t]‌eaching promotes students’ understanding of Danish and foreign musical tradition as a part of cultural life, partly as it is included in the current society, partly in its historical perspective (Fælles Mål 2009, 3). In response to increasing cultural diversity, the Finnish National Core Curriculum (2004) that has guided teaching and learning for the past 12 years7 cross-​curricular themes is titled “Cultural Identity and Internationalism.” According to the document, the task of the teacher is “to help the pupil to understand the essence of the Finnish and European cultural identities, discover his or her own cultural identity, and develop capabilities for cross-​cultural interaction and internationalism (National Core Curriculum 2004, 37). This example may be seen as illustrative of the pan-​Nordic concerns regarding the compatibility of nationalist (or “European”) ideals with the ideals of multicultural music education that is tailored for the diverse needs of the students who strive to build their musical identities “in between” cultures (Karlsen 2011; Saether 2003). Yet, in assisting teachers and students to develop multicultural skills and understandings, one of the primary objectives of Finnish curriculum, as outlined in aforementioned quote, is to orient the students to “the essence of Finnishness” (see also [Swedish] Curriculum for the Compulsory School 2011, 9). It can be argued that the potential or even the desirability to achieve a unified cultural or national musical identity is questionable if music educators are to help their students to navigate a late modern culture increasingly characterized by flexibility, instability, impermanence, transformation, and accelerating change (see Bauman 2000). As

Inclusive Popular Music Education    81 Espeland (2010, 129) notes, there is “no doubt that globalisation takes place at a greater speed than ever before, and that this process profoundly influences the essence of music education.” In the teacher interviews, processes of exclusion may be seen to operate as much in the attempts to cope with changing cultural situations as in traditional nation-​based systems of education with more explicit favoring of certain kinds of musical genres and styles over others. The teacher, quoted earlier, who was working in the Swedish-​ speaking school in Finland outlined her insecurities in incorporating the musics of other cultures, given the cultural focus and time restraints of the curriculum and the need to maintain the traditional cultural events of the school year, particularly those pertaining to religion. She added: We have to follow the curriculum, but … after Christmas I was planning to ask [one foreign student] maybe he could tell about his country and maybe when they have their independence day and how is the song—​we can listen from YouTube his song also. Maybe I could take that even when we have our independence day.8

Such cultural events celebrated as part of school life present not only opportunities for unification but also for exclusion, particularly with immigrant students (see also Karlsen 2011). When asked how the cultural events that make reference to religious practices, outlined in the national curriculum work with foreign students, a teacher from Northern Finland noted, “In this school we have quite many immigrant students, I think it’s the most in [the region], so sometimes there is the situation when a Muslim student doesn’t come to the party because there are some religious things, for example.”9 These concerns did not only pertain to perceived newcomers, nor did they only relate to religious practices and sensitivities. Although teaching music that is most familiar to the students in their local cultural milieu (as is so often one of the justifications for the inclusion of popular music in lessons) has been seen as an easy solution to the dilemma of national/​local and international/​global repertoire, the teachers’ stories suggested that this was not always the case. For example, a Finnish-​speaking teacher living in the Sámi homelands in northern Finnish Lapland suggested that Sámi music, even popular music, may be sometimes excluded from school activities on grounds of cultural sensitivity, implying that it would be inappropriate for a non-​Sámi to teach Sámi music—​ even though it was seen as “students’ own”: “The Sámi people are very sure about their own culture; they don’t want somebody to come and teach them how to do it; it’s inside their own culture. I understood from the beginning that I cannot be teaching [Sámi music].”10 Nevertheless, while still somewhat unsure of her own role balancing those of teacher with cultural outsider, the teacher had made it possible for a Sámi popular music ensemble to rehearse at her school, herself assuming the role of learner alongside her students. It is interesting to consider this teacher’s statements in relation to the primary context directives of educational curricula. The Finnish national curriculum expects that “the school must provide [Sámi] pupils with conditions … to preserve Sámi identity without

82   Geography being absorbed into the main population” (National Core Curriculum 2004, 32), suggesting that cultural identity can only be taken as an either/​or option. Also in Norway, it has been recognized that education is a crucial realm in which the equality of the Sámi people can be furthered without integration to the majority culture (see Jakobsen 2011, 12). All of this raises complex cultural and political questions regarding the importance of educating about, for, or through a national or cultural heritage in an increasingly global, transnational, and multicultural world. As Nordic school curricula continue “to stress the importance of national heritage to the rising generation” (Folkestad 2002, 158), it may be asked whose national heritage is emphasized and whose is exoticized, assimilated, or excluded. In line with these concerns, while popular music may be seen as a “glocal” industry, catering as much to local as to global cultural needs, it may be asked whether its local variants capitalize on stereotyped majority-​defined sentiments. This raises further questions for the popular music teacher who wishes to position her curriculum between the immediate ethnic, national, and/​or cultural experiences of her students and the increasingly borderless world in which their (and others’) musics are produced, mediated, and consumed as part of the late-​modern economy.

Educating for Democracy and the Challenge of Consensus Against this backdrop of tensions between global and local musical practices and economies, another area in which popular music in schools may be seen to reveal processes of exclusion and legitimization is the Nordic conceptualization of democratic participation. The ideal of democratic participation frames both Nordic educational policy and classroom practice, as expressed both through curriculum documents and in teacher interviews. Democracy in Nordic education is usually understood as participatory, referring to a “socially fair and inclusive education system … based on equality of educational opportunities” (Sahlberg 2010, 45). Nordic educational systems are often said to share an egalitarian perspective in the sense that “[e]‌quity, participation and welfare state have been known as [their] major socio-​political … model” (Antikainen 2006, 229). This model can be recognized through the aim to provide students with equal access to schools and other publicly funded educational institutions throughout the Nordic countries. Nordic educational institutions are often understood as being committed to progressivist pedagogies, “either as a realization of a search for new, unprejudiced solutions, or at least an image and myth associated with Scandinavian culture” (Antikainen 2006, 229). This progressivist image suggests that schools should not only be democratic but also contribute to the cultivation of a democratic way of public life (Carlgren et al. 2006). Hence, Nordic schools may be ideally seen as places of preparation for public participation as much as points of access to educational goods. Indeed, the very first sentence of the Swedish primary school curriculum is “Democracy forms the basis of the national

Inclusive Popular Music Education    83 school system” (2006, 3). The Icelandic National Curriculum Guide for Compulsory Schools expands upon this notion: Democracy is important in schools. Firstly, schools have to take into consideration that children and youth will in the future take part in democratic society and therefore it is important for children to learn about such societies. Secondly, in all their working methods schools have to take into consideration that the human rights of every individual have to be respected. It is expected that children and youth learn democracy by learning about democracy in a democracy. ( Icelandic National Curriculum Guide 2008, 19)

Nordic cultural institutions generally operate on this principle through the assistance of public subsidies, providing access to shared cultural goods, and thus reflecting pan-​Nordic democratic and egalitarian values (e.g., Antikainen 2006; Bakke 2001; Duelund 2003). A further indication of a common political creed between Nordic cultural and educational policies can be found in the directives of Nordic music curricula that suggest drawing upon students’ own musical interests. Seen as more accessible and engaging for more students, popular music has been viewed as a means to achieve equality. It is often assumed that there is a consensus with regard to what popular music students enjoy, and the working ensembles in Finland and Sweden, such as classroom rock bands or “garage bands,” are designed with this vision in mind. However, one might question the extent to which student interests can be generalized. Is the focus on international or local varieties of “Anglo-​American guitar-​based” popular music (Lindgren and Erikson 2010) reflective of the diversity of student populations? Is selecting repertoire already familiar to the majority of the students even desirable? These questions are particularly relevant if we look at the Nordic nations as places of change that do not afford any simplified cultural significations in terms of either national issues or students’ shared musical tastes, rather catering to a multiplicity of musical-​cultural identities subject to constant processes of negotiation. This change in cultural attitude may also be seen to affect teachers’ own preferences. A teacher working in central Finland described the change in her own thinking regarding these issues: When I started teaching I thought that playing music was only nice when you can play what you enjoy to listen to. It is nice for me too, as a teacher. I like to play what I enjoy listening to. But I thought it had to be that way, so I had to be aware what is popular now, what kind of bands are on the radio, what kind of music. But it is not that way. I feel now I should focus on their attitude, I want them to be curious about different kinds of music and enjoy that too.11

Another teacher reflected on the tension between choosing repertoire according to the alleged mainstream popular taste and introducing variety to the curriculum, implying the complexity of the issue: “It’s very fine line there—​when it’s mutual agreement and really

84   Geography working together and deciding together without letting all the authority to the group and the media—​or nowadays, competitions [such as the Idol franchises]. It’s a fine line. I think.”12 The assumptions of what popular music students enjoy, and what constitutes “mainstream popular taste” are compounded through the publication of school music textbooks outlining “expert selected” songs for students to learn. Although these texts may not be prescribed by official policy for classroom use, they provide another level at which processes of legitimization and exclusion are manifested and reinforced. Although the above discussion relates to the day-​to-​day classroom work of Finnish teachers, the same phenomenon may be seen in other Nordic countries, as recent research on Swedish secondary school “rock band teaching” (Georgii-​Hemming and Westvall 2010; Lindgren and Ericsson 2010) suggests that consensus policy in terms of classroom repertoire may lead to neglecting the dynamics of difference between not just the musical values of the students and the teachers but also the students, leading to the perpetuation of an inert, irrelevant classroom repertoire. Beyond the differences of musical taste and preferences within the student population itself, several music education scholars have warned that disparities between students’ own musical worlds and what is learned in school may result in a peculiar “school music” idiom (e.g., Stålhammar 1995). If we are to take into account the argument that students’ own music functions “as a source of identity and différance from the adult and school worlds” (Regelski 2004, 30; Ståhlhammar 2000), there are clear problems in establishing any given popular music style or genre as a legitimate, institutionalized study subject. In fact, disparities between popular music in and out of school provide further indicators that contemporary mediated music culture caters to a variety of musical tastes reflecting and constituting multiple “glocal” musical identities that do not afford clear-​cut curricular decisions (Johnson 2009; Karlsen 2011; Ojala and Väkevä 2015; Väkevä 2010). This becomes especially relevant when considering that Nordic policy operators are increasingly conscious of the diverse aesthetic needs of students living in multicultural societies, which Nordic nations are fast becoming. As discussed, contemporary popular music might not allow for unified national, cultural, or political agendas, but instead suggests a variety of approaches that entail constant negotiation of musical and cultural identities in educational contexts. Thus, even if Nordic music curricula aim to welcome pluralism and to hold diversity as an important ideal, the complexities involved in the day-​to-​day teaching and learning of music in schools suggests that this goal is by definition unachievable and that the projects of inclusion and democracy are ongoing. Making assumptions about what constitutes mainstream youth taste in selecting popular music may cultivate the opposite of musical pluralism in the classroom and lead to a narrower “school music” policy, disregarding the vast proportion of students’ “own” preferred musics. As a result, a peculiar genre of “school popular music” may inadvertently become an institutionalized study subject, with only occasional reference or relevance to students’ musical experiences and interests outside school.

Inclusive Popular Music Education    85

Conclusion This chapter has illustrated some of the processes of legitimization and exclusion evident in educational policy texts and in local contexts of classroom teaching and learning. It seems that ideals of inclusion and democratic participation in Nordic music education are restricted by ideological frames that do not account for the experiences of teachers and students, or for the complexities of consumption, mediation, or production of popular music in contemporary Nordic societies. In formal school settings, the tensions negotiated between the objectives of curricular texts and the everyday national, cultural, ethnic, and ideological ideals of the classroom may result in practices that undermine the inclusive, democratic ideals often celebrated as Nordic values (see also Allsup 2010). Thus, welcoming popular music into Nordic classrooms has not been an easy route to democratic participation through “real-​world” music making, nor to the inclusion of all students through “mainstream” popular repertoire (cf. Green 2008). Rather, processes of legitimization and exclusion are evident in the policies and practices of Nordic popular music education. In this chapter, this has been discussed in terms of multiculturalism and the ideal of democratic participation in schooling, raising questions regarding whose music is being taught to whom and with what criteria (Rideout 2005). These processes in Nordic popular music education reveal the “other side” of the ideals of inclusion and democracy, warranting further attention on the part of researchers, policymakers, and educators. This is especially so if we are to move beyond reductive notions of popular music in schooling, and take into account the complexity of the practices of legitimization and the ways in which they manifest in policy and practice. Thus, discourses of inclusion should also be studied as evidences of exclusion within existing policies and practices, in working toward the Nordic ideal of democracy in societies that are increasingly recognized as more diverse, complex, and fluid. If the Nordic ideal of a “socially fair and inclusive education system … based on equality of educational opportunities” (Sahlberg 2010, 45) is to be taken seriously, we should acknowledge the importance of a recognition of practice-​based processes of legitimatization and exclusion, even when aiming at inclusion at the broader, national policy level. Given that educational policies are enacted by teachers and students in classrooms, certain musics will be selected for students to learn in the future, as others will be excluded. Hence, it is also necessary to reflect on the decision processes in order to understand whose musics are legitimized as cultural matter worth learning, whose are excluded, and on what (and whose) premises. Turning our attention to these issues aims toward the Nordic ideal of democracy in education through a more in-​depth understanding not only of “whom policy serves” but also “whom it disadvantages or excludes” (Wright 2012, 22).

86   Geography

Notes This research has been undertaken as part of the ArtsEqual project funded by the Academy of Finland’s Strategic Research Council from its Equality in Society programme (project no. 293199). 1. All translations are by the authors. 2. Although arguably forming the basis for school music education, popular music seems to be a somewhat marginalized subject in Finnish extracurricular music schools (Väkevä and Kurkela 2012), whereas in Swedish cultural schools, it appears to be a central educational subject. 3. H. Gudmunsdottir, personal communication, November 6, 2012. 4. It should be noted that all teachers in this chapter are referred to by pseudonyms. 5. Author interview of “Maria,” September 13, 2009. 6. Author interview of “Outi,” November 24, 2011. 7. It should be noted that a new Finnish Curriculum has recently come into effect, which also emphasizes the importance of cultural identity in a globalizing world 8. Author interview of “Maria,” November 7, 2011. 9. Author interview of “Risto,” May 18, 2012. 10. Author interview of “Iida,” December 11, 2011. 11. Author interview of “Outi,” November 24, 2011. 12. Author interview of “Julia,” November 11, 2011.

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Inclusive Popular Music Education    87 Carlgren, I., K. Klette, S. Mýrdal, K. Schnack, and H. Simola. 2006. “Changes in Nordic Teaching Practices:  From Individualised Teaching to the Teaching of Individuals.” Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 50(3): 301–​326. Curriculum for the Compulsory School, Preschool Class and the Leisure-​time Centre. 2011. Stockholm:  Skolverket. At www.malmo.se/​download/​18.29c3b78a132728ecb52800034181/​ pdf2687.pdf. Curriculum for the Upper Secondary School. 2013. Stockholm: Skolverket. At http://​flexlearning.se/​ictmodule1a/​ictmodule1adocs/​lgr11english.pdf. Duelund, P. 2003. The Nordic Cultural Model. Copenhagen: Nordic Cultural Institute. Espeland, M. 2010. “Dichotomies in Music Education—​Real or Unreal?” Music Education Research 12(2): 129–​139. Folkestad, G. 2002. “National Identity and Music.” In Musical Identities, ed. R. MacDonald, D. Hargreaves, and D. Miell, 151–​162. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Folkestad, G. 2006. “Formal and Informal Learning Situations or Practices vs. Formal and Informal Ways of Learning.” British Journal of Music Education 23(2): 135–​145. Fælles Mål 2009 Musik. 2009. Faghæfte 7. København: Undervisningsministeriets håndbogsserie nr. 9–​2009. At http://​www.uvm.dk/​~/​media/​Publikationer/​2009/​Folke/​Faelles%20Maal/​ Filer/​Faghaefter/​090713_​musik_​06.ashx. Georgii-​ Hemming, E., and M. Westvall. 2010. “Music Education—​ A Personal Matter? Examining the Current Discourses of Music Education in Sweden.” British Journal of Music Education 27(1): 21–​33. Green, L. 2001. How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education. Aldershot: Ashgate. Green, L. 2008. Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy. London: Ashgate. Hebert, D., and A. Kertz-​Welzel, eds. 2012. Patriotism and Nationalism in Music Education. Aldershot: Ashgate. Icelandic National Curriculum Guide for Compulsory Schools. 2008. General Section. Reykjavik: Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. Jakobsen, J. 2011. “Education, Recognition and the Sami People of Norway.” In Writing Postcolonial Histories of Inter-​cultural Education, ed. H. Niedrig and C. Ydesen, 222–​238. New York: Peter Laing. Johansson, Ola. 2010. “Beyond ABBA: The Globalization of Swedish Popular Music.” Focus on Geography 53(4): 131–​141. Johnson, B. 2009. “The Sound of Music.” In Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence, ed. B. Johnson and M. Cloonan, 13–​30. Burlington: Ashgate. Jørgensen, H. 2001. “Sang og musikk i grunnskole og lærerutdanning 1945–​2000.” Studia Musicologica Norvegica 27: 103–​131. Kallio, A. A. 2015a. “Drawing a Line in Water: Constructing the School Censorship Frame in Popular Music Education.” International Journal of Music Education 33(2): 195–​209. Kallio, A. A. 2015b. “Navigating (Un)Popular Music in the Classroom: Censure and Censorship in an Inclusive, Democratic Music Education.” Doctoral dissertation, Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts, Helsinki Studia Musica 65. Kallio, A. A., and H. Partti. 2013. “Music Education for a Nation: Teaching Patriotic Ideas and Ideals in Global Societies.” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 12(3): 5–​30. Karlsen, S. 2011. Music Education in Multicultural Schools: Report from the Nordic Research Project “Exploring Democracy: Conceptions of Immigrant Students’ Development of Musical Agency.” Oslo: Konsis Grafisk.

88   Geography Karlsen, S., and H. Westerlund. 2010. “Immigrant Students’ Development of Musical Agency:  Exploring Democracy in Music Education.” British Journal of Music Education 27(3): 225–​239. Kjeldgaard, D., and S. Askegaard. 2006. “The Glocalization of Youth Culture: The Global Youth Segment as Structures of Common Difference.” Journal of Consumer Research 33(2): 231–​247. Lindgren, M., and C. Erikson. 2010. “The Rock Band Context as Discursive Governance in Music Education in Swedish Schools.” Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education 9(3): 35–​54. Music Subject Curriculum. 2011. At www.udir.no/​Upload/​larerplaner/​Fastsatte_​lareplaner_​ for_​Kunnskapsloeftet/​english/​5/​Music_​subject_​curriculum.rtf. Muukkonen, M. 2010. Monipuolisuuden eetos. Musiikin aineenopettajat artikuloimassa työnsä käytäntöjä. Helsinki: Sibelius Academy, Studia Musica 42. National Core Curriculum for Basic Education. 2004. Part I: Index and Chapters. Vammala: Finnish National Board of Education. At www.oph.fi/​download/​47671_​core_​curricula_​ basic_​education_​1.pdf. Ojala, A., and L. Väkevä. 2015. “Keeping it Real:  Addressing Authenticity in Classroom (Popular) Music Pedagogy.” Nordic Research in Music Education Yearbook 16: 87–​99. Olsen, E. 2012. “IDEOSKOSA. Ideas and ideologies in Norwegian School Songbooks.” Paper presentation at Nordic Network for Music Education (NNMPF) Conference, Bergen, Norway, February 28, 2013. Paynter, J. 1987. “Music Education in the Nordic Countries.” British Journal of Music Education 4(3): 251–​252. Pedersen, P. 2011. “ ‘Rhythmic Music’ in Danish Music Education.” Paper presented at Leading Music Education International Conference, London, May 30, 2011. At http://​ir.lib.uwo.ca/​ cgi/​viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context=lme. POPS 70. 1970. Peruskoulun opetussuunnitelmakomitean mietintö II. Oppiaineiden opetussuunnitelmat. Komiteamietintö: A5. Helsinki: Valtion painatuskeskus. Regelski, T. 2004. “Social Theory, and Music, and Music Education as Praxis.” Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education 3(3): 2–​42. Reimer, B. 1993. “Music Education in Our Multimusical Culture.” Music Educators Journal 79(7): 21–​26. Rideout, R. 2005. “Whose Music? Music Education and Cultural Issues: Debates about What Music to Study Can Raise Questions Related to the Very Purpose of Music Education.” Music Educators Journal 91(4): 39–​41. Saether, E. 2003. The Oral University. Attitudes to Music Teaching and Learning in the Gambia. Malmö: Malmö Academy of Music. Sahlberg, P. 2010. Finnish Lessons:  What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? New York: Teachers College Press. Stålhammar, B. 1995. Samspel. Grundskola—​Musikskola i samverkan: En studie av den pedagogiska och musikaliska interaktionen i en klassrumssituation. Gothenburg:  Gothenburg University. Stålhammar, B. 2000. “The Space of Music and Its Foundation of Values—​Music Teaching and Young People’s Own Music Experience.” International Journal of Music Education 36: 35−45. Tagg, P. 1982. “Music Teacher Training Problems and Popular Music Research.” In Popular Music Perspectives, ed. D. Horn and P. Tagg, 232–​242. Gothenburg and Exeter: International Association for the Study of Popular Music. Väkevä, L. 2010. “Garage band or GarageBand®? Remixing Musical Futures.” British Journal of Music Education 27 (Special Issue) 1: 59–​70.

Inclusive Popular Music Education    89 Väkevä, L., and V. Kurkela. 2012. “Rhythm Masters: Developing a Master Program in Popular Music and Folk Music in Provincial Areas in Finland.” US-​ China Education Review B2: 244–​257. Väkevä, L., and H. Westerlund. 2007. “The ‘Method’ of Democracy in Music Education.” Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education 6(4): 96–​108. Westerlund, H. 2006. “Garage Rock Band: A Future Model for Developing Musical Expertise?” International Journal of Music Education Showcase 24(2): 119–​125. Westvall, M. 2014. “Musical Diversity or Conformity?: An Investigation of Current Norms in Music Education Through the Lens of Educators in Swedish-​Speaking Minority Schools in Finland.” Finnish Journal of Music Education 17(2): 8–​18. Wright, R. 2012. “Policy and Practice in Music Education.” In Debates in Music Teaching, ed. C. Philpott and G. Spruce, 20–​32. New York: Routledge.

Chapter 4

Ro ots, Rou t e s , and C osmop ol i ta ni sm David Lindley Meets Harding Hank Hans Weisethaunet

While giving a concert at the small place of Gaupne (in Sogn, in western Norway), the Norwegian country-​rock band Hellbillies were approached by a member of the audience: “There’s an American here who wants to see you.” “I totally couldn’t believe this,” says vocalist, Aslag Haugen—​rather instantaneously recognizing that the “American fan” in front of him was none other than one of his musical idols, the Californian singer-​songwriter Jackson Browne, at the time staying in this remote Norwegian village, in the innermost parts of the Sognefjord, in search of his Scandinavian roots. The Hellbillies front man laughs: “The funniest thing about it, the guard at the door even had no clue who this was.”1 Since the mid-​1990s, the search for “roots”—​including musical ones—​has intensified rather than diminished. Well-​established paradigms of “folkloric authenticity” (Weisethaunet and Lindberg 2010) prevail in music criticism, among performers, and in audiences’ appreciation of their “local,” “pure,” and “sanitized” notions of tradition. The background in terms of identity politics, of course, is simple: we like to belong and to know where we’re from. In the words of phenomenologist Edward Casey (1993), “belonging in place” is at the foundation of the human condition. After decades of “cultural grey-​ out” (Lomax 1968), increased economic and cultural globalization (Featherstone 1990; Appadurai 2001), escalating consumerism in the “postmodern condition” (Lyotard 1979), and academic poststructuralist and postcolonial critique, the notion of “roots” still stands—​like an unshakable tree. In being given the opportunity to contribute to a volume focusing on Nordic relations in popular music, one question immediately arose: How are we to understand the possible boundaries in the music of the Nordic countries? Nordic popular music can hardly be understood as an entity; indeed, all popular music in the Nordic countries has been influenced by processes of globalization, at least since the invention of

92   Geography the gramophone record. It seems important to consider that movements and musical exchange are not new phenomena (consider, for instance, how vise (song) traditions have traveled across the Scandinavian borders for centuries).2 This chapter argues that circulation comes first, whereas most research seems to take it for granted that music is “national” or “regional” to begin with, then it becomes “transnational” or “global.” The examples in the chapter, dealing with both popular and traditional musics, draw from a national (Norwegian) context, yet they exemplify a more fundamental argument concerning how music travels—​an argument that might seem valid in the Nordic region as a whole, as well as in various forms of Nordic popular and/​or traditional music. Underlying this question, of course, is the more ubiquitous local one:  On what grounds are we to treasure, for instance, any concept of Norwegian or, say, Swedish music in the first place? Having discussed the ideas of the “national” and “local” in Norwegian music to some extent (Weisethaunet 2007, 2011), I would nevertheless like to move on from these questions to interrogate the much-​related idea of “roots” in music. As novelist Salman Rushdie has indicated, the general condition of humans is that we do not have roots, but we have feet; that we, ​unlike trees, a​ re quite mobile. Nevertheless, this fact seems to matter less in this context. To the contrary, the more we globalize, or move around, the interests in “roots,” in heritage, and in places of origin may seem to intensify.3 In this sense, to separate any inquiry into “roots” from the epistemology of “routes”—​from the condition of traveling—​would be an inexactitude; in fact, a mistake. Following historian James Clifford (1997, 3), one may as a matter of fact question the very idea that “authentic social existence is, or should be, centered in circumscribed places”: that “roots always precede routes.” In Clifford’s terms, “[p]‌ractices of displacement might emerge as constitutive of cultural meanings,” and the trope of “travel” might then perhaps best be understood as “a figure for routes through a heterogeneous modernity.” In this sense, traveling informs the complexity of diasporic experience, but it simultaneously challenges the idea of culture as centered: “Cultural centers, discrete regions and territories, do not exist prior to contacts, but are sustained through them, appropriating and disciplining the restless movements of peoples and things” (3). Can we view musical expressions as being informed by travel, by movements, as much as by their (often essentialized) connections to place? This concerns how musical objects circulate and create new meanings; nevertheless, it is also how travel informs the making of music. In its recorded form, as sound objects, music has in the twentieth century traversed borders to an extent indisputably unheard of at any time prior in history. My argument in this context is that an understanding of the significance of “routes,” of travel, may also come to influence the concepts through which meanings are fashioned—​such as “insiders” versus “outsiders,” “natives” versus “explorers,” “folk” versus “popular”—​including our ideas of how music is thought to be linked to place. How can we make sense of the relations between “roots” and “routes”? Any interest in “roots,” undeniably, is informed by distance—​that is, considerations that presuppose movement—​and perceptions that operate on difference. In such a context, musicians, of course, assert agency and contribute to the chronotopic creation of musical meaning along the way, so the speak. The various cases to be discussed in this chapter, including

Roots, Routes, and Cosmopolitanism    93 the Hellbillies, Jackson Browne, David Lindley, and Harding Hank, all share in the fact that they make visible quite different musical connections between Norway and North America. These connections are typically not inter-​Nordic, but are exceedingly illustrative of the cultural entanglement and interconnections between the European North and the outside world. Rather than dwelling one-​sidedly on any of these individual cases, questions regarding the significance of “roots” and “routes” are pursued here in order to explore the connectedness between them. Among other things, this chapter will talk about what happened when Jackson Browne came to Norway in search of his “roots,” the complexities of the “routes” of Norwegian country music and folk musics, and the hitherto unheard-​of meeting between David Lindley and the legendary Harding Hank.

“Out of Norway” When Jackson Browne came to Norway to perform in 2009, he took time to visit several of his relatives, including spending some time with a local historian in Gaupne in order to be informed about his ancestry. Prior to this, in Los Angeles he had even come to learn some of the essentials of what it means to be “Norwegian.” Being commended to join the local organization of resettled Norwegians there, he had told them that he was in fact only “half Norwegian.” Much to his amusement, however, he was informed that this was no hindrance whatsoever: the society was well acquainted with this situation, since their principal slogan is “half is better than none.”4 Both of Browne’s grandparents on his mother’s side, Margareth Haugen and Jens Dahl,5 were Norwegians. They emigrated from Norway around 1910 at the age of sixteen or seventeen, but met and married in Minnesota. Jackson Browne’s heritage travel story is included here, not because it says something specific about his music and lyrics, or makes the argument that his music is “Norwegian” to any extent.6 Rather, it is quite illustrative of the condition of Norwegian migration to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—​and for the Norwegian-​American cultural relationship that followed. In many small places in Norway, up to 75% of the inhabitants left with hopes for a prospective new life “over there,” and this background can serve to explain why American music, and especially American country music (but also blues and other kinds of American popular music), have had such a stronghold in the Norwegian population throughout most of the twentieth century. From the beginning of the first mass emigration wave in 1866 until 1900, some 441,000 Norwegians immigrated to America, and from 1847 to the present, more than 280 different Norwegian-​language papers were launched in the United States (Lovoll 2010, 94, 426). The scale of migration taking place in earlier centuries was by no means of a lesser degree than that of recent decades—​a fact that may seem underplayed in much of the current literature on “globalization,” which often describes massive immigration and movements as peculiar to “postmodernism,” or what is often termed “late modernity.”7

94   Geography Norwegians have been oriented toward America (in terms of politics and culture) perhaps to an even greater extent than have the communities of Norwegian Americans kept in touch with their “homeland” through their visits, commemorations of local customs, folkloric practices of song and dance, and so on. As Jackson Browne pointed out to his audience in Norway in 2009, “It is interesting to me that people living in Gaupne have really paid attention to where people immigrated to, so that they can show you the records of where people went.”8 This leads us to a significant point in this context: American music holds a passionate grip on the musical identities of many Norwegians. The preference for American country music has been especially strong in the western parts of Norway, a fact that may also be connected to another factor of cultural contact—​that Norwegian seamen every so often brought records with them from their travels abroad. Such travels and musical exchanges—​the ongoing “movements of peoples and things” (Clifford 1997, 3); the taking part in musical interactions and performances; the circulation of records, their “assemblages” and “social connections” (Latour 2005, 16–​17)—​inform our

Figure  4.1  Jackson Browne and family visiting the home turfs of his great grandfather, in Prestvika, Nærøy, Norway, 2005. In front: Eldrid Eraker, with Simen and Sindre Bredesen. In the back (from left to right): Astrid Prestvik, Randi Breivik, Einar Bredesen, Tore Prestvik, Jon Sandmo, Harald Prestvik, Kari Sandmo, Oddmund Breivik, Jackson Browne, Ryan Browne, Diana Cohen, Rune Rønningen and Laila Sandmo. Photo: Ragnar Prestvik (used by permission)

Roots, Routes, and Cosmopolitanism    95 musical experiences and the construction of social identities. As such, the engagement with music must be understood as a particularly meaningful activity. In the terms of Georgina Born (2013, 9), this has to do with “music’s social mediation”: “how music is transformed by its social manifestations or embodiments, as well as to how the social is produced and transformed by music.”

The American Connection The Hellbillies, from Ål in Hallingdal, have been one of the most popular live bands in Norway for the past twenty-​five years, as well as one of the bestselling recording acts. They have in the period 1992–​2016 released fifteen albums (this includes three live albums and a best-​of collection) and three live DVDs. And all their records have reached high positions on the list of bestselling albums in Norway, VG-​lista (the Norwegian equivalent to Billboard). There is little doubt that their popularity is largely due to the fact that they have managed to combine an idiosyncratic style of country–​ rock with strong musicianship and the use of local Norwegian dialect. Their lyrics, most of them written by band member Arne Moslåtten, are sung (and written) in the local Hallingdal dialect (an inland area in mid-​southern Norway), which serves to connect their expression very much to a locality. In general, they dwell on themes that engage with the struggles of everyday life, in particular advocating the rural over both urbanity and modernity, and especially against what might be called the “cappuccino culture” of the city. Much of the band’s success might be attributed to their ability to combine down-​to-​earth observations of locality and everyday local community life with a lyrical imagery that on occasion even touches on existential and philosophical questions. One interesting fact about this band is that they have been embraced by the general public, critics, and fellow musicians alike, while there is a tendency (in Norway) that country music in general may be popular in parts of the population, but as such is considered “low culture.”9 The band has received several official prizes, including Spellemannprisen in 2007 (“the Norwegian Grammy”), but also prizes for their contribution to the Norwegian language (Målprisen, in 201110 and the Alf Prøysens Ærespris, in 2002). The band members, however, grew up on American country and rock, from the likes of The Byrds, The Allman Brothers Band, David Lindley, and Jackson Browne; and the Hellbillies’ first album basically consisted of new versions of songs by American artists.11 Even though most of their material is original, some of their songs have been based on tunes by John Prine, Buck Owens, Dwight Yoakam, Richard Thompson, and The Grateful Dead. That their music is in general considered to be “Norwegian” has, according to guitarist Lars Haavard Haugen, most of all to do with their use of dialect: Personally, I do not have any relationship with Norwegian folk music. The only reason why people may come to think of our music as particularly “Norwegian” is due to the lyrics, the use of the inland dialect. The way I play guitar, and all of my musical

96   Geography references, come from somewhere else; much American music and some English. I grew up with a lot of music. From the time I was 2 or 3 years old I listened to The Grateful Dead, The Band and Creedence [Clearwater Revival]: that was my kind of folk music, so to speak.12

This situation is more typical than unique. As pointed out by Norwegian anthropologist Odd Are Berkaak, the idea of “Norwegianess” is no longer something to be harvested or collected; rather, it exists as an ongoing project of choices and negotiations, where elements of popular culture have since long obliterated the assurances of a fixed cultural heritage, and personally he nurtures “an equally close relationship to the lyrics of Chuck Berry as to Aasen, Wergeland and Bjørnson taken together” (Berkaak 1996, 14; my translation). For guitarist Lars Haavard Haugen (born 1969), as well as his brother, Hellbillies vocalist and songwriter Aslag Haugen (born 1960),13 the travels of their late elder brother, Arne Sigurd Haugen (1953–​2011), was a significant factor in their musical upbringing. He had brought home a lot of records from his time as a student at an American college. Lars Haavard’s earliest musical memory is of hearing the music of The Allmann Brothers Band from his brother’s record player, an influence that can be spotted in his guitar playing to this day, even if his style has developed into something quite personal.14 In this sense, he views himself as part of an international community of musicians, having played with musicians from Nashville and featuring Nashville fiddle player Rob Hajacos on a number of their recordings.15 The Hellbillies also had one of their albums produced by the late Stephen Bruton and recorded at Hit Shack Studio in Austin, Texas (Urban Twang, WEA, 2001). One may argue that their music has moved more toward the rock idiom, and somewhat away from country, and much so due to the development of Lars Haavard’s guitar playing. In all, the band very much operates within an international circuit of musicians, and even though the band has primarily been catering to the Norwegian market, they have released their recordings on major labels such as BMG, WEA, and EMI Virgin.

“Out of Place”—​“Out of Time” Whereas Jackson Browne indulged the audience with some stories and music during his Bergen visit in 2009, he and his musical associate John David Souther (in the early 1970s, both Browne and Souther played significant roles in the songwriting of the Eagles, one of the world’s bestselling bands of all times)16 were in return given a local rendition of one of Souther’s songs by singer-​songwriter Olav Stedje from Songdal, who, although somewhat embarrassed, performed his truly Norwegian version of Souther’s “Black Rose”17 (“Svart Rose” from his successful debut album Ta meg med, Philips, Norway 1981). Stedje became very popular in Norway in the 1980s, with his kind of Souther-​Browne-​James Taylor–​influenced style of music, soft-​spoken but quite competently backed up by

Roots, Routes, and Cosmopolitanism    97 the Norwegian band Lava and other top-​class Norwegian pop/​rock musicians of this period. Stedje’s success was greatly due to the fact that his often romantic but largely accessible lyrics were written in Norwegian nynorsk, inflected by his local Sogndal dialect, and ultimately his performance made a glaring statement for “Norwegian west-​ coast country.” In addition, the international guests were treated with some traditional folk music performed by fiddle player Annlaug Børsheim from Ulvik in Hardanger.18 Asked to comment on the music, Browne responded that it reminded him very much of the stuff that his long-​time musical partner and comrade David Lindley was into, also knowing that Lindley had been in Norway to record a few years earlier. Lindley’s guitar playing, slide and lap-​steel, but especially his fiddle playing—​in interplay with Browne’s voice and lyrics—​provided a signature sound on many of Browne’s most artistically successful recordings of the 1970s, including For Everyman (Asylum 1973), Late for the Sky (Asylum 1974), The Pretender (Asylum 1976), and Running on Empty (Asylum 1979). Lindley and fellow guitarist Ry Cooder, both Californians, became protagonists of the American “roots,” pre-​“world music” movement in the 1970s and ‘80s,19 exploring the idioms of the African American blues, American folk, and Caribbean musics; however, also moving on to other places as the concept of “world music” took on new dimensions in the late 1980s and ‘90s. In the early 1990s, Lindley recorded two albums in Madagascar with fellow Californian guitarist Henry Kaiser and various musicians from Madagascar (recorded during a two-​week visit in 1991), both of them entitled A World out of Time (vols. 1 and 2; later a vol. 3 was also released).20 Then, after Madagascar, Kaiser and Lindley came to Norway for a three-​week period in 1994, resulting in the albums The Sweet Sunny North (Shanachie 1994) and The Sweet Sunny North, Vol. 2 (Shanachie 1996), both bearing the subtitle Henry Kaiser & David Lindley in Norway. Like the Madagascar recordings, these albums featured Lindley and Kaiser in interplay with local musicians, and in all, quite a mixture of musicians from different traditions and musical styles including, among others, some of the most renown Norwegian traditional singers, Kirsten Bråten Berg and Tone Hulbækmo; fiddlers Annbjørg Lien, Susanne Lundeng, Hallvard Bjørgum, and the late Hans Brimi; Elisabeth Kværne (langeleik); Bjørgulv Straume (Jew’s harp); Jon Faukstad (accordion), and more contemporary-​crossover constellations like The Brazz Brothers, Chateau Neuf Spellmannslag, Farmers Market; Sámi artist Áilu Gaup, and guitarist Knut Reiersrud.21 Under the heading “Another World Out of Time,” the liner notes of the first The Sweet Sunny North also offered some words of explanation and clarification regarding the incentive and motivation for these recordings: Various destinations were considered and much research transpired before Norway was selected for this recording expedition. Then followed months of research and planning for the trip. Upon their arrival in Norway and throughout their visit in the early summer of 1994, many Norwegians asked Henry and David, “Why Norway, after Madagascar?” Norway, like Madagascar, is another kind of “World Out of Time.” Norway has, in some ways, remained musically very isolated from the rest

98   Geography of the world and thus many of its cultural traditions have remained strong, alive and developing; without being destroyed by the international television/​disco/​manufactured pop culture.22

In their Norwegian “world music” expedition, there is little doubt that the Californians Kaiser and Lindley felt that they, as in Madagascar, had come to a very exotic place, being the voyagers and the explorers of a music from the fringes of the world—​the “far North”—​an image further adhered to by the words from the late American composer Lou Harrison (1917–​2003), highlighted in the CD booklet: The joyous ease with which these Norwegian singers and players use real musical intervals is a rich and moving pleasure, no gray industrial “all-​equal” relationships obscure the lovely musicality and human expressions in these remarkable recordings; recordings that widen our grasp of World Music and astonish us because they come from the far North.23

The Setesdal Connection Hallvard T. Bjørgum (born 1956) lives in Valle, in the middle of Setesdal, a valley in the Aust-​Agder county in the southern inland parts of Norway, an area particularly known for its distinctive folk music traditions.24 Bjørgum is indisputably one of the greatest living fiddle players of traditional music in Norway today; at the “roots” of Norwegian folk music you will find Bjørgum. He has won Landskappleiken, in the category of Harding fiddle,25 twice (1982 and 1988).26 And he has won Spellemannprisen (“the Norwegian grammy”) in the category folk music three times. I visited Bjørgum for some days in the early spring of 2013, and got to learn a lot about the local music scene, the conditions for his music today, and the personality of this distinguished musician. Hallvard’s father Torleiv Hallvardsson Bjørgum (1921–​1990) was one of the most notable bearers of this traditional music in the twentieth century, and Hallvard learned to play the fiddle from his father at an early age. One of the albums they recorded together, Skjoldmøyslaget:  Faremoslåttar frå Setesdal (Sylvartun 1990), released after Torleiv’s death in 1990, was in 2011 voted the fourteenth best Norwegian album of all time, being the highest score for a folk music album in this poll (“Morgenbladet topp 100”), initiated by the Norwegian weekly Morgenbladet. Both Hallvard’s and Torleiv’s playing styles are based in a lineage of transmitted knowledge, Faremo-​spel, learned through their mentors Andres K. Rysstad (1893–​1984) and Knut Jonsson Heddi (1857–​1938). When David Lindley came to Sylvartun (Hallvard’s place) in Setesdal in 1994, he was much greeted and welcomed, and at night Lindley and Kaiser “slept in the two tiny one-​room cabins that Hallvard and his father’s families had lived in when they were young.”27 While requested to consider some tunes to be selected for recording, however, Hallvard unquestionably gave Lindley a rather solid dose of Setesdal music

Roots, Routes, and Cosmopolitanism    99 performance, fiddling for more than four hours without break. I had heard of this story, and wanted to ask Hallvard why he did that: “You could say, maybe I thought it would be good to give him a shot right away; to make him understand what this was all about; what he had devoted himself to. To take in this much all in one go, very few people would be able to handle that.”28 As Bjørgum muses, to listen to such music performance might be a challenge, especially if you are not familiar with it—​ and Bjørgum gave Lindley so much “that he probably could not have taken one more tune.” Hallvard Bjørgum’s performance is conspicuously “rooted” in the Setesdal tradition (as folk music researchers may call it)—​or Setesdals-​spel—​“play,” as they would more likely say in the valley. As such, their emic term for music to a certain extent corresponds to the term “musicking” advocated by Small (1998), to make musicologists recognize that music is just as much a process and a social activity as a product or entity. It seems evident that Setesdals-​spel epitomizes a particular kind of musical knowledge, an acoustemology in Feld’s terminology (Feld 1996, 97). This is connected to the knowledge of various tunes and styles of performance. Still, more important, it embodies an understanding of the musical past and a way of listening. It concerns musical memory (often termed “oral/​aural”), however, it is also historical and social memory linked to the local place-​world: a recollection of the past and a very detailed knowledge of how the various spel-​men in the musical-​historical lineage played and acted; how they lived their lives and the stories they told—​an act of remembering and recollection of the past,29 and a continuance of the past into the present, that comes close to what anthropologists term “local cosmology.” The spelmann (“the playing man”) Hallvard T.  Bjørgum holds a musically embodied and almost encyclopedic knowledge of his forebears.

From “Roots” to “Routes” What David Lindley probably did not know is that Bjørgum, in addition to being a “traditional” musician, known to be very strict about matters of local fiddle performance, is a fervent traveler and an ardent fan of The Rolling Stones, the latter also being a central part of his musical upbringing. As Hallvard told me, “When I grew up here in Setesdal in the 1960s, actually there were only two camps: either you were a fan of The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, and I have to say I was much more of a Stones guy”—​an interest also leading him to later become a friend of Keith Richards.30 In addition, Bjørgum has an alter ego, at times featured in performance and on his own recordings—​namely, Harding Hank. It is no exaggeration to say that Hank (a.k.a. Bjørgum) is a true Hank Williams devotee, having also composed and recorded his own Hank Williams tunes, including one of a text that Williams Sr. himself never made into song owing to its (for the time) controversial lyrics.31 Harding Hank is in possession of a strong country-​music voice, and discussing matters of the life and times of Williams with him seems by and large like entering into a dialogue with a Hank Williams scholar.

100   Geography Like Williams, Bjørgum found that he needed an alias for this very different side of his musical personality, and he was inspired to become Harding Hank from the fact that Hank Williams had invented his alias, “Luke the Drifter,” in order to do stuff that did not fit neatly into the country-​music market at the beginning of the 1950s. And having toured with the band Danko/​Fjeld/​Andersen in the early 1990s, led Hallvard to a close friendship with the late Rick Danko (1942–​1999), member of The Band, with whom he also made a tour around the New York area in 1994–​95, featuring Danko on guitar and voice and Hallvard on the fiddle, and aided by Ed Kaercher (guitar and vocals). Some of the songs they performed together are released in a home-​session version, recorded at Danko’s house in Woodstock, New York, on Bjørgum’s album Peace Will Come (Blue Mood 2009; see ­figures 4.2 and 4.3). This album also features Hallvard in interplay with ex-​Band-​member Garth Hudson, Eric Andersen, Blondie Chaplin, and others. Looking into the history of music performance in Setesdal, however, one may come to understand that this heritage is not simply about “roots,” but is equally about “routes.” Folk music researcher Morten Levy (1974) has even found reason to believe that there are links between the distinctive Setesdal performance and medieval traditions of the Orkney Islands, including to the St. Magnus Hymn (14th century), along with relations to the playing of instruments such as the gígja and fidla at the beginning

Figure 4.2  Hallvard Bjørgum a.k.a. Harding Hank: Oil painting by Johan Hermsen, Delft, Netherlands, based on photos of Hank Williams and Hallvard Bjørgum. From record cover: Peace Will Come (Blue Mood 2009)

Roots, Routes, and Cosmopolitanism    101

Figure 4.3  Hallvard Bjørgum jamming in the kitchen with Rick Danko, Woodstock 1994. Photo: Marianne Berg (used by permission)

of the eleventh century, mentioned in the Icelandic sagas.32 In the early Norse literature, there are descriptions of wandering musicians coming from the south. Nonetheless, in Setesdal, the best-​known fiddler in the nineteenth century was Olav Faremo (1786–​), as described by Skar (1903), and from this period on, much is known. As these stories go, also in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries musicians traveled. One of them was Peter Stømsing (1759–​1836), one of “Vardalsfantarne” from eastern Norway, who was of Roma heritage, and who often competed with the fiddlers in Setesdal (Skar 1903, 131). And according to Hallvard Bjørgum, the fiddle tradition in Setesdal has in some periods probably been considerably influenced by the playing styles of traveling Roma people, who lived and traveled in Norway and Sweden, at least from the seventeenth century on. Since then, much is known, including the fact that one of Hallvard’s musical forefathers, the brother of Olav Faremo, named Tarjei Faremo (1790–​), as well as his son Olav Minemo (1823–​), left for America and most likely ended up in New Orleans, and the family never heard from them again. Nevertheless, when Hallvard went on a long journey in the United States in the aftermath of his tour with Danko, he chose not to visit any Norwegian Americans, or to make contact with any of their organizations. He would much rather meet with other musicians, be it rock or country musicians; and most important, he set out on a long journey visiting every place in the United States where Hank Williams had ever lived.33 In his youth, Hallvard was introduced to Hank Williams through his cousin Hallvard B. Helle, a sailor who had brought a lot of records home from “overseas.” The importance of the circulation of records and the impact they made on people in the valley probably cannot be overstated. As Hallvard told me,

102   Geography another of his neighborhood residents had been away at sea for more than two years. When he finally returned home, he held a large bag of records under his arm, and he did not even have time to greet his mother properly; the first thing he said to her was, “Where is the gramophone?”

The Cosmopolitan “Rag,” Mama As illustrated, different “routes” have influenced Hallvard T. Bjørgum’s musical identity, and in recent years he has been traveling to Azerbaijan in order to pursue the theory that the old Setesdal-​spel might have connections to the east, and especially to the Caucasus, where trade routes and contact with Scandinavia may go as far back in history as 2000 years. Even if some of these theories may be disputed, Bjørgum’s enthusiasm to follow these routes demonstrates a willingness to look beyond sanctified truths and the taken for granted, in search of new, alternative explanations—​alternative “routes”—​to some of the ambiguities regarding “roots” and questions of Norwegian folk music origins, oftentimes more dogmatically protected by others. Besides, there is little doubt that his own travels have influenced both his thinking and his musicking. In the case of Bjørgum and/​or Harding Hank, the complex relationship between “roots” and “routes” can in no way be seen as an antagonism; they may perfectly well live side by side—​in perfect harmony, to use a cliché—​without threatening each other. Bjørgum’s cosmopolitan34 outlook, reflected also in his music performance, does not at all indicate that he is willing or needs to compromise when it comes to his musical legacy, the musical knowledge learned and inherited from his forefathers. A concrete musical example of this cosmopolitanism is found in Bjørgum’s rendition of Robbie Robertson’s “Rag Mama Rag,” first recorded on The Band album simply entitled The Band (Capitol 1969) and to be found on Bjørgum’s Free Field (Sylvartun 2003). It is a uniquely original version of this rock tune, or perhaps better described, an impeccable amalgamation of Robertson’s tune with one of the oldest known tunes in the Norwegian slått repertoire, “Rammeslått no. 1” from Setesdal. The word “rag” may have many different meanings, including the reference to the pre-​jazz musical form ragtime. For Robbie Robertson, his musical imagery was much inflected by the experience of being taken on a journey, from Canada to the American South, when he was sixteen. And his creative imagination related to these experiences contributed greatly to making rock music relevant to American cultural history.35 As Robertson told me in an interview, “When I joined up with Ronnie Hawkins, when I was 16 years old, and I went from Canada down to the Mississippi delta, it was a huge experience for me, a very deep experience, musically, culturally, everything. And it had a profound effect on me.”36 “Rammeslått no. 1” is a “gorrlaus slått,” a term that basically refers to a particular tuning of the fiddle where the lowest string is tuned down from g to f, making the tuning: f - d´ - a´ - e´´. These slåtts are thought to have originated from the legendary Olav Faremo: “Han gjorde tri Slaattar som han kalla ‘dei tri gorrlausann’—​dei fekk det

Roots, Routes, and Cosmopolitanism    103 namnet av di, at dei gjekk på gorrlaus Bas. Basen surra attunder som ei humle” (Skar 1903, 127); “He did three slåtts that he named ‘the three gorrlaus ones’—​they got that name since they had the gorrlaus bass; the bass summed underneath like a bumblebee.” Rammeslått (at times termed rammeslag) is from Old Norse: rammr (meaning: powerful, strong) (Levy 1974, 13). It is known as a dangerous tune, a slått that might bring both performer and the listeners into an ecstatic condition or state of trance. Johannes Skar’s Gamalt or Sætesdal (8 volumes, published 1903–​16) offers a rich account of local Setesdal history and lore, and describes in some detail events that took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when fiddlers like Olav Faremo, Peter Stømsing, and Tarkjell Aslakson (1802–​1875) at different occasions happened to perform the rammeslått. Whenever the spel-​men get into the rammeslått, there is usually no way to make them stop. They are in a state of trance, and the fiddle must be taken away from them. At one instance, Tarkjell Aslakson had gotten into the rammeslått, but as the story goes Ånond Neset managed to take the fiddle away from him. Nevertheless, the fiddle still played, lying there on the table. Unsurprisingly, that scared the shit out of everybody present (Skar 1903, 153).37 It is those unearthly and ecstatic slåtts that Levy (1974) links to the narratives of Bose’s saga, a handwritten Icelandic text from the fifteenth century. There is no space to go into any detailed musical analysis here, but there are some similarities between the opening riff of The Band’s “Rag Mama Rag” (played on fiddle by Rick Danko in the original 1969 version) and the melodic and rhythmic contour of the slått. Still, to this writer, it appears as one of the mysteries of musical creation that Bjørgum and his spel-​men are able to merge these tunes into such an intelligible and coherent musical statement. In Bjørgum’s “Rag Mama Rag,” the tempo is much slower than on The Band’s original, and the other musicians build their performance of the song around the repetitious, however powerful and intensely sounding motifs of the slått, in this case performed in unison by Bjørgum on viola and Daniel Sandén-​Warg on the Swedish stråkharpa. In itself, the performance of the slått is remarkably similar to the version Hallvard Bjørgum recorded with his father on Skjoldmøyslaget (1990). This recorded version was played on ordinary fiddles (in Setesdal, commonly termed “dusinfele”).38 At the start, however, a different opening motif is added by Swedish flutist William Olson, who thereafter joins in with Bjørgum and Sandén-​Warg in performing the actual slått. Bjørgum and Sandén-​Warg are at the center throughout, with everything else organized around their performance. The basic 2/​4 rhythmic structure is then considerably enhanced by percussionist Paolo Vinaccia, an Italian drummer (born 1954), who since 1980 has lived in Norway, and has made a remarkable difference to countless pop/​rock/​jazz recording sessions, including with guitarist Terje Rypdal and bassist Arild Andersen. Vinaccia induces a polyrhythmic complexity by gradually moving the focus somewhat from 2/​4 to 4/​4, and adding rhythmic gestures that might be approved of, although possibly in different ways, by folk and rock enthusiasts alike. Finally, the overall structure of Robertson’s song and the vocals is amply taken care of by Blondie Chaplin, a South African musician (born 1951) who became a vocalist for The Beach Boys in the early 1970s, was a member of the late 1980s reconfiguration of The Band, and has toured with The Rolling Stones on a number of occasions.

104   Geography In all, Bjørgum’s rag/​slått and the assembly of musicians he has gathered bear remarkable witness to his cosmopolitan agency; the musical paths of these individuals evince an almost infinite number of connections and musical crossroads. Musically, one may say, it is virtually as though he has unified his soul with his since long-​lost forefather, the enigmatic master fiddler Tarjei Faremo, from Rysstad in Setesdal; in a ghostly manner having arisen from the cemeteries of New Orleans or from the city’s Cajun environs, and returned home through the complex entanglements and mediations of twentieth-​ century popular music history, and by way of Bjørgum’s custody for the music of Hank Williams, The Rolling Stones, and The Band.39

“Routes” of the Twenty-​First Century In the case of Bjørgum, there is an incentive, a willingness to cross borders, and not to be framed one-​sidedly within the expectations that come with the ideas of the “rootedness” of Setesdal performance. It is an inclination to ask where this music stands in the contemporary world—​not just in relation to the past or to valley or possible neighboring valleys in Norway (or in relation to imagined limitations of “folk” or “tradition”)—​but in the world at large. This in no way indicates that he does not see the value of his performance as based in locality and as learned and transmitted from his musical forefathers. It seems credible to follow Clifford’s argument that local spaces (that is, communities) gain their significance through contact and travel, rather than simply through dwellings in place, that the connectedness and entanglements of “routes” may forestall “roots.” In fact, popular music history in Norway might very well be written from such a perspective. The Pussycats, from Tromsø, Northern Norway, made their way through a Nordic touring circuit, television appearance, and recording in Sweden to become the opening act for The Rolling Stones in Scandinavia in 1965, in turn becoming the first Norwegian band to record an “internationally sounding” LP in London, at PYE Studios, in 1966 (Olsen 1998). Norwegian popular music history is replete with such examples—​too many for this short chapter. Others are the case of guitarist Rune Walle from Bergen, Norway, becoming a member of the American country–​rock band The Ozark Mountain Daredevils in the 1970s; a-​ha recording for American Warner Bros. in the 1980s; the more recent global success of the songwriting team Stargate, writing for the likes of Beyoncé and Rihanna. And, of course, this story goes further back: Ole Bull traveled incessantly, and was the one who placed Myllaren (1801–​1872) on the concert stage (initiating the “folk scene” in Norway); Grieg traveled relentlessly, not wanting to stay in Bergen for “too long” and classifying himself a “cosmopolitan” in 1889 (Weisethaunet 2011, 73, 57); Hamsun drove a streetcar in Chicago in the 1880s; whereas Ibsen was equally cultured from “the outside”—​living in Italy and Germany for twenty-​seven years. It might equally be argued that the marketing concept of “world music” and the travels of the likes of Lindley and Kaiser have opened up new “routes,” with the exception

Roots, Routes, and Cosmopolitanism    105 that it should no longer be so safe to delineate who the “natives” or the “explorers” are. As Appadurai (1988, 36) pointed out a quarter of a century ago, “natives are immobilized by their belonging to a place” essentially through a “language of incarceration.” Feld (2000, 153) tidily summed up the discourse on “world music” as being ideologically divided: as “forged out of narratives equally anxious and celebratory about the world—​and the music—​of world music.” Nevertheless, general categories—​such as “world music,” “fusion,” “folk,” or “tradition”—​tell us nothing substantive about the musical qualities or the actual musical experiences taking place in various sound spaces, within or across borders.40 In this sense, the question of “roots” versus “routes” illuminates the complexity of such entanglements. The significance of place and ideas of origin informs travels and “routes” to the extent that the dualism of such connections cannot be effaced by choosing one in favor of the other, or in the terms of Casey (1993, 297), “it is the remembering body that, concluding a time-​consuming but timely and well-​timed journey, brings us back into place.” In the case of the Hellbillies, their contribution to Norwegian popular music is also twofold. For instance, one might make the case that the band members, and in particular guitarist Lars Haavard Haugen, possess a stylistic-​aesthetic performance competency mostly unheard in 1960s or 1970s appropriations of American country or rock in Norway. In short, it was a while before Norwegian musicians had fully learned the styles of Nashville or Austin in country, rock, or blues terms of musicianship. In the twenty-​first century, it has become harder to tell a Norwegian musician from an American. This might be viewed as one effect of a more globalized musical world. On the other hand, the Hellbillies have indigenized their American musical influences by way of their poetic and creative uses of the Norwegian language, in turn opening up new roads for many other artists, including Odd Nordstoga and Stein Torleif Bjella (also using inland dialects) and numerous others. In 1974–​75, it was the left-​wing-​oriented Vømmøl Spellmannslag—​in part, viewing American culture and politics as their antithesis—​who moved several Norwegian rock artists, including Åge Aleksandersen, Stavangerensemblet, and others, to start using the Norwegian language and local dialects rather than English in Norwegian pop/​rock lyrics. To Norwegian readers, it might perhaps be ironic, then, to learn (as I discovered through doing the research for this chapter) that Vømmøl Spellmannslag’s bass player, Leiv Prestvik, is in fact the second cousin of Jackson Browne’s mother (several of their common relatives are pictured in figure 4.1, on page 94).41 In the case of Bjørgum/​Hank, is there a backdrop to their musical amalgamation across the continents? In short, may such “routes” destroy the “roots” of the Setesdal spel/​play, and delimit or weaken (the borders of) “tradition”? Would “tradition” possibly be better “preserved” in isolation? It seems tempting to follow Gilroy (1993) in his understanding of diasporic “tradition” in this context, arguing that “[t]‌radition can be seen to be a process rather than an end, and is used … neither to identify a lost past nor to name a culture of compensation that would restore access to it” (quoted in Clifford 1997, 268). “Routes,” in this sense, does not eliminate concepts of local knowledge or the agency of bearers of “tradition,” but becomes “a network of partially connected histories” (1997, 268).

106   Geography In Setesdal, the interest in spel is probably greater now, well into the new millennium, than was the case, for instance, in the 1970s or 1980s, including among younger members of society. But such interests are not equally shared among the population in Setesdal, or in other Norwegian rural or urban areas. Bjørgum’s successor, or protégé if you like, came to him not as a “prodigal son” but completely out of the blue. Hallvard T. Bjørgum does not have any children; however, Swede Daniel Sandén-​Warg (born 1977 in Østersund, Sweden) had picked up a cassette with Setesdal-​spel, Klunkaren (Sylvartun 1985), recorded by Hallvard T. Bjørgum and his father Torleiv H. Bjørgum. It was an experience so transforming that it completely changed his life, enough to leave his Stratocaster and musical hero Jimi Hendrix behind to devote himself fully to Setesdal-​spel and later studies with Bjørgum: “Daniel is the best student I ever had,” Hallvard T. Bjørgum concludes.42 Daniel has lived in the valley for almost twenty years now, having recorded extensively and also toured the country (including with the very indigenous folk-​country-​ rock band of Odd Nordstoga), but for the most part he has devoted himself to the “traditional” material. Verbally, Daniel expresses himself in the very characteristic Setesdal dialect, more persuasively than probably any of his local contemporaries. In this sense, “roots” seem to persist through new and unforeseen “routes.”

Notes 1. Interview with author, October 10, 2012. 2. See, for instance, Lilliestam 2013 on how Swedish rock emerged under the influence of a complex web of local and transcultural musical influences. 3. The condition of disaporic experiences is a recurring theme of many of Rushdie’s novels, including Grimus (1996), Midnight’s Children (1995), and The Ground Beneath Her Feet (2000). 4. As told by Jackson Browne (interview, Bergen, 2009; public interview conducted by Bård Ose and Finn Tokvam, Radisson Hotel Norge, Bergen, Bergenfest, May 1, 2009). 5. Browne’s grandmother, Margareth Haugen, came from Gaupne in Luster, in Sogn og Fjordane, and his grandfather, Jens Dahl, was from Nærøy, in Nord-​Trøndelag (see figure 4.1). The ancestry on his father’s side is a combination of Irish and English lineages. 6. Other renown musicians of Norwegian-​ American heritage include Peggy Lee, Joni Mitchell, Grace Slick, Lynn Anderson, Gwen Stefani, Iggy Pop, Beck, Tom Waits, Chet Baker, and Pat Metheny, to name a few. 7. Rather to the contrary, borders are more controlled in the twenty-​first century than at any time prior in history. 8. Public interview conducted by Bård Ose and Finn Tokvam, Radisson Hotel Norge, Bergen, Bergenfest, May 1, 2009. A detailed account of the emigration from Sogn to America is given in Årbok for Sogn 1994 [Yearbook for Sogn 1994]. 9. In a survey addressing the changing relations between class, education, and cultural tastes in Norway, Gripsrud et al. (2011, 512) point out that “distinction lives on, precisely in the fine-​tuned combinations of generous or omnivore inclusiveness, on the one hand, and the use of quite sharp distinctions and hierarchies within genres and forms that are no longer condemned: Hank Williams is fine, and maybe Dolly Parton on a good day, but most country ​music singers are not.”

Roots, Routes, and Cosmopolitanism    107 10. This is a prize given by Noregs Mållag, an organization founded in 1906, working for the promotion of Norwegian nynorsk (New Norwegian), one of the two official written standards of the Norwegian language. 11. Sylspente Boots (Spinner Records 1992). 12. Personal interview, October 15, 2012. 13. The other original members of the Hellbillies are Arne Moslåtten (accordion and flutes), Bjørn Gunnar Sando (drums), Arne Henry Sandum (bass), and a few shifting keyboard players. 14. Personal interview, October 15, 2012. 15. Hajacos plays on many of Garth Brooks’s records, and is one of the most used and respected musicians in the international country music industry. He has also played with the Hellbillies in Norway on several occasions. 16. Browne co-​wrote the Eagles’ first single release “Take it Easy” with Glenn Frey, released in 1972, and Souther has co-​written several of the Eagles’ major hits. 17. From the album by John David Souther, Black Rose (Asylum 1976). 18. Børsheim (born 1982) is close to local Norwegian fiddle traditions, but she has also learned and studied traditional music in Scotland, and has collaborated with many musicians from different genres. 19. Lindley has recorded extensively with other musicians, including with Ry Cooder, Warren Zevon, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, Taj Mahal, and Rod Stewart, to mention just a few. And both he and Cooder became, in particular, widely known owing to their musical contribution to the movie soundtracks of Paris Texas (1989), Alamo Bay (1985), and Long Riders (1980). 20. Among other things, a solo album by Madagascarian guitarist D’Gary came out of these recording sessions. 21. Reiersrud is a very versatile musician, whose career has been much influenced by his travels, in the United States, Africa, and Asia (including performing on stage with Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, Junior Welsh, and Stevie Ray Vaughan in Chicago, at the age of 18!), and a significant contributor to the Danko/​Fjeld/​Andersen recordings and tours as well. 22. From liner notes, The Sweet Sunny North:  Henry Kaiser & David Lindley in Norway (Shanachie 1994): 4. 23. Harrison, in liner notes, The Sweet Sunny North: Henry Kaiser & David Lindley in Norway (Shanachie 1994): 27. 24. The area is especially renown for the gangar dance tunes, in duple meter. Setesdal consists of the municipalities Bykle, Valle, Bygland, Iveland, and Evje og Hornnes, and runs from Haukeligrend in the north, bordering Telemark. The city of Arendal is located in the south of Aust-​Agder county. 25. The terms “Harding fiddle” and “Hardanger fiddle” are commonly used as synonyms. 26. The Norwegian Traditional Music and Dance Competition that has been arranged since 1923, a contest that often counts more than one thousand musicians. 27. Liner notes, The Sweet Sunny North: 14. 28. Personal interview, February 13, 2013. 29. Connerton (1989) outlines how memory processes are both individual and collective; transmitted and recollected as “traditions” of “social memory” and “bodily practices.” 30. Interview with author, February 12, 2013. 31. For this recording, “Peace will Come,” in which Williams addresses the leaders of the world, Harding Hank also consulted Williams biographer Colin Escott “to get  all the details right.”

108   Geography 32. The connections between Norway and the Orkney Islands, with Norwegian settlements beginning at the end of the eighth century, are well documented. 33. Interview with author, February 13, 2013. 34. I am using the term “cosmopolitanism” to refer to the view of “a citizen of the world,” cf. Appiah’s (2007) claim that we often concentrate too much on difference vs. the shared grounds of humanity. 35. See, for instance, Marcus 1975. 36. Personal interview, December 14, 2011. 37. “Tarkjell retta seg med kvart og kom paa godt lag. Han kom paa Ovlag. Han sette Rupl i heile huset. Me gaadde aldri aat, so var Stoga full av folk. Men daa vart Spilet ovbyrja. Det øya og kvein i kvar ei Sud. Det var ei Gru aa høyra. Aanond Neset tok fela av han. Men ho let Slaatten like godt. Alle var vordstøkte. Dei saag fela med ho laag paa Bordet og let” (Skar 1903, 153). 38. A transcribed version of the slått, as performed by Torleiv Bjørgum in 1946, is found in Gurvin 1959, 90. 39. It has not been proved that Norwegian traditional music has influenced folk music practices in America to any great extent. Laura Ellestad is writing a Ph.D. thesis (at the Norwegian Academy of Music), in which she has documented continuation of Norwegian folk music traditions in America, noting the performances of Eilev Smedal (1889–​1938) and others. Moreover, a large number of Harding fiddles have been registered in North America, and the Helland Brothers (Knut and Gunnar G.  Helland) emigrated from Telemark in 1901, in order to become renowned fiddlemakers in Wisconsin, between 1905 and 1927 (Aksdal 2009). 40. This was also pointed out by music critic, the late Robert Palmer (1991), in the liner notes to the album Danko/​Fjeld/​Andersen (Ryko 1991), in which Hallvard Bjørgum contributed with a solo performance of another rammeslått, Domedagsslåtten (Judgement Day): “In America, ‘roots music’ is becoming a generic’ catch-​all, used by critics and the record industry to label anything from blues to folk to traditionally-​based rock and roll. This album neatly eludes category, but it has a great deal to do with musical roots, American and otherwise.” 41. Today, Prestvik admits that their music was definitely much influenced by American and British popular music. At the same time, he shared with Jackson Browne a stance against parts of American imperialistic foreign politics in the 1970s and 1980s (personal interview, November 15, 2013). 42. Interview with author, February 24, 2013.

References Works Cited Aksdal, B. 2009. Hardingfela:  Felemakerne og instrumentets utvikling. Trondheim:  Tapir Akademisk Forlag. Appadurai, A. 1988. “Putting Hierarchy in Its Place.” Cultural Anthropology 3(1): 36–​49. Appadurai, A., ed. 2001. Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Appiah, K. 2007. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton.

Roots, Routes, and Cosmopolitanism    109 Berkaak, O. A. 1996. “Om ‘norsk nerk’ og ‘virtuelle selv’. Noen refleksjoner omkring kulturarv og formidlingsideologier.” Norsklæreren 4: 5–​14. Born, G., ed. 2013. Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Casey, E. 1993. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-​World. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Clifford, J. 1997. Routes:  Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Connerton, P. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Featherstone, M., ed. 1990. Global Culture:  Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity. London:Sage. Feld, S. 1996. “Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea.” In Senses of Place, ed. S. Feld and K. Basso, 91–​135. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Feld, S. 2000. “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music.” Public Culture 12(1): 145–​171. Gilroy, P. 1993. The Black Atlantic:  Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gripsrud, J., J. Hovden, and H. Moe. 2011. “Changing Relations: Class, Education and Cultural Capital.” Poetics 39: 507–​529. Gurvin, O., ed. 1959. Norsk Folkemusikk. Serie 1.  Hardingfeleslåttar. Band II. Oslo: Univsersitetsforlaget. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-​Network-​Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Levy, M. 1974. Den stærke slått. Höjbjerg: Wormianum. Lilliestam, L. 2013. Rock på svenska: från Little Gerhard till Laleh. Göteborg: Bo Ejeby Förlag. Lomax, A. 1968. Folk Song Style and Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Lovoll, O. 2010. Norwegian Newspapers in America. Connecting Norway and the New Land. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press. Lyotard, J.-​F. 1979. La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Editions de minuit. Marcus, G. 1975. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. New York: E.P. Dutton. Olsen, P. K. 1998. Det store popeventyret. Pussycats og norsk rock i 60-​åra. Oslo: J.W. Cappelens forlag. Palmer, R. 1991. Liner notes. Danko/​Fjeld/​Andersen CD, Rykodisc. Rushdie, S. 1995. Midnight’s Children. London: Vintage. Rushdie, S. 1996. Grimus. London: Vintage. Rushdie, S. 2000. The Ground Beneath Her Feet. London: Vintage Skar, J. 1903. Gamalt or Sætesdal. Kristiania: Eige forlag, Johansen and Nielsens prenteverk. Small, C. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Weisethaunet, H. 2007. “Historiography and Complexities: Why is Music ‘National’?” Popular Music History 2(2): 169–​199. Weisethaunet, H. 2011. “Music and National Identity: Grieg and Beyond.” In Music and Identity in Norway and Beyond. Essays Commemorating Edvard Grieg the Humanist, ed. T. Solomon, 41–​85. Oslo: Fagbokforlaget. Weisethaunet, H., and U. Lindberg. 2010. “Authenticity Revisited:  The Rock Critic and the Changing Real.” Popular Music and Society 33(4): 465–​485.

110   Geography Interviews Jackson Browne, interview by Bård Ose and Finn Tokvam, May 5, 2009. Hallvard Bjørgum, interview by Hans Weisethaunet, February 11, 12, and 13, 2013. Aslag Haugen, interview by Hans Weisethaunet, October 10, 2012. Lars Haavard Haugen, interview by Hans Weisethaunet, October 15, 2012. Leiv Prestvik, interview by Hans Weisethaunet, November 15, 2013. Robbie Robertson, interview by Hans Weisethaunet, December 14, 2012. Daniel Sandén-​Warg, interview by Hans Weisethaunet, February 24, 2013.

Discography The Band. 1969. The Band. Capitol Records. Bjørgum, Hallvard T., and Co. 2003. Free Field. Sylvartun. Bjørgum, Hallvard T., Bjørgum and Co. 2009. Peace Will Come. Blue Mood. Bjørgum, Torleiv H., and Hallvard T. Bjørgum. 1985. Klunkaren. Sylvartun. Bjørgum, Torleiv H., and Hallvard T. Bjørgum. 1990. Skjoldmøyslaget:  Faremoslåttar frå Setesdal. Sylvartun. Danko/​Fjeld/​Andersen. 1991. Danko/​Fjeld/​Andersen. Rykodisc. Hellbillies. 1992. Sylspente Boots. Spinner Records. Hellbillies. 2001. Urban Twang. Wea. Kaiser, Henry, and David Lindley. 1992–​96. A World Out Of Time. Vol. 1: Henry Kaiser & David Lindley In Madagascar. Shanachie; Vol. 2: Henry Kaiser & David Lindley In Madagascar. Shanachie. Kaiser, Henry, and David Lindley. 1994–​96. The Sweet Sunny North. Vol. 1:  Henry Kaiser & David Lindley in Norway. Shanachie; Vol. 2: Henry Kaiser & David Lindley in Norway. Shanachie. The Pussycats. 1966. Psst! Psst!. Polydor. Souther, John David. 1976. Black Rose. Asylum. Stedje, Olav. 1981. Ta meg med. Philips, Norway.

Chapter 5

F rom the Faroe s to the World  Stag e Joshua Green

The Faroe Islands are a small archipelago nation of about 49,000 inhabitants situated in the North Atlantic, between Iceland, Scotland, and Norway. Though legally defined as a “self-​governing national community within the kingdom of Denmark” (Nauerby 1996, 61), since settling the islands in the tenth century, the Faroese have developed their own distinct language and culture. Since the 1980s, thanks especially to television, tourism, and the Internet, these islands have become increasingly well-​known globally, and musicians are beginning to play a considerable role in growing their islands’ visibility abroad. Though no Faroese musicians have yet reached the level of international stardom enjoyed by some of their Icelandic neighbors like Björk and Sigur Rós, following what some have described as an explosion of or “youth revolution” in locally produced Faroese popular music in the 1990s and early 2000s (Green 2013, 211–​212), a number of the islands’ musicians have established themselves as internationally touring musicians. Týr, Eivør, and Teitur, in particular, have gone some way toward making a name for Faroese music abroad; Teitur was even initially signed to Universal Music; one of the “big three” record companies. Despite this, the fact remains that the Faroes are situated, as one musician suggested, “in the middle of nowhere … away from everything” (Green 2013, 211). How does such music find a place in a globalizing world? In short, this chapter argues that the Faroese case points to a growing importance for the small languages and cultures of the “Nordic peripheries” as symbolic resources in the globalized music market. In this process, barriers presented by remoteness are increasingly being circumvented by engagement with transnational institutions and networks of expertise and capital. The chapter further contributes to the broader Nordic popular music literature on the significance of place-​based identities in music (e.g., Dibben 2009 and van den Berg 2012). By illustrating how processes related to the institutionalization and commodification of music are unfolding in the Faroes, this chapter also allows for a regional comparison of these two trends (see Aggestam 2007; Sigurðardóttir and Young 2011; and Johansson 2013).

112   Geography The first section draws on conceptions espoused by Chartier, Schram, and others to provide a theoretical basis that informs the later sections’ analysis of some of the strategies employed by the bands Hamferð and Týr. These two bands serve as case studies of the increasingly transnational character of the Faroese music scene. This section also contextualizes the chapter’s specifically Faroese contribution within an ongoing discussion in recent writing on the relationship between tourism, exoticism, and Nordic (especially Icelandic) culture and music. The second section examines Faroese music’s emergent place in a globalizing world in concrete and practical terms, illustrating how one Faroese band, Hamferð, engages in transnational networks and flows of capital. The third and fourth sections extend this analysis to the musical and aesthetic choices that Hamferð and Týr make in their efforts to push the islands’ music scene onto the world stage. Speaking to the first section’s comments on the interplay of foreign and local constructions of place, these sections argue that Faroese musicians’ strategies include especially the explicit targeting of international audiences, even to the extent of arguably engaging in self-​exoticization.

Listener-​Tourists and Exoticism Schram’s appropriation and substitution of Edward Said’s “orientialism” for his term “borealism” points to the complex of historic and contemporary discourses and cultural productions that have framed the north as a location of exotic Otherness (Schram 2011, 106). In line with Schram’s assertion that borealism has entailed even the occasional internalization of images of the self as the Other (106–​107), I will argue that musicians are often actively involved, in concert with foreigners, in the co-​construction of images of the Faroes and Faroese music as exotic. At its base, this co-​construction of the exotic concerns those ways in which actual music practice is shaped by Faroese musicians’ ideas about how their music will be received internationally. Analysis of the aforementioned interplay between local and foreign constructions of place-​based identities, which I call “co-​construction” as a shorthand, is reasonably well established in recent literature on Nordic culture and music (e.g., Jakobsson 2009 and Ísleifsson 2011). Some of this work examines how touristic, journalistic, and other popular depictions of Nordic places, their peoples, and musics, produced locally and in foreign countries, contribute to far-​reaching circuits of discourses and images that frequently feed into one another (Neijmann 2011; Oslund 2011; and Kjartansdóttir 2011). Considering this, music and writing from and about, for instance, Iceland (the Faroes’ closest Nordic analogue) can be seen as contributing to what Chartier calls “the idea of Iceland”: [The idea of Iceland] must be understood, analyzed, and interpreted as a broad and complex combination of internal discourse (from Icelanders about themselves), external discourse (from foreigners about Iceland), and a variety of elements taken

From the Faroes to the World Stage    113 from pre-​existing discourses (insularity, the North, Scandinavia, and many others) to which Iceland may be linked. (Chartier 2011, 513)

Discussion of the relationship between such discursive and visual constructions and Iceland’s music also abound in recent writing. Cases in point include Dibben’s (2009) commentary on the conflation of nation with nature in Icelandic music and music videos, van den Berg’s (2012, 35–​36) reflections on perceptions of the idiosyncrasy of Iceland’s music and musicians, and work by Prior (2015, 94–​95) and Bogason (2012), who have critiqued some of the more simplistic but pervasive borealistic and romantic narratives surrounding the Icelandic scene that have proliferated over the last decade. Much writing about the Iceland situation find parallels in the Faroese, therefore this chapter takes steps toward elucidating Faroese music’s role in the construction of “the idea of the Faroe Islands.” It is critical at this juncture to point out that the concepts introduced thus far—​borealism and the broader notion of co-​constructed place-​based identities—​inform the following discussion of Faroese music precisely because they speak to the increasingly interconnected and transnational milieu in which much of the islands’ music is now made. Significantly, there lay an obvious parallel between Urry’s (2002) classic concept of the tourist gaze and borealism: the objects both of the tourist gaze and of borealism are defined by contrast, alternatively implicit and explicit, to their imagined opposites. More specifically, touristic experience and the exotic are necessarily locked in dialectic relationships with their respective negative terms—​that is, nontourist everyday experience and the mundane (i.e., non-​northern1). Even accepting this, however, how might Urry’s and Schram’s complementary concepts inform an examination of the production and dissemination of Faroese popular music? Though Urry asserts that music is but one means of constructing the tourist gaze (2002, 3), it is useful to think of the ways in which music and musicians are also socially organized and constructed through difference. Music consumers around the world can be conceived as virtual tourists in that they, too, are frequently seeking types of difference packaged in appealing and recognizable enough forms. And this “listener as tourist” analogy has precedents in both the realm of music promotion and in academic literature on music and travel.2 Regarding consuming “worldly music,” for instance, Keir Keightley (2011, 117) describes how, by the 1960s, bossa nova eventually “successfully entered a large, adult market for music that promised a vicarious, virtual voyage around the world.” Similarly, Connell and Gibson (2004, 20) have described at length how “music in a variety of forms has provided metaphors for being elsewhere,” and, more specifically, “how idealized places and essentialized identities have been produced and reinforced through visual and musical texts [which] have created vicarious tours, through music, to distant, exotic places” (2). So, it is with such ideas of aural tourism (Cosgrove 1988) and “listener-​tourists” in mind that we can question the role that language and other elements of place-​based identities might play in connoting difference for music consumers. It is also necessary, though, to acknowledge that both Schram’s and Urry’s constructions are essentially predicated on the same axiom, previously articulated by Dean MacCannell (1999, 3): for moderns, and modern tourists especially,

114   Geography “reality and authenticity are thought to be elsewhere.” For that reason, a central motivator of tourism and, I argue, of much of contemporary music consumption, remains a search for and persistent concern with authenticity (1999, 3). In both tourism and music, then, this search for difference and authenticity “elsewhere” implies and perhaps sometimes even engenders processes of Othering, which define places, people, and their music as exotic. And there has been no shortage of foreign commentators engaged in framing the Faroes as exotic and even primitive. After anti-​whaling protests in the 1980s, for instance, the Faroese were often accused of being uncivilized, barbaric, and thoroughly unmodern (Nauerby 1996, 162–​163). However, foreigners more commonly tend to romanticize the Faroes as exotic and mythical. A 2007 Australian Broadcasting Corporation program, for instance, described the Faroes as quaint, old-​fashioned, and unequivocally Other: “Remote and intriguing, they look like something out of a Norse fairy tale. People live in log houses with turf rooves, speak an ancient Viking language and delight in dressing up in traditional costume and singing Norse ballads” (Foreign Correspondent 2007). Similarly, a 2007 New York Times article titled “Into the Mystical Unreal Reality of the Faroe Islands” proclaimed that “the islands have stayed essentially an ancient place” (Metcalf 2007). Comparable exoticizing descriptions continue to proliferate, especially in travel writing: a 2010 blog article on Fairytale Destinations proclaims “The Lord of the Rings scenery of Faroe Islands truly

Figure 5.1  Horses at Kirkjubøur, Faroe Islands, 2011

From the Faroes to the World Stage    115 makes you believe the archipelago is inhabited by hobbits and elves… . The islands’ magical and mysterious scenery seems to be much closer to the fantasy world than to reality” (Dorotix 2010) (­figure 5.1). Viewed through the lens of borealism, common to all these accounts are the processes of essentialist Othering, whereby the Faroes are contrasted, even if implicitly, to more southerly and populous locales. Further, the New York Times and Australian television quotes especially can be seen as examples of how professionals shape the tourist gaze and influence perceptions of the Faroes as exotic. However, descriptions by foreigners constitute only one half of the co-​construction of Faroese exoticism. The other half, which arguably sometimes amounts to self-​exoticization, will be explored specifically with regard to Faroese music. In short, on the one hand, foreigners (listener-​tourists) are seeking authenticity and the exotic elsewhere, and many are, in turn, producing and reinforcing narratives and descriptions of the islands and their music as exotic. On the other hand, some island musicians recognize and accept the common foreign conception of the Faroes as exotic and consequently engage in varying degrees of self-​ exoticization. Before returning to the issue of the co-​construction of Faroese music as exotic, though, I will first illustrate the increasingly transnational character of Faroese music to call attention to the degree to which island musicians are engaging with off-​ island professional music networks and institutions. This discussion is essential to understanding what I argue to be a corollary of such transnational engagement: the growth of a local concern with creating music that explicitly targets international audiences.

Transnational Connections: Hamferð and G! Festival Given the genre’s popularity in the islands and its transnational history (Wallach, Berger, and Greene 2011), metal music provides an illustrative case for examining Faroese musicians’ engagement with international networks. Kahn-​Harris (2011) has shown how the global extreme metal scene has seen a shift from a period of relative egalitarianism in the 1980s to one characterized by increasing amounts of economic capital in the 1990s and 2000s. Within the global metal landscape, he suggests, “the support of economically powerful institutions remains essential” (207). Such developments have significantly impacted metal’s production and dissemination globally, including in the Faroes. The case of Hamferð illustrates this point well. Hamferð’s first gig, at the Faroese national level of the 2008 Global Battle of the Bands (GBOB), is indicative of the degree to which the band would become involved in and benefit from transnational networks and the exposure they offer. Based in London, GBOB is an annual worldwide competition for the prize of a US$100, 000 “band development package” (see https://​web.archive.org/​web/​20120826110253/​http://​gbob.com/​

116   Geography about). GBOB’s judges have included representatives of major recording companies such as Virgin and Universal and of Grammy-​winning producers. The event relies partly on multinational corporate cooperation, including from MTV and Fujifilm. Hamferð’s participation in this global contest highlights the range of opportunities afforded to Faroese musicians who engage with such transnational connections, and their later career reinforces the significance of these connections. Later in 2008, Theodor Kapnas joined as Hamferð’s second guitarist. In 2009, while pursuing his sound-​ engineering degree at Sweden’s Karlstad University, Kapnas and singer, Jón Hansen, recorded vocals for their demo at the university’s studio. Evidently, Kapnas’s expertise and access to quality studio equipment in Sweden were invaluable resources: the Karlstad demo quickly gained popularity back in the Faroes, becoming a hit on the islands’ national radio station. By January 2010, the band had won another music competition, Sement, and those winnings opened up new opportunities to engage with transnational networks. Specifically, they won a week of time at a Faroese studio and performances at the islands’ biggest music festivals, G! Festival and Summarfestivalur. The studio time proved instrumental for the band’s expansion beyond the Faroes, and Hamferð immediately began to draw upon a series of off-​island connections, outsourcing both technical expertise and equipment. Taking advantage of the studio time, they recorded most of the album in the Faroes with Kapnas. However, significantly, the band hired New York–​based sound engineer Greg Tomao to produce their guitar sound. Finally, Kapnas again met with vocalist Hansen at the university studio to record the vocals and mix the album. This EP, Vilst Er Síðsta Fet, was released in December 2010 through the Faroese recording company Tutl, as well as on iTunes. The sorts of movements of people and sound recordings between countries and continents during Hamferð’s production are not uncommon for Faroese musicians. However, it becomes possible to illustrate a better picture of the off-​island networks that Faroese musicians engage with by examining the significance of Hamferð’s other Sement prize, the festival performance slots. Impressively, attendance at G! Festival and Summarfestivalur has exceeded 10,000 (one-​fifth of the Faroese population). However, more relevant to the transnational theme at hand is that G! Fest is explicitly conceived of by its organizers as a showcase for the Faroes’ musicians to the world. As festival founder Jón Tyril explained to me, “it is a Faroese event, and the idea when we started, and the same idea is applicable still, was to get some of the best Faroese artists, showcase them, and give them a place where they can play.” Simultaneously, the festival aims to bring international artists to the islands, a place often neglected by touring bands. As Tyril continued, “the other part is to bring some new stuff in, that Faroese musicians can, and Faroese audiences can, listen to and ya know get inspired by… . [W]‌e wanted to make it international and have international artists.” Perhaps most significantly, these two goals of G! Fest are both conceived as part of a broader strategy of fostering connections between the Faroes and the world. In Tyril’s words, G! Fest affords Faroese audiences and musicians an opportunity to “interact and just to become a part of the music world, in some way.” Facilitating such interaction is an essential function of the festival because, as Tyril suggests:

From the Faroes to the World Stage    117 [I]‌n many ways, the Faroes hasn’t been a part of the world, and still isn’t in many ways … but the music tradition is really strong, and nobody knew about Faroese music until recently. And, yeah, one part of the vision of G! is just to connect the Faroes, the musical scene in the Faroes to the world. And that means first to our neighbours like Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, U.K.3

Notably, this festival, organized with the express purpose of encouraging musical links and exchanges, has been supported by an intergovernmental organization that most embodies the ideals of regional transnational connection: the Nordic Council. G! Fest has received as much as 250,000 Danish krone from the Nordic Culture Fund. However, returning to Hamferð’s experience there reveals how G! Fest functions as a hub of transnational connections for Faroese bands looking to play abroad. Following their 2010 performance at G! Fest, Hamferð received a positive review from Kerrang!, the U.K.-​based “world’s biggest selling weekly rock magazine” (see http://​kerrang.com). Following a 2011 G! Fest performance, Hamferð was invited to play the renowned showcase Iceland Airwaves Festival, in Reykjavik; G! Fest and the larger Iceland Airwaves Festival regularly send local artists to the each other’s festivals. Both of these developments point to the festival’s growing importance as a site of international exposure and networking for Faroese musicians. Hamferð’s Kerrang! review is also suggestive of G! Fest’s increasing visibility in the regional music scene. Recently, G! Fest has featured in other prominent U.K. media outlets, including The Guardian and Wired UK, and in 2012, G! Fest appeared on Billboard.biz, the online industry news arm of Billboard magazine. That year, an impressive array of national radio correspondents (Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, and Austria) and national publications (Belgium, the Netherlands, and U.K.) were also present, including British music industry reporters, Complete Music Update (Tyler 2012). Significantly, Billboard.biz stressed the growth of G! Fest as an emergent node in the European music industry, a place where new talent is scouted in order to be “exported” and developed around the continent. In 2012, there were festival representatives from Germany (Reeperbahn), Denmark (SPOT), and Austria (Waves), as well as Iceland Airwaves, all seeking new Faroese acts to book (Tyler 2012). European recording company employees turned up with similar intentions and signed two Faroese acts (Tyler 2012). Further, the aforementioned cooperative (or bipartite) aspect of the co-​ construction of the exotic and, indeed, MacCannell’s suggestion that modern tourists often imagine reality and authenticity to be elsewhere (1999, 3), arguably speak to the motivations behind such scouting efforts at Nordic festivals. More specifically, in line with Urry’s notion of the tourist gaze being “constructed in relationship to its opposite, to non-​tourist forms of social experience and consciousness” (2002, 1–​2), scouts may take interest in the perceived “Nordicness” of festival artists: some attend Iceland Airwaves, for instance, looking to recruit specifically Nordic artists to perform at international festivals specializing in showcasing Nordic music to non-​Nordic audiences, as in the case of Dutch festival, Nordic Delight, which scouted Airwaves in 2013.4

118   Geography The 2012 festival also signaled a shift in how G! Fest acts as a locus of international attention:  that year marked the first time that G! Fest was organized in cooperation with the islands’ recording company, Tutl, and the Faroese government in the partnership, FAME (the Faroese Alliance for Music Export). FAME was involved in organizing music-​ business–​ oriented events around the festival, including networking sessions intended to bring together international and Faroese industry professionals (MacCannell 1999, 1–​2). FAME, via government funding, also offers increased support for Faroese artists to tour abroad (Geere 2012). The creation of FAME mirrors the founding of organizations, such as Music Export Norway and Iceland Music Export, which have recently become significant players in the Nordic music scene. Considered in its regional context, then, FAME’s creation points to transnational currents of ideas about the commodification of music as an exportable resource, and to the perceived utility of such alliances in supporting a nation’s musicians. Simultaneously, FAME represents both the partial institutionalization of the Faroese music scene and the tacit acknowledgment by the islands’ government that music is a resource worthy of investment. FAME also constitutes a concrete manifestation of founder Jón Tyril’s ideal of connecting the Faroes to the world. Significantly, Faroese artists often necessarily rely on local and transnational financial support, considering that transport to and from the Faroes can be prohibitively expensive. For instance, international tours are regularly supported by Norðurlandahúsið, the Faroese Nordic House. Norðurlandahúsið itself is a cultural house and venue in the Faroese capital, Tórshavn, but it also administers funds for artistic endeavors. The transnational factor at work here is that the annual operating budget for Norðurlandahúsið is largely provided by the Nordic Council of Ministers: 8% of the budget is furnished by the Faroese government, and the remaining 92% comes from the Nordic Council of Ministers (see www.nlh.fo/​Default.aspx?pageid=13314). Access to specifically Nordic monies has become an essential boon for some, and Hamferð is again instructive in this regard as a final example of how flows of international capital directly impact Faroese music’s circulation abroad. In short, in the summer of 2012, Hamferð received some funding from Norðurlandahúsið (and elsewhere) to travel to Germany for a performance at Wacken. Wacken Open Air bills itself as the largest open-​air metal festival in the world (see http://​ wacken.com/​), and over 70,000 fans regularly attend. Recently, the festival has also taken a more active role in engaging the global community of metal fans. Since 2004, Wacken has organized a battle-​of-​the-​bands–​style competition, Metal Battle, which has become increasingly global in its scope. In 2012, participants from twenty-​nine countries faced off for prizes of various equipment and instruments, and a worldwide record deal with the prominent German recording company Nuclear Blast (“the world’s biggest independent heavy metal label”; see www.nuclearblast.de/​en/​). The year 2012 also marked the first instance in which the Faroes organized their own Wacken competition, which Hamferð won. Partly supported by Norðurlandahúsið, the band then competed at Wacken that August, and won first place in the worldwide competition, along with the offer of a global record deal. Significantly, the fact that Hamferð ultimately decided

From the Faroes to the World Stage    119 to turn down that record deal following a round of negotiations arguably speaks to how business savvy the group had become since their inception. They also weren’t the first Faroese musicians to think critically about major record deals: by this time, Teitur and the members of Týr had also either parted ways with, or switched between, major recording companies prior to Hamferð’s win at Wacken. With all these major steppingstones in place, the foundation was laid for Hamferð to continue their upward trajectory: they have since been on multiple European tours with well-​established metal bands, like Finland’s Moonsorrow and Amorphis, as well as with their countrymen, Týr. Most significantly, in terms of transnational engagement and visibility, in 2015, the band was nominated for the prestigious Nordic Council Music Prize. In some respects, Hamferð’s rapid rise to a touring band with global prospects in the course of four years speaks to Kahn-​Harris’s (2011, 206–​208) observations that metal bands now tend to enter networks of economic capital circulation and accumulation more rapidly, and that the support of economically powerful institutions remains imperative for metal musicians’ success. In their short career, Hamferð have benefited considerably from transnational institutional support, including from the Nordic Council of Ministers. By drawing on resources and expertise from within the Nordic region, across Europe, and beyond, Hamferð have been actively engaging and forging the kinds of essential transnational links that can help propel a group from a relatively out of the way portion of the north Atlantic to a world stage.

Answering the Tourist Gaze: Marketing Musical Exoticism As suggested in the previous section, a major upshot of this transnational engagement in the Faroese scene has been a heightened awareness and response to external perceptions of the Faroes as exotic. Specifically, some artists appear to be deliberately building upon and anticipating the image of the Faroes as exotic, as evident in those aforementioned examples of borealistic writing. For instance, the islands’ two most successful metal bands, Týr and Hamferð, both foreground their Faroeseness in a variety of ways. Significantly, both make extensive use of the Faroese language: Týr features Faroese on each of their seven albums, and Hamferð’s two releases are entirely Faroese. The groups’ Faroeseness inevitably generates curiosity and discussion abroad. In the following excerpt from a Czech website, MortemZine, for instance, the interviewer asks Kapnas of Hamferð about the benefits and drawbacks of being from the Faroes, and Kapnas responds frankly about their motivations in employing Faroese language and themes: Mortem:  Is it difficult to break through when one is hailing from a small country like Faroe Islands? Or is such [an] “exotic” country an advantage as the band is more interesting and attractive than if it was for example from the U.S.?

120   Geography Kapnas:  It has it’s [sic.] advantages and disadvantages… . The fact that we are from The Faroe Islands is part of our identity, and we’d like to think that it gives us something unique when we write our music. The music is strongly influenced by our surroundings here. It has given us some attention abroad too, seeing as there is a niche market for bands that sing in Faroese. Týr have built themselves a huge fanbase abroad where a great part of their fanbase is fascinated by the Faroese language and heritage, so this obviously makes people look us up who otherwise wouldn’t really care about a doom metal six-​piece from the middle of nowhere.5

Despite the interviewer’s use of quotation marks around the word in asking about being from an “exotic” country, there is an implication that some audiences imagine the Faroes as an exotic place. Interestingly, Kapnas chooses to acknowledge this foreign perception of the islands, but also to recast the discussion more explicitly in terms of economics. Kapnas moves quickly to say that he imagines that there is a “niche market” for Faroese language music abroad, evidenced in part by Týr’s fan base, who are “fascinated by the Faroese language and heritage.” It is also significant that the interviewer frames the supposed exoticness of the Faroes in contrast to the implied unremarkable character of bands from the United States. Consonant with typical borealistic depictions, and indeed much touristic material, the Faroes are juxtaposed with more southerly, and thus purportedly more mundane, locales. Hamferð’s explicit Faroeseness, then, is imagined by Kapnas to play an important role in drawing outside attention to a band “from the middle of nowhere.” In my own interview with Kapnas in 2011, he reiterated a similar conception of the international marketability of the Faroese language and markedly Faroese music. Discussing language choices, he again pointed to Týr’s success in using Viking imagery and the Faroese language, saying: I mean it’s kind of a gimmick, if you wish, but people find it fascinating… . [I]‌f you want to make yourself a living and make a proper career, you need to know which niche to go for. And I think using the Faroese language definitely helps in our image and makes us a little bit more exclusive, makes our appeal to a certain target audience stronger.6

Kapnas’s references to making a living, exclusivity, niche markets, and target audiences reinforce a sense of his eminently practical rationale for playing expressly Faroese music. And, for Hamferð, this Faroeseness is consciously highlighted in a number of ways other than their exclusive use of the Faroese language. The group’s name is drawn from local folklore: it refers to the belief in the appearance of an apparition of a person who is about to die. Further, Hamferð’s EP cover depicts a silhouetted figure, suggestive of the apparition of a person “in hamferð.” The EP also opens with the psalm “Harra Guð, títt dýra navn og æra,”7 a translation of a centuries-​old Norwegian hymn by Petter Dass. Sometimes sung during funeral processions, the psalm is another example of the band’s appeal to a specifically Faroese past.

From the Faroes to the World Stage    121 While space does not permit any definitive survey of the foreign reception of Hamferð’s foregrounding of Faroese elements as exotic, anecdotal evidence suggests that the musicians have correctly anticipated global listeners’ responses to the band’s national identity.8 That is, many listeners interpret the band’s explicit Faroeseness as something exotic and Other. For instance, as one reviewer opined, “Hamferð have decided to write everything in Faroese language and their choice appears to be excellent, as the release consequently appears to be more intriguing and mysterious” (Aren 2011). Similarly, speaking to the aforementioned typical construction of the Faroes as an exotic place “out of time,” another reviewer from northern Norway explained that he appreciated the band’s language choice, in part because it evoked a sense of connection to an archaic past: “[It is] about 500 kilometers away from here, but sounds like 500 years back in time for my language” (Mikalsen 2011). Though the band’s openness about their conscious marketing of a Faroese musical identity might leave them vulnerable to cynical accusations of crass commercialism, they have also been equally forthcoming in discussing the band’s initial impetus, which had more to do with personal artistic and creative goals. As Hamferð’s founder and guitarist, John Áki Egholm, explained to me: It has something to do with the landscape, the isolation, the weather, you know, makes for a very particular mindset … and I started to talk about this with some friends of mine, and I said … “I want to use our heritage to strengthen ourselves and, you know, to become something unique in the Faroese scene.” We eventually decided that, you know, it should be completely Faroese because it makes it more unique … bands from around the world sing English no matter what their nationality is, and it wouldn’t be right for us to … sing about our heritage in English.9

While illustrative on their own, Egholm’s comments about his motivations can be better contextualized via a brief discussion of metal’s relationship with language and senses of place. As in other global genres, the English language long enjoyed a position of relative dominance in metal. Some scholars, including Deena Weinstein (2011, 45), have connected the primacy of English in the genre to a broader notion of metal as an internationalized form since its inception, arguing that “metal has always been deterritorialized.” In some subgenres, however, a significant shift began taking place regarding the incorporation of distinctively “local” elements, including non-​English languages, especially by the 1990s. Among the early releases by a small number of Norwegian black metal bands, for instance, musicians began composing in Norwegian, as on Darkthrone’s 1993 release Under A Funeral Moon, and Burzum’s 1994 release Hvis Lyset Tar Oss. Following Norwegian precedents, many bands within metal subgenres such as folk, pagan, and Viking metal have included their own languages and regional traditional music in their compositions. In light of such trends, Hamferð’s expressly Faroese approach, while idiosyncratic in execution, could be seen as a local iteration of an ongoing transnational pattern within the global metal community (­figure 5.2).

Figure 5.2  Trøllanes, Faroe Islands, 2011

From the Faroes to the World Stage    123

Týr: Constructing Faroeseness As hinted at, however, Hamferð’s success was preceded by that of another Faroese band, namely Týr. Týr’s image relied even more on a foregrounding of their Faroeseness to such an extent that it could even be regarded as a form of self-​exoticization. Since the release of the band’s first album in 2002, Týr have repeatedly drawn upon local landscape, mythology, traditional music, and language to construct their specific interpretation of Faroese identity. Typical of borealistic imagery, five of their seven studio albums feature covers that portray mostly unpeopled, occasionally snow-​covered fjord landscapes reminiscent of the Faroes, sometimes complete with Viking longships and warriors.10 The use of local language and metal reinterpretations of traditional songs have also become trademarks of Týr’s style. Other distinctively local musical elements appear on their albums as well, including an instrumental version of the national anthem. The band’s dedication to a Faroese aesthetic extends into their promotional materials and merchandise: one album edition included a local flag, and some of the band’s tee-​ shirts have featured local signifiers such as the language and flag. Further, a number of publicity photos of the band feature the members sporting Viking armor and weaponry against the local landscape. One series of photos depicts the band standing alongside a traditional sod-​roofed house, a building type that has become something of an icon of the islands’ culture and history. In that same shoot, one of the band members appears to be brandishing a sóknarongul, the hook that is traditionally used to drag pilot whales ashore during whale drives. This reference to the islands’ continued practice of communal subsistence whaling points to a practice that is both highly contentious abroad and quintessentially Faroese. Considering the lengths Týr have gone to assert their Faroeseness, there can be little doubt, as Kapnas and many others whom I spoke with in the islands suggested, this has become an essential element of their international appeal. Countless reviews and interviews with the band confirm foreigners’ fascination with the specifically Faroese elements of Týr’s compositions. One review of the band’s 2011 album articulated this plainly: “ ‘The Lay of Thrym’ is full of epic and majestic elements of traditional music with Nordic pride… . [T]‌hey often sing in their native tongue, making those songs immeasurably interesting” (Simms 2011). The reviewer’s reference to “Nordic pride” points to a transnational thread in Týr’s music: their reliance on a familiar repertoire of symbols and images that many associate with an imagined pre-​Christian, Viking Nordic past. In a number of ways, Týr has cultivated an aesthetic that relies nearly as much on an appeal to pan-​Scandinavian, if not pan-​Nordic history and iconography, as it does on specifically Faroese elements. For instance, the band’s strategies include drawing inspiration from the poetic Edda, sometimes employing the Danish and Norwegian languages, using stylized runic characters, and depicting Viking imagery. As evidenced by the prior discussions of

124   Geography Hamferð’s access to specifically Nordic funds and of their participation in Wacken, it is often advantageous for Faroese musicians to alternatively emphasize their Faroeseness or their Nordicness:11 in the case of Wacken, despite being defined as a “self-​governing national community within the kingdom of Denmark” (Nauerby 1996, 61), the Faroese were able to enter the Metal Battle as a separate nation, thereby asserting their distinctiveness and ensuring the place of a Faroese entrant, rather than forcing local bands to compete with a larger group in the Danish national competition. Hamferð and Týr are both engaged in creating locally inflected musics that rely on established transnational genre conventions to effect senses of local identities that are likely to be received as such by international audiences. The music of these bands, as Weston (2011, 11) has observed of Basque metal, similarly “projects a specific ‘musical identity’ that relies on the preferred reading of the generic connotations of Pagan Metal, understood by its global audience despite the linguistic barrier.” Just as “Basque Pagan Metal expresses a local, ethnically defined cultural viewpoint, understood by its audience on a global scale because the genre code dictates this reading” (Weston 2011, 11), Týr and Hamferð also rely on the broad comprehensibility of globally circulating styles which they anticipate will resonate with global audiences despite the incomprehensibility of the Faroese language for most listeners. And, as Berger (2003, xvii) has noted with reference to Szego’s work on Hawaiian music, even when the referential function of language is lost on listeners, people “may be attracted to the romance of songs with incomprehensible … words and may invest the sounds of those words with powerful meanings.” Considering this, if either band could be said to be engaged in self-​exoticization, each has only employed it in a form that is regularly engaged in by metal bands and musicians worldwide who purport to create a unique place-based identity. More significantly, however, the musicians of Hamferð and Týr are involved in processes of co-​construction of Faroese exoticness with foreign listeners, writers, and a plethora of other interested off-​island parties. That is, the music and imagery produced by these and other artists both builds upon and contributes to the considerable body of existent borealistic depictions of the Faroes as exotic and unique, albeit deliberately and strategically. In this way, the islands’ internationally oriented musicians who choose to foreground and perform Faroeseness themselves become active agents in shaping the gaze of the tourist or listener-​tourist (Urry 2002, 1).

Conclusion We’re not another Iceland, we are something else. —​Jón Tyril12

Tyril’s assertion about the distinctiveness of the burgeoning Faroese music scene points us back to this chapter’s overarching question of how locally produced music finds a

From the Faroes to the World Stage    125 place in a globalizing world. While the Faroes are geographically distant from Nordic and European centers of power, capital, and influence, resourceful young artists like the musicians of Hamferð are engaging with transnational networks and flows of capital, musicians, and industry professionals in order to project their music farther afield. Though these more concrete aspects of some Faroese artists’ engagements with the larger world that were explored in the second section tell us something of how musicians on the so-​called Nordic periphery (Hovgaard 2002) can “make a proper career,” as Kapnas of Hamferð phrased it, they do not reveal the whole story. It is only in considering how some of the ideas put forth by Chartier, Urry, and Schram discussed in the first section can frame our understanding of aesthetic choices that a fuller picture of the developing Faroese scene emerges. Specifically, Chartier’s notion of the interplay between local and foreign constructions of place is useful in considering how local artists become agents (what Urry calls professional experts) involved in constructing and developing the gaze of those tourists and listeners whose attention is directed to the Faroe Islands and their music. Further, Schram helps us contextualize specific strategies and ideas within this transnational traffic of images about a place; for instance, Týr’s fjord landscapes and Viking motif evoke both distinctively northern and Scandinavian geography and history. Hamferð’s own acute awareness of foreign perceptions of their homeland and language as “exotic” (which is at least a partial motivation for their devotion to local folklore and language) also points to the utility of Urry’s and Chartier’s concepts in examining the construction of place-​based musical identities. In short, through their efforts to carve a niche for themselves in the global music market, whether selecting and foregrounding exclusively and expressly Faroese elements or combining pan-​Scandinavian and Faroese elements, the musicians discussed in this chapter become participants in co-​constructing national identity. The preceding discussion of the transnational dimensions of the Faroese music industry also leads to two main conclusions about the nature of music, movement, and identity that speak to a variety of issues related to popular music in the Nordic countries in the twenty-​first century. Most significantly, the Faroese case points to an increased importance for the small languages and associated cultures of the “Nordic peripheries” as critical symbolic resources to be employed in a globalized music market that apparently continues to value representations of difference. Additionally, the Faroes, along with Iceland before them, provides scholars with yet another example of how the barriers presented by remote island life are increasingly being circumvented by engagement with transnational institutions and the regional and broader networks of expertise and capital, as well as in no small part thanks to the connectivity and increased visibility afforded by the Internet. This chapter’s discussion of the construction and marketing of explicitly Faroese musical identities, as well as of the increasingly transnational character of the islands’ scene, makes a contribution to the broader Nordic popular music literature on the significance of place-​based identities in music (e.g., Dibben 2009 and van den Berg 2012) within which the Faroese viewpoint has been largely absent. Further, this chapter

126   Geography portrays a national music scene that is very much in transition from an almost exclusively locally oriented situation only fifteen years ago to an increasingly internationally oriented one; even aside from those artists who explicitly create music with international audiences in mind, the growth of the G! Festival as a regional industry hub, and the recent formation of the Faroese Alliance for Music Export, speak to this transition. This chapter’s examination of these currents in the Faroes allows for a comparison of regional trends in the institutionalization and commodification of music, the study of which is already well under way in the literature on the popular music of the other Nordic countries (see Aggestam 2007; Sigurðardóttir and Young 2011; and Johansson 2013). And, finally, this chapter provides a basis for further research on what is one of the Nordic region’s most vibrant yet understudied music scenes in which many artists are continually driving their forms of “island music” far beyond their horizons and onto the world stage, while still keeping one foot firmly planted on their own soil.

Notes 1. Echoing this notion, “various master polarities,” Joenniemi (2013, 147) writes, have been “premised on the profound otherness of the North,” and the North has “had the role of the “non-​us” in the opposite in regard to the South. 2. The notions of music as a key element in virtual tourism and of listeners as tourists are well established. See Hayward 1999; Dawe 2004, 9–​11; and especially Connell and Gibson 2005, 21–​26. 3. Jón Tyril, interview with author, September 2011. 4. A  self-​described “Nordic music and lifestyle expedition in Utrech,” this Dutch event encourages festival-​goers to “experience the culture of Northern Europe at Nordic Delight Festival” (see www.Nordicdelight.nl). At this and similar festivals, “Nordicness” is made a central concern, and it is this perceived Nordicness, contrasted with the non-​Nordic (Urry’s non-​tourist forms), of the artists which is arguably on display: “Design, fashion, film, art and music from Northern Europe nowadays reaches more and more Dutch people… . From this love of Northern European culture Nordic Delight was born.” 5. Interview with Hamferð, MortemZine, May 2, 2011. At http://​archive.is/​fK9K Significantly, such perceived “remoteness” plays a key role in borealistic depictions of the north; see Kjartansdóttir 2009. 6. Theodor Kapnas, interview with author, September 2011. 7. “Lord God, thy precious name and glory.” 8. Hamferð’s anticipation of (and catering to) international audiences’ perceptions of the Faroes as exotic speaks to Schram’s claim that borealism may entail the internalisation of images of the self as the Other (Schram 2011, 106–​107). Further, this also speaks to such musicians’ roles as “professional experts who help to construct and develop our gaze as tourists” (Urry 2002, 1). 9. John Áki Egholm, interview with author, September 2011. 10. Significantly, Vikings have become an integral part of borealism’s “emergent oral and visual iconography” (Schram 2009, 259); see also Kjartansdóttir 2011 and Margaryan and Zherdev 2011, 11.

From the Faroes to the World Stage    127 11. In agreement with Urry’s suggestion that “What makes a particular tourist gaze depends upon what it is contrasted with” (Urry 2002, 1–​2), musicians’ choices to alternately emphasize their Nordicness or their Faroeseness (in compositions, competitions, funding applications, etc.) are similarly context-​dependent and may shift in response to the exigencies of each situation, and especially in light of musicians’ expectations regarding foreign perceptions (i.e., those whom they will be “contrasted with”). 12. Jón Tyril, interview with author, September 2011.

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128   Geography Ísleifsson, Sumarliði R., ed. 2011. Iceland and Images of the North. Québec:  Presses de l’Université du Québec. Jakobsson, Sverrir, ed. 2009. Images of the North:  Histories—​Identities—​Ideas. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Joenniemi, Pertti. 2013. Review of Images of the North: Histories—​Identities—​Ideas. Journal of Borderlands Studies 28(1): 147–​148. Johansson, Daniel. 2013. “Music Festivals in Sweden—​ An Analysis of the Ten Largest Commercial Festivals 2000–​2013.” Online PDF. At https://​medarbetare.lnu.se/​polopoly_​fs/​ 1.98239!Johansson%20D.%20(2014)%20Music%20Festivals%20in%20Sweden.pdf. Kahn-​Harris, K. 2011. “ ‘You Are from Israel and That Is Enough to Hate You Forever’: Racism, Globalization and Play within the Global Extreme Metal Scene.” In Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music Around the World, ed. J. Wallach, H. Berger, and P. Greene, 200–​ 226. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Keightley, K. 2011. “ ‘Un Voyage via Barquinho’: Global Circulation, Musical Hybridization, and Adult Modernity, 1961–​9.” In Migrating Music, ed. J. Toynbee and B. Dueck, 112–​126. New York: Routledge. Kjartansdóttir, Katla. 2009. “Remote, Rough and Romantic: Contemporary Images of Iceland in Visual, Oral and Textual Narrations.” In Images of the North: Histories—​Identities—​Ideas, ed. Sverrir Jakobsson, 271–​280. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Kjartansdóttir, Katla. 2011. “The New Viking Wave:  Cultural Heritage and Capitalism.” In Iceland and Images of the North, ed. S. R. Ísleifsson, 461–​481. Québec: Presses de l´Universite du Québec. MacCannell, Dean. 1999. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: University of California Press. Margaryan, Lusine, and Zherdev, Nikolay. 2011. Tourism Development in Northern Iceland. Akureyri: Icelandic Tourism Research Centre. Mikalsen, Steffen. 2011. “Vilst Er Síðsta Fet Review.” The Metal Archives. At www.metal-​archives. com/​reviews/​Hamfer%C3% B0/​Vilst_​er_​S%C3%AD%C3%B0sta_​Fet/​292093/​. Metcalf, Stephen. 2007. “Into the Mystical Unreal Reality of the Faroe Islands.” New York Times, March 27. At http://​travel.nytimes.com/​2007/​03/​25/​travel/​tmagazine/​03well.faroes.t.html. Nauerby, Tom. 1996. No Nation Is an Island: Language, Culture, and National Identity in the Faroe Islands. Århus: SNAI—​North Atlantic Publications. Neijmann, Daisy. 2011. “Foreign Fictions of Iceland.” In Iceland and Images of the North, ed. S. R. Ísleifsson, 481–​512. Québec: Presses de l´Universite du Québec. Oslund, Karen. 2011. “The Image of Iceland in the Local and Global Nexus of Whaling Politics.” In Iceland and Images of the North, ed. S. R. Ísleifsson, 285–​304. Québec: Presses de l´Universite du Québec. Prior, Nick. 2015. “ ‘It’s A  Social Thing, Not A  Nature Thing’:  Popular Music Practices in Reykjavik, Iceland.” Cultural Sociology 9(1): 81–​98. Schram, K. 2009. “The Wild Wild North: The Narrative Cultures of Image Construction in Media and Everyday Life.” In Images of the North: Histories—​Identities—​Ideas, ed. Sverrir Jakobsson, 249–​260. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Schram, K. 2011. “Borealism: Folkloristic Perspectives on Transnational Performances and the Exoticism of the North.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Edinburgh. Sigurðardóttir, Margrét Sigrún, and Tómas Young. 2011. Towards Creative Iceland:  Building Local, Going Global. Reykjavik: Consultative Forum of Creative Industries in Iceland.

From the Faroes to the World Stage    129 Simms, K. 2011. “Tyr—​The Lay of Thrym Review.” Heavymetal.about.com, June 7. At http://​ heavymetal.about.com/​od/​tyr/​fr/​Tyr-​The-​Lay-​Of-​Thrym-​Review.htm. Tyler, Kieron. 2012. “Backbeat:  Faroe Islands’ G! Festival Takes A  Local Approach in Showcasing Indie Artists.” Billboard.biz, July 30. At www.billboard.biz/​bbbiz/​industry/​ backbeat/​backbeat-​faroe-​islands-​g-​festi val-​takes-​1007696952.story. Urry, John. 2002. The Tourist Gaze. Wiltshire: Cromwell. Van den Berg, Ilana. 2012. “The Island Syndrome: A View on the International Success of the Icelandic Music Scene.” MA thesis, University of Utrecht. Wallach, Jeremy, Harris M. Berger, and Paul D. Greene, eds. 2011. Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music Around the World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Weinstein, Deena. 2011. “The Globalization of Metal.” In Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music Around the World, ed. Jeremy Wallach, Harris M. Berger, and Paul D. Greene, 34–​62. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Weston, Donna. 2011. “Basque Pagan Metal: View to a Primordial Past.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 14(1): 1–​20.

Chapter 6

Christian Meta l a nd t he Transl o ca l  Nort h Henna Jousmäki

This chapter is a contribution to the growing area of research on religion and globalization in Nordic popular music studies. The chapter examines the YouTube circulation of music by Christian metal groups to shed light on the relation between Nordic localization and the transnational dynamics of this particular genre of popular music, which is known to have a distinct Nordic history both inside and outside of the region. Previous studies on popular music and religion have documented the discourses, structures, and functions of Christian metal music culture (Bossius 2003; Jousmäki 2015; Moberg 2009, 2015). This chapter expands the field of inquiry by analyzing the discourse of locality in global social media services. More specifically, I examine user-​generated content by fans of the Finnish band Scandinavian Metal Praise and the Australian band Horde. The analysis draws from sociolinguistics, discourse studies, and cultural studies to examine the theme of translocality among audiences participating in the mediation of music, place, and religion in global social media services. The argument is that, first, the dynamics of culture and place are essentially translocal in that they gain meaning and relevance in multiple places while retaining associations with the place of production. Second, in the process of translocal mediation examined in this chapter, Nordicness has not been weakened but instead becomes more salient as non-​Nordic audiences celebrate Nordic countries as an ideal territory for authentic Christian metal.

Translocality and the History of Christian Metal The term “translocal” is commonly used in both music and religious studies for cultures and communities that transcend the boundaries of the local in contexts of

132   Geography globalization (e.g., Alim 2009; Bennett and Peterson 2004; Peuronen 2011). These are defining aspects of Christian metal and its “glocal” dynamics (e.g., Bennett 2000; Mitchell 1999). Within comparative religion, Moberg (2009) prefers the term “transnational” to describe Christian metal. In this chapter, “translocality” is used to emphasize the local activities and identifications of Christian metal bands, on the one hand, and their mobility, on the other, with the latter making it possible for bands to evolve into local contexts elsewhere (Jousmäki 2014). Today, these locales tend not to be primarily national (Appadurai 1996, 178), but their “inhabitants” operate and communicate to a great extent on the Internet and on social media (Bennett 2004; Block 2004; Leppänen et al. 2009; Kytölä 2015). In his thorough review of the term’s history and use, Kytölä (2015, 372, 375) discusses the emphasis on place in the term “translocality,” as well as its fundamental aspects of connectivity and hybridization of culture(s). Kytölä (376–​377) further argues that in digital information and communication systems, translocality may manifest at five levels: individual, community, communication, culture(s), and experience and social meaning. Before discussing how this theory applies to Christian metal, it is useful to consider the main trajectories in its history. Christian metal emerged in the United States in the 1980s, when metal was also diversifying into other subgenres. At the time, Christian metal was also known as white metal, but it came to be defined as an Evangelical counterattack against the alleged demoralizing aspects of metal culture (Luhr 2005, 103–​106). Key figures included bands such as Stryper, Stryken, and Vengeance Rising. Specific opposition was targeted at the death and black metal genres, which emphasized themes of decay and rebellion toward authorities and organized forms of religion (Kahn-​Harris 2007, 2–​4; Weinstein 2011, 41–​43). Walser (1993, 55) noted how “metal’s noisiness might seem incompatible with a Christian agenda” but that “Stryper exploits just that subversive aura to make more appealing what would otherwise seem a wholly institutional message.” Along similar lines, Moberg (2009, 231–​2 48) defines Christian metal as an alternative way of religious expression and evangelization, one that complements rather than competes with institutionalized Christianity. Christian metal gained considerable traction in the Nordic region in the 1990s with bands such as Deuteronomium in Finland, Antestor in Norway, and Jerusalem in Sweden, the last which had cultivated Christian themes since it was formed in 1975. These bands eventually became influential to the global development of Christian metal (Moberg 2011, 33). Indeed, Nordic metal groups, both Christian and secular, have found success in their home countries, as well as beyond national borders, to the extent that the broader regional scene is now highly esteemed by metal music audiences worldwide (Kahn-​Harris 2007, 97–​98, 105–​109; Moberg 2009, 173; Moberg 2011, 34). However, Christian metal has remained rather distinct from the secular metal scene, although individual members may cross over (Kahn-​Harris 2007, 144).

Christian metal and the Translocal North    133

Evangelical Christianity and Youth Subcultures Equally central to my analysis is the conception of Christian metal as youth subculture, referring not to participants’ biological age but, rather, to their characteristic ways of constructing their identities with the help of music, symbols, and distinctive styles. This conception draws from cultural studies in which the frequent association of youth and subculture has been subject to critiques (Bennett and Kahn-​Harris 2004). Information about the age of producers and audiences can be particularly tricky in mediations on YouTube, where subjects might be playing with the possibilities of anonymity (Wood and Smith 2005, 63–​67). However, in the context of Finland, Moberg (2009, 178–​179) estimates the number of Christian metal adherents to amount to up to 1,000 sixteen-​ to thirty-​year-​olds, and the online/​offline continuities in contemporary youth culture (Bennett 2004) indicate that Moberg’s estimation is also referential of the group uploading, watching, and commenting on Christian metal material on YouTube. Christian metal has been characterized as a metal missionary effort in the Evangelical Christian tradition of encouraging spiritual conversion (Jousmäki 2013; Luhr 2005; Moberg 2009, 214–​218). However, it is important to remember the different social and religious backgrounds of Californian and Nordic Christian metal bands. While North American Christian metal bands are more closely connected with the Evangelical Christian tradition and with the Contemporary Christian Music industry (Hendershot 2004, 52–​84; Howard and Streck 1999), Nordic bands come from countries with a long and established Lutheran tradition (Hjarvard and Lövheim 2012, 10–​11). Lutheranism differs from Evangelicalism most notably in the way it emphasizes God’s mercy and authority, and the minimal role of humans in finding salvation, whereas Evangelicalism puts more stress on a personal conversion experience (Gassmann and Hendrix 1999; Woodhead 2010, 225). Despite these differences in background, today’s global spread of Evangelicalism (Hutchinson and Wolffe 2012) makes it highly relevant for Nordic Christian musicians, as well.

Translocal Christian Metal on YouTube On YouTube, the comments section includes audience responses to the video and the video maker’s replies to questions. Users frequently comment on each other’s comments and questions, thereby also negotiating a more or less shared understanding of what and where Christian metal is, especially in relation to non-​Christian and black metal, and in

134   Geography how Christianity can/​cannot and should/​should not be lived out in today’s world, especially in the Nordic region. In doing so, the discussants are also negotiating the relationships between music, religion, and place. Data for the two cases discussed next was collected on YouTube in 2012 with regard to various similar types of videos. However, the stories behind the videos go further back in time. The following accounts thus also illustrate how social media can be used to enliven popular cultural phenomena not quite “in” anymore in mainstream and music media.

“You Are Not Bound to Be Pagan Just Because You Are Nordic” An illustrative case of translocality is provided by the YouTube circulation of a 2006 live festival video by the Australian band Horde, which is described as having started the Christian black metal scene in the world with the release of their album Hellig Usvart (Holy Unblack) in 1994. A short-​lived one-​album project featuring Jayson Sherlock and a session line-​up, the name enjoys the popularity of fans even today. It is no coincidence that this type of music should be celebrated in Norway (the album title even appears in Norwegian), a country that has developed a questionable reputation for essentially non-​Christian black metal: Norwegian black metal has been associated with violence and public misbehavior, as well as with church burnings and Satan worship (Hagen 2011; Moynihan and Søderlind 2003). The most scandalous era of black metal may be over, but discursive clashes are triggered every now and then (Hjelm, Kahn-​Harris, and LeVine 2011, 9). Following from the dialogical nature of Christian metal also more generally (Jousmäki 2013), Horde utilizes the subversive aura (Walser 1993, 55) of black metal by adopting its sounds and subcultural ways of expression, yet appropriates them for its own Christian purposes. This means, among other things, that fast drumming and rasped screams are combined with a Christian message of salvation and of Satan’s defeat. The result, “unblack” metal, highlights the reversal of black metal. This already shows in the song title: “Invert the Inverted Cross” refers to the changes the symbol of the cross has undergone when being used for different ideological purposes (also see Jousmäki 2012, 220). Especially, black metal bands have preferred to place the cross, denoting the risen Christ, downward to refute Christian beliefs and values in favor of Satan. Thus, through wishing to “invert the inverted cross,” Horde addresses these histories of practice and, through the song, marks a homecoming of the symbol and celebrates the victory over what they perceive as the evil (Bossius 2003, 73–​170; Moberg 2009, 121–​124, 132–​133). On YouTube, the video in question is titled Horde Live at Nordic Fest 2006—​ Christian Black Metal1 by user Raul Sebastian Romero, who uploaded the video in 2008. The description of the video includes the name of the event, the band, and the song; moreover, it includes the line “Vocals: Pilgrim (Crimson Moonlight).” This piece

Christian metal and the Translocal North    135 of information is important for scene adherents because the visiting vocalist, Pilgrim, is also the lead singer of another Christian black metal group, Crimson Moonlight, which at the time of the performance had already established its position as one of the most well-​known Swedish Christian black metal groups. The cooperation of musicians and festival organizers from different countries to make Horde’s performance possible at Nordic Fest illustrates, again, how Christian metal has a translocal community (Kytölä 2015, 377). Here was people in and from different localities sharing a musical taste and skills for making such music together across national borders (for a larger-​scale review of these structures, see Moberg 2009, 172–​175; see also Bossius 2003, 68, 77). The translocality of Christian metal concerns not only production but also consumption. To start with, the user uploading the Horde video mentioned earlier declares to be from Argentina.2 Referring to the audiences of Christian metal as translocal means recognizing their local manifestation and relevance in spaces they physically inhabit, while also understanding their connections to other localities through social media (Jousmäki 2014; Leppänen et al. 2009, 2013, 2014; Kytölä 2015). Looking at the audience responses makes it clear that just as the fondness for Christian black metal is translocal, so is its rejection. Kytölä writes about “various meta-​ readings and evaluations” of transcultural products (Kytölä 2015, 377). The discussion that evolves concerning the uploaded video in the comments section is rather heated.3 While some video viewers celebrate and “hail” Horde, especially now that the performance features Pilgrim, as the ultimately best black metal group, many others face difficulties in accepting the combination of Christian values and the sounds and history of black metal: “Black metal and Christianity are two different things that shouldn’t mix because black metal is rejecting the Judeo-​Christian god and embracing nature. I would think they could change the name of the genre so it isn’t the oxymoron Christian Black Metal.”4 While user IRONxEWOK takes a rather neutral stance and only refers to Christian black metal as “an oxymoron” (as in Bossius 2003, 77), most other comments involve a highly emotional take on the issue. For instance: These people are wannabe’s and they will never know anything about black metal because they are christian [sic.]. You cannot promote christianity [sic.] by trying to be evil, it is just pathetic and looks stupid. It is like having Jews in an nsbm band. “Unblack metal” is for posers and blatant rip offs of the genre. They need to get they’re own genre and stop trying to be something they wish they were. It’s just like Christianity to mock the history’s of other deity’s, that the music will mock something also.5

In the above extract, user signofthegoat explicitly attacks Christian black metal and deems it a “pathetic” effort of “trying to be evil.” The user thereby constructs “evil” as desirable, which is the opposite view from Christianity. In addition, the user blames Christianity more generally of “mocking” those who believe differently in

136   Geography writing, “it’s just like christianity to mock the histories of other deities” (emphasis added). Interestingly, signofthegoat thus moves from scorning Christian black metal artists personally (“These people are wannabe’s and they will never know anything,” “posers and blatant rip offs”), to critiquing what to him or her appear as incompatible sets of beliefs such as Christian black metal and Jewish national socialist black metal toward the devaluation of Christianity in more general terms, finally. These two comments illustrate a translocal tendency of audiences neither to understanding nor accepting the union of Christianity and black metal. This means that wherever Christian black metal comes up, it is met with criticism and condemnation as long as the ideological controversy is retained in the translocal scenic discourses. From the perspective of the relationships between music, religion, and place, three comments are of particular interest in the discussion thread related to the Horde video. Two of them consider the Nordic area as inherently pagan. To start with, user Metaldude1945 comments on the video by wondering, “How can you be both Nordic and Christian???” In addition, user asarunnefer12 claims “ov course Nordic ppl were force feed christianity or death” while their “own” religion was “nearly burnt to extinction.” In these comments, the users refer to the pre-​Christian history of the Nordic countries, ended by the at least partly violent Christian Crusades of the nations. Importantly, both of them continue to connect the North with paganism. It seems thus that the commentators approve of the combination of the Nordic, metal music, and non-​Christian religiosity, whereas Christianity does not fit into that picture. From the perspective of translocality, it is interesting that the commentators make no difference between the countries, despite each of them having their own mythologies; it seems they consider the Nordic area a translocal one without internal national borders, and one that is or has been also pagan in a translocal sense. The question on the impossibility of combining Nordic-​ness and Christianity, posed by Metaldude1945, attracts one reply: “Uh, it’s actually a no brainer how one can be Christian and Nordic. Your faith has nothing to do with your nationality. [You are] not bound to be pagan just because you are Nordic, all faiths are a choice. I chose Christ like Pilgrim and Horde did!”6 This response by Mosh4Yesh777 denies the existence of any natural interrelationship between “Nordic” and “pagan,” yet admits the historical relevance of paganism in the North. Instead, the user emphasizes the active role of the individual in choosing his or her religion. In doing so, the user reproduces an important tenet of the translocal Evangelical Christian movement—​conscious conversion toward and a personal relationship with Christ (Woodhead 2010, 225). Evangelical Christianity is discussed in more detail in connection with the second empirical case. The discussion concerning the video of Horde’s performance in Oslo illustrates that Nordic Christian black metal finds both acceptance and rejection among those who watch such videos, based on ideological and religious history of the North, as well as on music. The case is not closed by any means, as various videos of Horde’s performance in 2006 continue to give rise to polarized comments at the time of this writing. From the perspective of translocal Christian religiosity, the case illustrates how popular music is

Christian metal and the Translocal North    137 used, independent of place and nationality, by believers to practice religion in noninstitutionalized ways and to challenge and transgress established practices of black metal (Hjelm et al. 2011, 14). Through the example, also, the translocality of digitally experiencing and attaching social meaning (Kytölä 2015, 377) to Christian metal became clear.

“It’s a Scandinavian ‘Hillsong’ ”: Translocal Evangelical Youth Continuing in the framework of Evangelical Christianity, the second empirical case to discuss Christian metal as translocal is Scandinavian Metal Praise. Similarly to Horde, Scandinavian Metal Praise merges the Christian worldview with the sounds of metal. However, whereas Horde performs original work, Scandinavian Metal Praise inherently builds on Evangelical and Charismatic Christianity in reproducing some its well-​known songs of worship. Often composed by Anglo-​American songwriters, these songs typically come from transnational mega churches (e.g., the Pentecostal Hillsong Church), from which they are transported to different local congregations where participants, led by a house band, sing them time and again, often in a focused, devoted manner (Bossius 2011, 54–​56, 61–​62; McGann 2002). While it is exactly within the Evangelical and Charismatic Christian traditions where metal music has been met with suspicion (Luhr 2005, 120–​124; Partridge 2010, 496), Scandinavian Metal Praise provides an example of the merging of metal music into a central form of religious practice in these traditions. This group is not, however, the first of its kind: in 1992, skilled musicians from various North American Christian metal bands expressed their values and object of praise in the project Metal Praise, producing a ten-​track CD featuring traditional hymns, such as “Rock of Ages” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” arranged in metal style with distinguished guitar riffs and high-​pitch screams (Angelic Warlord 2012). Scandinavian Metal Praise updates the song selection by making use of some of the hit worship songs of the twenty-​first century, such as “Praise Adonai” and “Worthy Is the Lamb,” as well as the Finnish-​made “Laulu Suomelle” as “a song for Finland.” Interestingly, the group chooses to call itself Scandinavian although Finland, the band’s country of origin, is mostly excluded from accounts of “Scandinavia” (see the Introduction chapter). From the perspective of translocality, the question therefore is what the label “Scandinavian” is used to convey and what consequences its use has for YouTube audiences. In general, many videos have been published through the translocal communication means (Kytölä 2015, 377) YouTube, building on the work of Scandinavian Metal Praise. These videos include recordings of the band’s live shows and slide shows using the 2008 album cover or photos, accompanied by song audiotapes. While the videos are thus often quite simple and unoriginal, it is the discussion threads that provide clues of the reception of Scandinavian Metal Praise and for understanding its nature as translocal.

138   Geography One interesting description of Scandinavian Metal Praise is given by user rafalopes93, who has uploaded on YouTube, among other things, the video “Scandinavian Metal Praise—​Worthy Is the Lamb {Legendado PT—​BR}.”7 Using the album cover as the visual, the song “Worthy Is the Lamb” as the soundtrack, and a Brazilian Portuguese translation for the lyrics as the textual input, the user introduces the band as “a Scandinavian ‘hillsong.’ ”8 The user thereby displays knowledge on the origins of the song in question, which is not Scandinavian but Australian, written by Darlene Zschech of the recording company Hillsong Music. The user thus sees Scandinavian Metal Praise adding a “Scandinavian” element to hillsong music. Scandinavia is thus equated with metal music and perceived as a transnational source of metal music. From the perspective of translocality, it is noteworthy that the uploader of the video declares to be from Brazil, a country with an established metal music scene (Avelar 2011, 142; Weinstein 2011, 44), Christian metal scene (Moberg 2009, 174), and vivid revivalist Christian religiosity (Pew Forum 2006). Thus, the case is translocal in its particular Christian orientation, in its musical genre, in its communication medium, and in its audiences. The translocalization of audiences of Scandinavian Metal Praise is partly due to the translation of the song lyrics in the video into the video uploader’s (supposed) first language, Brazilian Portuguese. Translation of this type may be interpreted as the user’s wish to make the message of the song accessible also for other (non-​English-​speaking) speakers of Portuguese. And, indeed, this practice is successful, as shown in the Spanish and Portuguese comments not only on this video but also on other similar kinds of videos building on the music of Scandinavian Metal Praise. As to the reception of such videos in YouTube, comments are written in different languages (English, Finnish, Swedish, Spanish), which is already telling of the translocality of audiences. The responses also vary translocally in their tone from appreciation to rejection.9 For example, while some praise Christian metal in general (e.g., “adorei a musica”), others make it clear that they do not think of Scandinavian Metal Praise as “proper” metal: You joking me? This is musically terrible. The vocals are pretty, I’ll give it that much. [T]‌he drums are non-​existant [sic.] and the guitar is hilariously generic. Look guys, if you’re going to make metal, at least be serious about it. This *might* be enough for stupid Christians who like Metallica. For a proper metalhead like me, this. is. bull. shit.10

User r00rie defines him-​or herself as a “proper metalhead” who does not buy such “terrible” and “hilarious” music as produced by Scandinavian Metal Praise. Moreover, she or he dis-​identifies with “ ‘stupid’ Christians who like Metallica” whereby she or he positions him or herself as wiser than “them” and as not being into such “light” metal as produced, for example, by Metallica. Yet, through watching the video and commenting on it, the user participates in building a translocal audience for the band in question. User Altairograph responds to r00rie’s comment as follows:

Christian metal and the Translocal North    139 Those are gospel songs man. Have you even read the lyrics? Usual metal arrangements wouldn’t fit the message and the intended atmosphere at all. I enjoy metal in many forms in this is just another form, but it’s not supposed to be “proper” metal. It’s just a heavier version of gospel/​worship music. The intent behind it is just very different then [sic.] normal metal and so is the musical execution.11

This quote shows how user Altairograph acknowledges the existence of a translocal Christian worship music genre and its influence on Scandinavian Metal Praise. In contrast with the focus on ideology and place among the Horde video commentary examined in the previous section, the commentators on this Scandinavian Metal Praise video negotiate translocally whether the band’s music counts as metal music. However, there is consensus in both situations that Scandinavian Metal Praise is not “proper” metal, with Altairograph being more appreciative of the diversity of metal subgenres. I have only discussed a few of the many comments on the two YouTube videos to illustrate the different ways in which users respond to the music translocally by celebrating and criticizing it. Videos of translocal religious music are uploaded and shared within transnational spheres to generate debate over the identity and geography of the genre (Kytölä 2015, 377). In some other cases, the reception of Scandinavian Metal Praise involves accepting the band both ideologically and musically. For example, after viewing the “Scandinavian Metal Praise–​When The Spirit Of The Lord,”12 uploaded by user Marinilson Sampaio, the user gramirez1814 states: “great metal music for Christ our Lord!!!! i will pray and dance like David did!!!! rock on!!!!”13 Thus, for this user, Scandinavian Metal Praise becomes a personal preference to practice religiosity and worship, as shown through the recontextualization of a part of the chorus (“I will pray /​ dance like David did”) in the comment. Scandinavian Metal Praise does nothing to emphasize its Finnish roots, itself a stance in the cultural geography of power (Kytölä 2015, 373), but the band provides an entry point for understanding key aspects of religious culture in Finland today. First, although a decreasing interest in religion among young Finns dominates the narratives of new media (e.g., Mikkola, Niemelā, and Petersson 2007), the case of Scandinavian Metal Praise provides another kind of a picture of the matter by illustrating how today’s young Finns are actively “doing” religion in new ways, utilizing translocal popular cultural resources such as YouTube and metal music. With this exactly being the thing to do in the Evangelical Christian tradition (e.g., Hendershot 2004, 6), Scandinavian Metal Praise illustrates the ongoing translocal spread of Evangelicalism. In other words, this example offers an insight into processes of change in the Finnish religious landscape. Despite the survey results according to which the majority of Finns prefer modesty and privacy to strong and open religiosity (Ketola et al. 2011), Scandinavian Metal Praise shows, through its appropriation of Evangelical and Charismatic worship styles, and of the uncompromising “out loud” attitude of metal, that things may be undergoing a change from below.

140   Geography

Conclusion This chapter has discussed Christian metal music as a translocal example of Nordic youth culture. By looking into user-​generated YouTube videos featuring two different types of Christian metal groups and into audience responses to these videos, we see that Christian metal can be interpreted as translocal in three ways. First, as a form of music, Christian metal is a translocal, imagined community as the artists of the genre come from various national backgrounds and geographical localities and cross these borders to cooperatively strengthen the ties between scene members and structures. Second, social media, in their part, afford Christian metal with translocal audiences. As shown in the production of and discussion on Nordic Christian metal videos on YouTube, Christian metal evokes interest in various parts of the world to the extent that some users have started to translate the lyrics to ease the transportation and reception of this type of music. In this process, Nordicness is not weakened but, rather, becomes even more salient, especially as non-​Nordic audiences come to celebrate such countries as ideal for making Christian (metal) music. Third, and related to this, Christian metal provides its audiences with an experience of translocal religiosity, leading many to find the Nordic region as a particularly suitable place for practicing (Evangelical Christian) belief through the type of music one enjoys. This shows particularly well in the discussions about the videos made around the music of Scandinavian metal praise. Here, the translocal character of Christian metal relates first and foremost to practicing of worship relying on songs that are well known in Evangelical and Charismatic Christianity in various parts of the world. The widespread international appreciation of Nordic Christian metal in YouTube discussions could easily lead to a celebratory narrative in Nordic popular music studies, but future studies of such place associations in Nordic popular music should consider the deeper tensions in discourses on Nordic identity engendered by the geographies of economic and political power. The chapter analysis has illustrated how such tensions surface in discussions that seem to be about musical aesthetics, and specifically about the authenticity of Nordic places and genre developments. Another complex aspect is the tension between Christian black metal and Nordic paganism, which shows how translocality involves both transgression and reconstitution of borders. Moreover, the social media culture of Nordic Christian metal shows how young people redefine national and religious identities through their participation in the international Christian metal community, challenging and potentially transforming dominant ideas of the Nordic religion as private and Lutheran Christians as modest.

Notes 1. See www.youtube.com/​watch?v=KoC1bRU8wGc. 2. See www.youtube.com/​user/​eternalemperor/​about. 3. See www.youtube.com/​all_​comments?v=KoC1bRU8wGc.

Christian metal and the Translocal North    141 4. Horde Live at Nordic Fest 2006. Posted on YouTube by IRONxEWOK, 2012. 5. Horde Live at Nordic Fest 2006. Posted on YouTube by signofthegoat, 2011. 6. Horde Live at Nordic Fest 2006. Posted on YouTube by Mosh4Yesh777, 2011. 7. See www.youtube.com/​watch?v=PwRtoBEybVU&feature=related. 8. Comment on Scandinavia Metal Praise, “Worthy Is the Lamb.” Posted on YouTube by rafalopes93, 2011. 9. See www.youtube.com/​all_​comments?v=PwRtoBEybVU. 10. Comment on Scandinavian Metal Praise. Posted on YouTube by r00rie, 2012. 11. Comment on Scandinavian Metal Praise. Posted on YouTube by Altairograph, 2012. 12. See www.youtube.com/​watch?v=u3I-​F9uwT3g&feature=related. 13. Comment on Scandinavian Metal Praise, “When the Spirit of the Lord.” Posted on YouTube by Gramirez1814, 2011.

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YouTube Postings Horde. Comments on Live at Nordic Fest 2006, Christian black metal, www.youtube.com/​all_​ comments?v=KoC1bRU8wGc. Scandinavian Metal Praise. Comments on “When the Spirit of the Lord,” www.youtube.com/​ all_​comments?v=u3I-​F9uwT3g. Scandinavian Metal Praise. Comments on “Worthy Is the Lamb” {Legendado PT—​BR}, www. youtube.com/​all_​comments?v=PwRtoBEybVU.

Chapter 7

Music and L and s c a pe in Icel a nd Tony Mitchell

Iceland is a leading contender among the Nordic countries in terms of its culture. It has the highest government expenditure on culture, a total of 3.3% of its gross domestic product (GDP) in 2011, well ahead of Denmark with a total of 1.6% of its GDP in 2011. Museums in Iceland also have the most visitors among the Nordic countries, an average of four and five visits per inhabitant. Its small population of 328,000 people has the highest literacy rate in the world (99%) and its people read more books than any other nation in the world. Iceland also has the highest proportion of writers in the world—​an estimated one in ten people will have a book published (Goldsmith 2013)—​as well as the best gender equality in the world and the most musicians per capita (Eliason 2014). Its jazz musicians score high in the annual Young Nordic Jazz Comets competition, and its filmmakers have won the last two Nordic Council Film Prizes (Benedikt Erlingsson’s Of Horses and Men in 2014, and Dagur Kári’s Fúsi in 2015), although they had not won a single time since the establishment of the award in 2002. The Nordic Council Music Prize, which was established in 1965 for living Nordic composers or musical ensembles, has been won by Iceland five times, with Björk winning the artist prize in 1997, the only popular singer ever to have done so. The Nordic Council Literature Prize has been won by Iceland writers seven times since 1962—​fewer than Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland, with Sjon, a poet who has collaborated with Björk, winning it in 2005. Iceland’s prominence among Nordic cultures, especially Nordic music, is thus notable. Recent discussions of Icelandic music, especially outside Iceland, almost inevitably invoke the contours, textures, and emotional grain of Iceland’s distinctively Nordic landscape (Picard 1999; Sullivan 2003; Dibben 2009b; Mitchell 2009, 2012). As Prior has noted, the “romantic exaltation” of natural beauty in the context of Iceland is tied to the assumptions that its music “could not have come from anywhere else but the rousing wastes and wilds of its landscape” and the assumption that a relational affinity exists between the natural environment and autochthonous creativity. But, he argues, “to reduce the complexity of musical worlds to the immanent or generative qualities

146   Geography of nature is simplistic at best, and damaging at worst” (Prior 2015, 84). Prior suggests that the “cultural agencies and intermediaries” (83) of the Icelandic music industry have had a far greater impact in marketing and disseminating Icelandic music than its landscape, especially recently, although the old attachments to landscape have tended to linger, often encouraged by Icelandic films and music videos (Dibben 2009a). Nonetheless, Icelandic landscape is the least favorite topic of discussion among Icelandic musicians, who see its invocation as a clichéd response to their music. This view has historically been encouraged by the nationalist landscape ideology of Iceland’s premier composer, Jón Leifs, who based three of his compositions directly on Icelandic topographical features. Geysir (1961), in the words of John Picard, is “the most obviously programmatic of the three, insofar as its structure describes an eruption of the Great Geysir itself,” while Dettifloss (1964) was described by the composer as “a dialogue between the poet [Einar Benediktsson (1864–​1940)] and the waterfall.” The most spectacular of the three works is based on the eruption of Mt. Hekla, considered to be the largest volcanic eruption of the twentieth century, which Leifs witnessed in 1947: “the notorious Hekla, an 8-​minute volcanic eruption of such overwhelming vehemence as to make the excesses of Le Sacre du Printemps or Varèse’s Amériques appear comparatively tame” (Picard 1999, 12). Picard’s description of the musical piece itself as a “volcanic eruption” emphasizes Leifs’s blending of his music with its object of representation. Videos accompanying the three pieces on YouTube offer a programmatic audiovisual display for the works that emphasizes the music’s direct link to natural forces. Picard also relates Leifs’s choral compositions to the Icelandic traditional form of tvisongur (twin song, sung by two voices), which he links directly to Iceland’s geographical fault line: “It is perhaps not too fanciful to liken these two lines to two geological plates, grinding against one another (Iceland is, after all, riven by the fault which separates the European and American continents)” (Picard 1999, 10). Dibben has discussed the use by Björk of both tvisongur (Dibben 2009a, 36)  and sonic and visual embodiments of the movement of tectonic plates (61) in her 1997 album Homogenic, an attempt to produce a self-​defining album of “Icelandic techno.” Dibben also summarizes the results of a database of words used by 152 English-​language reviewers of Björk’s music between 1984 and 2006. Seventeen prominent topics emerge, based on the most recurrent target words:  landscape, folklore (including sprites, elves, goblins, trolls, and pixies, which occupy the highest mean percentage, 23%), ice, eccentricity, northern people, nature, light, water, magic, gender, Vikings, exploration, fire, travel, supernatural aspects, violent (land) movement, and sanctuary. This indicates that Björk’s music is predominantly perceived globally as “elemental,” ethereal, and geomorphic, deeply grounded in Icelandic geography, nature, and culture. Dibben notes: The elision of the Icelandic nation with landscape and nature has historically been an important aspect of Iceland’s national ideology, and is found throughout much of its contemporary popular music. Iceland’s distinctive topological features (mountains, volcanoes, glaciers, lava fields, waterfalls, geysers, hot springs, cliffs, black sand

Music and Landscape in Iceland    147 beaches, and the sea) frequently appear in music videos and documentaries and form part of Iceland’s rural landscape ideology of “pure” nature free from human intervention. (Dibben 2009b, 135)

Popular musicians have also been active in ecological projects and in embodying Icelandic “landscape ideology” (Dibben 2009a, 59). However, Sullivan has noted that many Icelandic musicians find it difficult to talk about the influence of landscape and natural forces on their music, commenting that it is “simply there” (Sullivan 2003, 121), and they are sometimes frustrated that it is such a frequently asked question by visitors to the country. This suggests that Icelandic musicians are resistant to excessively localized interpretations of their music from outside (many of them, like Björk, and Of Monsters and Men, sing in English, in the interests of reaching a more global audience, although the latter also invoke landscape in their songs). Sullivan notes: It has become a cliché to describe Icelandic music in terms of its environment, although it is tempting at times, no matter how hard you try and resist. The slowly unfurling sounds of Sigur Rós seem the perfect description of Iceland’s vast, open landscapes, for example, as do Hilmar Örn Hilmarson’s emotive soundtracks, Múm’s pockmarked fantasy worlds, Ilo’s gorgeous electronic washes, Minus’s violent thrash-​ outs, and, of course, Björk’s own dramatic compositions. (Sullivan 2003, 122)

Clichés aside, it is clear from the almost constant visual representation of Icelandic music in terms of landscape, seascape, and icescape in music videos, films, and documentaries that they are an important aspect of Icelandic identity, ecology, and metaphorical conversation. The recent rise in the number of Icelandic hip hop groups in Reykjavík shows a recent development of more urban conceptions of music, although even there, a rapper such as Gísli Pálmi calls his crew the Glacier Mafia, while the Reykjavíkurdætur (Daughters of Reykjavík), a twenty-​plus collective of women, address more feminist concerns, refusing to be complacent about the perceived equality of women in Iceland (see Mitchell 2015).

Conversations with Landscape Returning to Leifs’s idea of a “dialogue between the poet and the waterfall,” in 2010 a group of Icelandic archeologists, anthropologists, geographers, literary critics, historians, philosophers, environmentalists, art critics, and visual artists, together with colleagues from Scotland, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, published Conversations With Landscape. This book was edited by Karl Benediktson, a geographer, and Katrín Anna Lund, an anthropologist, and it examines the Icelandic concept of landscape and the idea that “visual perception of landscape happens through a more general bodily engagement that involves all senses” (Lund and Benediktsson 2010, 7).1

148   Geography Music plays a secondary role in passing references in the book to the role of musicians in the movement against large-​scale hydroelectric projects in Iceland, “the exploits of sailors and fishers … in popular music” (193, 204), the documentation of human relations with seals “in folklore and songs” (219), and the use of the concept of attunement in sensing landscape and space in the experience of the aurora borealis (233, 237). There is also reference to Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s use of a musical analogy to describe “the lives of creatures … like melody in counterpoint” and “the entirety of living nature, so conceived, … as an immense, polyphonic score” (243). The authors evoke a plethora of ideas and features relating to the vital importance of landscape in Iceland and its emotional and behavioral impact. For example, a “Nordic” understanding of landscape regards it as in the making, and “lived/​worked/​practiced.” This is significantly different from “the visually-​centred and pictorial understanding prevailing in Britain and much of the English-​speaking world,” and Icelandic landscapes are perceived as possessing a “diversity and dynamism” (8). The metaphor of conversation with landscape runs throughout the book, disrupting binary notions of subjective and objective perceptions of nature, evoking “metaphysical experiences of wild landscape” that include “[f]‌olkoristic beliefs, myths and tales of hidden people and natural beings” (22), and situating humans within landscape, where “a sublime, awesome or wonderful landscape certainly has the ability to provoke a change in one’s own worldview” (39). Edda Waage invokes Bruno Latour’s actor network theory in arguing that the Icelandic term for landscape, landslag, “is the name given to an aesthetic relation between humans and the inanimate natural world” (Waage 2010, 47), and relates to the “nature” or “lie” of a country. She draws on the Icelandic sagas of the fourteenth century to claim that the “visual, morphological and aesthetic were already intertwined and embedded in the concept [of landslag]” (53), and that “the Icelandic landslag appears in a society of subsistence farmers and seafarers, living in a country that had only recently been settled” (54). This contrasts significantly with the nineteenth-​century British concept of landscape as a scenic resource for the educated classes (52). But Oscar Aldred (2010, 69) points to the applicability to Iceland of the palimpsest metaphor in terms of the “time-​depth of England’s landscape,” in the sense that “[t]he surface of England is a palimpsest, a document that has been written on and erased over and over again” (Crawford 1953, 51). He notes, however, that this reduction of landscape to a text to be deciphered “misrepresents the processes of landscape accumulation” (Aldred 2010, 70). Wilson explains how stories about the much-​vaunted Icelandic huldufólk (“hidden people”) and ghosts and outlaws, which, she was told while walking through the mountains of Tröllaskagi in the north of Iceland, provided an invaluable form of conversation which animated the landscape: “[E]‌very natural feature becomes an included part of society, a rock, a hill, becomes a persona itself, through the beings and histories who inhabit this wild land, it becomes connected to the people who have struggled to survive and often lost” (Lund and Wilson 2010, 105). In discussing landscape and aesthetic values, Guðbjörg Jóhannesdóttir applies German philosopher Gernot Böhme’s concept of atmosphere to an in-​ between

Music and Landscape in Iceland    149 emotion in perceiving landscape, linking the subjective and objective, relating it to field work carried out on participant responses to Icelandic glacial and geothermal landscapes, and showing how “atmospheres can be created by the objective physical features of a landscape and how they are then experienced by the perceiver [in terms of] an atmosphere of wonder and awe” (Jóhannesdóttir 2010, 119). Scottish geographer Emily Brady discusses Icelandic landscapes in terms of “the sublime, ugliness and ‘terrible beauty’ ”: Many of Iceland’s volcanoes are still active, with devastating eruptions occurring in recent times. The results of this activity are calderas, vast lava fields and black sand deserts. The lava fields are uneven, dull-​coloured, with many easily accessible from populated regions such as Reykjavík. The calderas and deserts are a more common feature of the highlands in the interior of the country presenting moonscape-​like places which can be both eerie and breath-​taking. Below the ground are geothermal areas with hot springs, boiling mud and extraordinary geysers. In sharp contrast, huge glaciers cover vast areas in the interior, with powerful waterfalls, glacial rivers and plains flowing through the landscape, and dramatic fjords cutting into the edges of the country. Looking upwards, there are sweeping high mountains, and in many places free from light pollution, there is the immense night sky. (Brady 2010, 127)

These features invoke both the sublime and ugliness, involving “a range of meaningful interactions with nature which lie beyond the realm of easy aesthetic appreciation … that strains us through its uneasiness” (Brady 2010, 135). Anna Jóhannsdóttir and Ástráður Eysteinsson discuss the way that city-​born Icelanders have domesticated landscape in the form of sófamálverk (“sofa paintings”), which are paintings of landscapes by prominent artists placed on the wall above the living room sofa (Jóhannsdóttir and Eysteinsson 2010, 145). Sveinn Yngvi Egilsson analyses some of the landscape poetry of Iceland’s foremost romantic poet, also a natural scientist, Jónas Hallgrímsson (1807–​1845), examples of which contain scientific analysis, reflections on history and politics, and horrors (such as ghosts) that are both “evoked by some outer, natural forces, but horrors which are also subjective and self-​ reflective” (Egilsson 2010, 165).2 Karl Bendiktsson points out the importance of sheep as actors on Icelandic roads as well as within the landscape, using von Uexküll’s concept of the umwelt (environment) of animals, and argues that “the phenomenal world of the animal be taken into account” (Bendiktsson 2010, 187) in the semiotic analysis of landscape. Canadian anthropologist Anne Brydon discusses the concept of sentience in relation to the whaling industry, the importance of considering the ocean as landscape, and hydroelectric development in Iceland, in a highly polemical essay, which explains how [i]‌mages carried on television and the internet, in documentaries and in art exhibits, of reindeer and pink-​footed geese, rivers, waterfalls, rocks and mountains—​ in short, landscapes—​ made hauntingly visible what the government and

150   Geography Landsvirkjun [the largest energy producer in Iceland] called barren wasteland. (Brydon 2010, 201)

One of the main arguments throughout the book is how expressions of aesthetic appreciation of landscape are usually discredited by government and by industrial and scientific representatives as sentimental and unscientific. In discussing the role of seals and other animals in Icelandic landscape and seascape, Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson conclude: Just as we increasingly understand that other animals are specifically such in relation to their dwelling, so we must recognize our own interdependence with habitat and the danger that by sustaining our unfettered and exploitative use of “resources,” including “land” and “animal others,” we resolutely keep our backs turned against the illuminating and rewarding conversation we might otherwise have. (Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson 2010, 225).

British geographer Tim Edensor discusses ways in which the aurora borealis (northern lights) extends and expands understandings of landscape, especially in relation to how they enhance vitalist notions of landscape, where the sensory impact of energies of weather, temperature, wind, sounds of rivers and streams, moisture, and other forces at work are considered, and the whole landscape is a heterogeneous medium of sensual, affective and emotional experience in which the light, the weather and the ground underfoot are not merely external objects available for inspection and perception, for the perceiver is inextricably entangled with that which is perceived. (Edensor 2010, 231)

This again suggests that the impact of Icelandic landscape on human emotions and behavior is interactive and dynamic. In his epilogue, Scottish professor of social anthropology Tim Ingold returns to von Uexküll, who would concur that non-​humans are unable to converse in words, [but] he would allow that they could converse in the way that musicians do, in gestures whose meanings lie in their melodic inflections and contrapuntal relations. Yet the music that each hears is radically different and impenetrable to others. (Ingold 2010, 250)

This suggests also that the three compositions by Jón Leifs referred to earlier do not need any visual association beyond their titles to evoke the disturbing and dramatic sonoric landscapes of a geyser, a waterfall, and a volcanic eruption. Conversations with Landscape is an important contribution to a multidisciplinary approach to landscape in Iceland, which sees (and on occasions, hears, feels, smells, and touches) it as an active, affective, and vital form of dynamic multi-​sensory engagement, and relates it to music in numerous ways.

Music and Landscape in Iceland    151

Dreamland Anne Brydon also makes reference to Andri Snær Magnason’s book Dreamland: A Self-​ Help Manual for a frightened Nation (2006), published in English with a short preface by Björk in 2008, and his documentary film based on the book (2009), directed by Magnason and Þorfinnur Guðnason, Draumlandið (Dreamland), about the Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Project and its environmental impact in Iceland. As Björk noted in her preface: Most Icelanders are not against dams or harnessing nature, but believe it can be done in a “green” way, without sacrificing nature, and so the Icelandic people profit from it, not the international industrial giants. Andri in his book not only explains the situation—​what these politicians did behind the scenes—​but also suggests other ways to interact with Icelandic nature and keep one’s dignity. (quoted in Magnason 2008, 7)

In using the words “interact with Icelandic nature,” Björk is in synchrony with the authors of Conversations with Nature, just as Sigur Rós, in the tour of Iceland they chronicled in the film Heima, chose to play a totally acoustic concert when they performed near Kárahnjúkar, in protest against the dams being built there. The film Draumalandið (Dreamland) deals with the devastation of the Icelandic countryside and natural resources for aluminum smelters by U.S. company Alcoa and the Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Project, at the behest at the pre-​Kreppa (economic collapse) Icelandic government, which attracted overseas developers with the promise of “the cheapest energy in the world.” It has been described by Ezra Winton as “a visual treatise that exposes the greed and corruption that has befallen Iceland like a plague of myopic and avaricious infection of the mind and heart. It is a poem to the natural world and speaks for ecology through stunning cinematography and the pacing of a practiced orchestra” (Winton 2010). The music for the film was composed by Björk’s former producer Valgeir Sigurðsson, and recorded in his ecologically named Greenhouse Studios, with electronic programming and other input from musicians from his Bedroom Community label: Americans Nico Muhly, Paul Corley, and Sam Amidon, fellow Icelandic composer Daníel Bjarnason, and transplanted Australian Ben Frost. In addition, the viola player Nadia Sirota played an important part, along with an Icelandic orchestral ensemble featuring violins, cellos, double basses, bassoons, French horns, a trombone, marimba, harp, percussion, and a prepared piano played by Valgeir and prepared by Bjarnason. In the first track on the CD, which reedited the music used in the film into a more meaningful sequence of tracks, Amidon sings a powerful, glitched-​up Icelandic folksong, “Grýlukvæði,” about a greedy hag who comes to devour naughty children, which seems to be a metaphor for the heavy-​ duty machinery devouring the land. As Magnason wrote in his liner notes for the CD: It was clear that the music needed to span a vast territory—​melancholic strings and deep, sonorous electro-​vibes could act as a foreshadowing of impending

152   Geography disaster. Without making the audience feel manipulated, tension needed to be created to underline, to accent, to enhance or temper the film’s effect in the appropriate places… . One could say the essence of their approach to the score can be found in the Icelandic folksong Grýlukvæði: something is off and it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what. There is a distortion, a din and a defamiliarising quality that is difficult to put into words. Flying over the Flötsdatur waterfalls that are no longer there, a solitary viola is our guide, and we can sense the threat. The music creates an intense atmosphere when we fly over the sand pyramids on Vatnajökull, in the direction of an area that is to be destroyed because of a short-​term gold rush. The shrill brass tones resonate ad contrast the heavy, impenetrable silence. (Magnason 2008)

It is clear from this description that the music plays an active role in the ecological impact of the film, more than just the usual underscoring, atmospheric role that film

Figure  7.1  Album cover for Valgeir Sigurðsson’s soundtrack to Draumlandið (Dreamland), 2009

Music and Landscape in Iceland    153 music usually plays. The titles of other tracks on the album indicate their direct involvement in landscape ideology: “Past Tundra,” “Cold Ground, Hot,” “Beyond the Moss,” and “Helter Smelter” (see fi ­ gure 7.1). The mood throughout is dark, somber, and gloomy, with a strong sense of tension and threat. As Valgeir told me in 2012, he was responding to those landscapes being destroyed and demolished and abused and sold off to corporations, so the music is about the land and the landscape… . It’s propaganda! It’s definitely taking the side of protecting, and looking beyond just selling off the landscape. So it’s taking a clear view of the subject, and at the same time pointing out things that have been going on throughout history. And the music was there to help the viewer to understand this a bit more immediately, and maybe have a stronger emotional response to the film. (Mitchell 2012)

On the more general issue of landscape and music in Iceland, Valgeir stated: I think wherever you are and you grow up and what you’re surrounded by—​books and landscape—​it all gets into your blood somehow. I don’t know how that translates into music—​maybe someone who listens to the music and then looks at the landscape or the other way around will make the connection. I don’t think any of us looks out the window and thinks “I’ll be inspired by the view.” So maybe it’s a more complicated path. (Mitchell 2012)

This suggests a more indirect, even subliminal influence of landscape on Icelandic music.

Landscape and Music in Icelandic Film Danish film critic Birgir Thor Møller begins his short history of Icelandic cinema, “In and Out of Reykjavík: Framing Iceland in the Global Daze” by emphasizing the role of landscape: “It seems difficult, if not impossible, for the international press to frame and describe Icelandic art, music, or film—​no matter what period it belongs to—​without referring to the country’s larger-​than-​life landscape, history, or folklore, even if for understandable reasons” (Møller 2005, 307). He applies this “contextualizing strategy” to the films of Iceland’s most prominent film director, Friðrik Þór Friðriksson, which have a direct connection to Icelandic landscape, amplified by the music by Hilmar Örn Hilmarson. Hilmarson is allsherjargoði (high priest) of the Ásatrú pagan religious sect in Iceland, who believe in Old Norse deities. In this role he erected a níðstöng (“scorn-​pole”) against the Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Project in 2003. He is also something of a musical polymath, having written and performed on guitar, bass, harp, and percussion, as well as doing production duties in almost every genre from pop to blues to punk, rap and classical. He has also composed music for more than twenty-​five films, and collaborated with Sigur Rós on Hrafngaldr Óðins (Odin’s Raven-​Magic), based on an Icelandic saga, in 2002, and with

154   Geography rímur (traditional rhymed chanting) singer Steindór Andersen. The 2006 album Dust to Dust assembles some of Hilmarsson’s film music for films by Friðriksson, who began his career with the music documentary about the early 1980s Reykjavík punk scene, Rokk í Reykjavík (1982), and was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film for his 1991 Börn Náttúrunur (Children of Nature), placing Icelandic cinema in an international spotlight for the first time. Hilmarsson received a Felix, the European music award, for his music for Children of Nature, which as Møller states, “blends Icelandic church and folk traditions with the late romantic (which is the cornerstone of Hilmarsson’s as well as that of more traditional classic film music)” (2005, 314). Møller also notes that both Children of Nature and Hilmarsson’s 1994 Bíodagar (Movie Days) generated “a colourful Icelandic debate in the 1990s about the movie industry’s aesthetic and thematic use of nature. A number of people argued that the nation’s film industry focused too much on nature, presenting an overly romanticized picture of the old and poor peasant community” (Møller 2005, 322). This debate persisted in newspapers and in the bimonthly film journal Land og synir (Land and Sons) until 1997, and was as much about the image that Icelandic cinema presented globally as domestic concerns. Children of Nature is a road movie that deals with the escape in a stolen jeep of Þorgeir, a former farmer, who has been admitted by his daughter to an old people’s home in Reykjavík, and his old flame Stella, to the old rural farm in northwestern Iceland where they both grew up, before their parents moved away. Much of the film presents long shots of remote Icelandic landscape, along the Hornstrandir coast, a nature reserve with arctic foxes, numerous birds, and diverse flora, popular for hiking in the north of the Westfjords. There is little or no dialogue, and the ambient music emphasizes the beauty of the land’s contours, and even evokes magic realist supernatural elements, such as the appearance of German actor Bruno Ganz, reprising his role from Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire (1987), to assist Þorgeir in his final release. (Wenders had attended the first Icelandic film festival in 1978 and had given encouragement to Friðriksson, who was showing his first short film.) The opening track of the film’s soundtrack CD, “Ars Moriendi,” a meditation on the art of dying, features a slow, haunting, poignant, high-​register violin solo, accompanied by cello and ambient sounds, which sets a suitably melancholic mood. “Suðurgata” (named after a street in Reykjavík) features what sounds like an íslensk fiðla, a traditional two-​string Icelandic fiddle, evoking a folk atmosphere, again with a haunting melody, while “Coffin” features a violin accompanied by a church-​like organ. The overall mood of the music is funereal, matching the mood of the characters in the remote and striking landscape. Møller notes that Friðriksson’s early career as a filmmaker “focused thematically on contrasts in modern Iceland, which swings between modern and traditional, the American and the Icelandic, film and the folk tale, city and country” (Møller 2005, 318). Á Köldum klaka (Cold Fever, 1995)  is also a road movie, about a trek across Iceland in wintertime to a remote part of the country by a Japanese businessman, Hirata, to perform a ritual for his parents who drowned there in an avalanche seven years previously, and the strange encounters he has along the way. As Møller points out, “the story was inspired by a newspaper article about a group of Japanese geologists

Music and Landscape in Iceland    155 who drowned in a remote Icelandic river,” as well as the fact that Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train (1989) had featured in the 1989 Reykavík film festival, with Japanese actor Masatoshi Nagase in attendance (Møller 2005, 323–​324). Hirata completes the last phase of his journey on horseback, and passes hot pools, geysers, waterfalls and many other features of Icelandic topography along the way. He functions as a kind of guide to foreign audiences to some of the main sightseeing highlights of the country, and the fact that he has to communicate with all and sundry in English means that it is an English-​language film (it was also internationally funded). Hilmarson’s still ambient, but more percussive rock-​oriented electronic music, including ethereal choral singing and Icelandic singing cowboys, expresses the hardship of the journey through strange and haunting places and harsh geographical features, but also a degree of Icelandic quirkiness. Track titles such as “Wanderer of the Waste,” “Ghost Medley,” and “Spirit of Solitude” emphasize the sense of desolation, supernatural elements, and isolation. The film again provoked controversy, with many Icelanders complaining that it showed the country in an unfavorable light, even making fun of them, owing to the eccentric locals that Hirata meets on his journey. This led Friðriksson to comment: “[Icelandic] national feeling [is] subdued by an inferiority complex due to the size of the rest of the world. On the other hand, we also suffer from megalomania. So the nation is somewhat schizophrenic, and that is what I enjoy playing around with” (quoted in Møller 2005, 324). In Englar alheimsins (Angels of the Universe, 2000), based on a novel by Einar Már Guðmundsson, who also wrote the screenplay, Páll, a working-​class young man obsessed with art, music, and poetry, becomes depressed and mentally unstable after his upper-​middle-​class girlfriend rejects him. He is committed to a mental institution, where he joins forces with various delusional characters, including a man who believes he wrote all the Beatles’ songs. After he is released, he struggles to regain his sanity, eventually committing suicide. As befits a more urban-​based film, the music is more varied, incorporating American blues songs like “I Put a Spell on You,” although these are not included on the soundtrack album, and two ambient post-​rock tracks by Sigur Rós, as well as Hilmarson’s more ambient music. This is described in a review by Dean Carlson in All Music as overcast and ethereal … perpetually in tune with the film’s despair … written with such a complex mixture of opaque strings and acoustic guitars that one imagines the composer having a tragic breakdown of his own during the songwriting process… . Sigur Rós has two pieces … a long, hypnotic interpretation of an ancient Irish-​ Icelandic lullaby … [and] “Dánarfregnir Og Jarðafarir” (Death Announcement and Funerals), … a slightly more prog-​rock take on a Jóni Múli Arnason composition. (Iceland radio service used the original track to relate daily deaths and arrangements.) (Carlson 2013).

The music expresses the film’s “stirring, remarkable melancholia” (Carlson 2013) in a particularly effective way, evoking an overall somber mood mixed with moments of absurd comedy.

156   Geography

Nói the Albino Another indication that Icelandic film, music, and “sonoric landscapes” are inextricably intertwined is the case of Dagur Kári Pétursson, musician and film director, whose first film Nói Albínói (Nói the Albino) had an international impact following its release in 2003, being selected for a number of international film festivals. Filmed with a cast of amateurs in various parts of the Westfjords, the remotest part of Iceland, where Children of Nature was also set, and an area also notorious for landslides, it deals with the isolation of its protagonist Nói (played by Tómas Lemarquis, primarily a visual artist whose work plays on his baldness). Nói is a slacker anti-​hero with alopecia who dreams of escaping to Hawaii, a slide of which he has in a viewfinder given to him by his grandmother. He spends most of his time wandering the desolate town of the remote fishing village he lives in, hanging out at the local bookshop, or in an underground cellar in his grandmother’s house. This latter location saves him from a landslide that kills almost everyone in the village, including Íris (Elín Hansdóttir, also a visual artist), a girl from Reykjavík whom he had befriended briefly. (This rather slender connection to Reykjavík enables Jez Conolly and Caroline Whelan to include a scene from the film on the cover of their 2012 book World Film Locations: Reykjavík. They note that the filling station in which Íris works is in Þingeyri, 429 kilometres from Reykjavík). In a key cartographic scene, Nói and Íris break into the local natural history museum on a freezing cold night, and amid a display of Icelandic fauna they discover a large map of the world containing red light bulbs that light up when buttons indicating different countries are pushed. They discover there is no button for Iceland, which Nói comments “looks like a spit” on the world map. Iris then suggests they run away, covering Nói’s eyes and telling him to “press any button.” Hawaii lights up, and they embrace and kiss, their profiles obscuring most of Europe on the map, but leaving Iceland and Greenland clearly visible. In later scenes, Nói is expelled from school, despite solving a Rubik’s Cube, takes a job in a graveyard, and makes an inept attempt to rob a bank with his grandfather’s shotgun, but is not taken seriously by anyone in the bank. He then steals a car with the intention of running away with Íris, but the car becomes stuck in the snow and he is arrested. In the final scene of the film, after the avalanche, Nói looks through his viewfinder. Pétursson wrote and performed the lo-​fi soundtrack to the film with his band Slowblow, and the indie pop amateurishness of the music seems appropriate for Nói’s character. Recorded by Valgeir Sigurðsson, and mixed to tape at the Sigur Rós studio in Mosfellsbær, the score is minimal, almost inconsequential, played, like a lot of Icelandic music, on a wide variety of instruments, including five-​string acoustic guitar, kalimba (thumb piano), musical saw, tambourine, xylophone, Copicat effects, banjo, harmonium, lap steel guitar, wordless vocals, and trumpet. There are also two tracks by Sigríður Níelsdóttir, known as “Grandma Lo-​Fi,” who began her prolific recording career at age seventy, without any formal musical training

Music and Landscape in Iceland    157 or ability to read music, and died in 2011. She was a Seventh-​Day Adventist, and released some fifty CDs of her own compositions, which she transferred from cassettes, designing the covers herself, and sold through local Reykjavík record shops. Interviewing her in 2002, Paul Sullivan stated: “Given how basic her recording system was—​a microphone, a MIDI hi fi and organ—​I was expecting her songs to be pretty raw. They were. But they were also very tuneful, and not surprisingly, had a naïve sweetness about them. Some of them sounded like jazzed-​up hymns (Sullivan 2003, 241). Since being endorsed by Björk and other leading figures on the Reykjavík music scene, Níelsdóttir had become something of a local celebrity. One track on the Nói the Albino soundtrack album is an instrumental played on her Casio organ, and the other is sung in Icelandic with piano accompaniment. Most tracks on the soundtrack album are short, with the exception of “Elegy,” a somber twelve-​and-​a-​half-​minute recording of the first part of String Quartet no. 15 in E Flat Minor by Shostakovich, performed by the Dutch Rubio Quartet. The last track, which was played over the final credits of the film, is a slow, mournful song by Slowblow, “Aim for a Smile,” sung in English by band member Orri Jónsson, also a photographer and designer, and co-​director of a 2012 documentary film about Níelsdóttir, accompanied by Pétursson on banjo. The album illustrates the collaborative nature of the very small but prolific Reykjavík music scene, as Pétursson told Paul Sullivan in 2002: [T]‌he scene is small and concentrated and everybody knows everybody… . The musicians like to hang out together and exchange talent, equipment, contacts and so forth. There is a general feeling of co-​operation, instead of competition. The borders are fluid, and the musicians are often members of more than one band, or else they make guest appearances all over the place. There is absolutely no governmental support, and maybe that generates solidarity. (Sullivan 2003, 217)

In his book-​length study of Nói Albínói, University of Iceland academic Björn Ægir Norðfjörð applies Tom Conley’s (2006) notion of cartographic cinema in an extensive analysis of the film in its historical and geographical setting, pointing out that on many maps of Europe, Iceland simply does not appear, owing to its troublesome position across the sea in the upper right-​hand corner. The film emphasizes this marginality by focusing on the Westfjords, a marginal area within Iceland itself, illustrated by the cartographic scene in the natural history museum. Norðfjörð draws attention to the map of the Westfjords on the wall in a scene in which a fireman studies Nói’s coffee cup: Instead of contextualizing Iceland with the rest of the world, this map situates the Westfjords as a distinct locale within Iceland. The Westfjords is separate not only from the rest of the world but also from Iceland… . Without the Westfjords, Iceland would be almost perfectly round and in many ways it is as if the Westfjords were a separate landmass, excluded as it is from the national highway. The triangle-​like area is characterized by numerous narrow fjords divided by high and steep mountains that seem to rise straight out of the sea, making transportation difficult by land and sea, especially during winter. The dwindling population of around 7,500 inhabitants

158   Geography relies primarily on fishing, as the land is mostly ill-​suited to agriculture and big industry. (Nordfjörd 2010, 56 and 70)

So the Westfjords could be defined as a troublesome, peripheral area in a peripheral country. Hesteyri, a deserted village accessible only by boat on the Hornstrandir coast of the Westfjords, is the setting for Yrsa Sigurðardóttir’s 2012 gothic thriller Ég man Þig (I Remember You), in which three visitors attempting to renovate a derelict house are haunted by “undead” children, along with all kinds of eerie events. As Sigurðardóttir commented in a blog entitled “Murder Is Everywhere: Hesteyri,” the place engenders ecological thoughts: The village has no phones, mobile connections, electricity or running water, aside from what passes by in the form of a small stream. It is the penultimate item that makes me squirm and what kicks the feet from under me as an author… . Being at Hesteyri or anywhere in the world where time has stood still makes me wonder about how much has evolved and how easy our life in the west has become… . Much thinking about this has led me to a conclusion which is a bit sad. I think our times will be looked at with disdain not because of what we wear, eat or drive. We will be infamous because of our spendthrift ways, consuming way too much of the limited resources available to us without much afterthought or conscience. (Sigurðardóttir 2010)

The landscapes Sigurðardóttir’s characters encounter are “sonoric,” as well as threatening, uncanny, foul-​smelling, and sometimes dangerous to the touch, reminding us of the “ugliness and ‘terrible beauty’ ” Emily Brady finds in Icelandic landscape. These aspects are echoed in the music of Jón Leifs, Björk, and Sigur Rós, as well as in Valgeir Sigurðsson’s music for Dreamland, Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson’s music for Friðrik Þór Friðriksson’s films, and Slowblow’s music for Nói the Albino, among many other examples of Icelandic music, where “conversations with landscape” are negotiated in musical form.

Conclusion: Encountering Borealism The Icelandic scholar Kristinn Schram (2011, 4) has invoked the term borealism, a word deriving from the aurora borealis, to describe “the exotic performances and representations of Icelanders and ‘the North.’ ” Based on Edward Said’s term orientalism, a now highly contested label that refers to ontological distinctions between East and West where power relations inevitably favor the West, Schram applies the term to analogous distinctions between North and South. The idea of Nordic orientalism was first evoked in a very different sense from Said’s in 2005 by Elizabeth Oxfeldt (2005), who applied it to nineteenth-​century Denmark and Norway, where orientalist imagery was appropriated from Paris.

Music and Landscape in Iceland    159 In relation to Icelandic cinema, Schram claims that Friðrik Þór Friðriksson’s films such as Children of Nature “have mainly depicted rural Iceland essentially as a wonderland of colourful characters; archaic customs and mannerisms; traditional ghosts and magic” (2011, 124). The local characters in Cold Fever have been described as “backward eccentrics” (126), and Schram claims that Friðriksson’s films rely on “a performative storytelling context where actuality is not sacrosanct” (128–​129). This latter qualification could surely be applied to fictional feature films of any country that are not realist. Schram goes on to explain that in Friðriksson’s films, “the ironies involved are in many ways the product of transnational reflexivity: an awareness of one’s own culture through the eyes of outsiders” (130). One could argue, however, that most national cinemas are the product of this type of “transnational reflexivity”; the main difference in Icelandic cinema (and Icelandic music) is that it is a relatively recent newcomer to global screens, and this factor has led to a certain degree of exoticization outside Iceland. Of Nói the Albino, Schram comments on the film’s resemblance to the fantastic stories of ancient Icelandic sagas: [T]‌here is something consciously Icelandic about it—​and it’s not just the snowscapes. There’s a fantastical quality to the story, as if it were based on an ancient folk tale. After Björk and cod, Iceland’s best known product is probably its medieval sagas. Perhaps it is inevitable that foreign eyes will read the film in this context. (Schram 2011, 131)

This is not deliberate exoticization (as Schram acknowledges, Dagur Kári Pétursson based the small town in Nói the Albino on Springfield in The Simpsons); rather, it is an imaginative representation of characters living in a remote part of Iceland. Schram also reads Nói “wearing the signature Icelandic woollen cap,” which in fact the actor wears because he has alopecia, a condition he plays on in his visual art, as “a representation of Icelandic rural life” (131). He also notes that Pétursson had never experienced a landslide at first hand, and the process of simulating one for the film became such a “real” and disturbing “performance in itself ” (134) that the director decided not to include landslide footage in the film but, rather, Nói’s reactions to seeing footage of it on television. This suggests that Kari in fact went out of his way to avoid any suggestions of exoticist exploitation of natural events. Another aspect of Icelandic film that Schram discusses in terms of borealism is the exoticization of Icelandic food. In Nói the Albino, the preparation of blood pudding is presented “in almost barbaric fashion,” and the protagonist spills a large bowl of blood in a scene of grotesque comedy, while in Myrin (Jar City, 2006), Baltasar Kormakur’s film based on the novel by Arnaldur Indriðason, there is a now-​famous scene in which the detective protagonist “is seen digging into a particularly gelatinous dish of singed sheep’s head or svið … to catch the othering eye of foreign audiences” (Schram 2011, 135). Schram argues that these traditional Icelandic dishes, along with “sour ram’s testicles and cured skate,” are strongly associated with “folksy patriotism” (134–​135), and their representation in films has “a potentially deprecating effect on the nation’s image, depicting it rather as eccentric and peripheral” (136). He concludes that such

160   Geography representations amount to the “contemporary exposition of Icelanders as primitive and exotic nature-​folk” (137). Although this is only a small part of Schram’s overall thesis, and he does not deal with Icelandic music, which may be similarly “guilty” of forms of borealism in its frequent evocations of what has been referred to as “krútt” (cute or twee), with brightly colored childlike clothing and behavior in relation to Icelandic independent music followers who are fans of Björk, Sigur Rós, Múm, and other bands (see Gunni 2013, 192–​ 203), it seems difficult to uphold this thesis. The term “krútt,” first used by writer Gerður Kristný Guðjónsdóttir in 2002, has also been applied to a 2012 documentary film about Sigríður Níelsdóttir (a.k.a. Grandma Lo-​Fi), who contributed to the soundtrack of Nói the Albino (Domaruth 2009; Louder 2012). Although “krútt” is a domestic term, without transnational applications, it could be seen to operate as a form of self-​borealism, just as Said’s term has become applied to a context of self-​orientalism (and also of its opposite, occidentalism, mostly in a Chinese context). While borealism has yet to go through the processes of expansion and reversal that have complicated orientalism, it is perhaps a useful starting point for discussion of the widespread exoticization of Icelandic film and music. In an article about “krútt,” Domaruth quotes the owner of a Reykjavik fashion store, who sums up a particularly Icelandic dilemma: Icelanders sometimes feel like a very isolated, small nation. Consequently, it’s very important for us to be independent from other nations and stand out. There is a different kind of energy in Iceland, an energy that probably serves in making us more extreme in everything we do. (quoted in Domaruth 2009)

The Reykjavik Grapevine, in which a number of articles about “krútt” have appeared, is an English-​language weekly newspaper aimed primarily at tourists, foreigners, and resident expatriates. Is this statement, then, just another version of borealism? Meanwhile, Iceland continues to be one of the most popular tourist destinations in Europe, as much for the thriving music scene in Reykjavík as for its landscape.

Notes 1. For simplicity, the following quotations are taken from the edited volume as a whole, while more detailed discussions with quotations mention the chapter authors. 2. Extensively annotated English translations by Dick Ringler of Hallgrímsson’s poems can be found online at www.library.wisc.edu/​etext/​jonas/​.

References Works Cited Aldred, O. 2010. “Time for Fluent Landscapes.” In Conversations with Landscape, ed. K. Benediktsson and K. Lund, 59–​78. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.

Music and Landscape in Iceland    161 Benediktsson, K. 2010. “A Stroll through Landscapes of Sheep and Humans.” In Conversations with Landscape, ed. K. Benediktsson and K. Lund, 173–​192. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Brady, E. 2010. “The Sublime, Ugliness and ‘Terrible Beauty’ in Icelandic Landscapes.” In Conversations with Landscape, ed. K. Benediktsson and K. Lund, 125–​ 136. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Brydon, A. 2010. “Sentience.” In Conversations with Landscape, ed. K. Benediktsson and K. Lund, 193–​210. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Carlson, D. 2013. Review of Angels of the Universe. All Music. At www.allmusic.com/​album/​ angels-​of-​the-​universe-​iceland-​mw0000961473. Conley, T. 2006. Cartographic Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Conolly, J., and C. Whelan. 2012. World Film Locations: Reykjavík. Bristol: Intellect Books. Crawford, O. G. S. 1953. Archaeology in the Field. London: Dent and Sons. Dibben, N. 2009a. Björk. London: Equinox. Dibben, N. 2009b. “Nature and Nation:  National Identity and Environmentalism in Icelandic Popular Music Video and Music Documentary.” Ethnomusicology Forum 18(1): 131–​151. Domaruth, I. 2009. “Dress Code Rvk:  Cutie Pies, etc., Run Amok.” Icelandic Grapevine, August 5, Edensor, T. 2010. “Aurora Landscapes:  Affective Atmospheres of Light and Dark.” In Conversations with Landscape, ed. K. Benediktsson and K. Lund, 227–​240. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Egilsson, S. 2010. “Ways of Addressing Nature in a Northern Context:  Romantic Poet and Natural Scientist Jónas Hallgrímsson.” In Conversations with Landscape, ed. K. Benediktsson and K. Lund, 157–​172. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Eliason, M. 2014. “The ‘Per Capita’ Champion of the World.” Iceland Magazine, October 22. At http://​icelandmag.visir.is/​article/​capita-​champion-​world. Goldsmith, R. 2013. “Iceland: Where One in Ten People Will Publish a Book.” BBC Magazine, October 14. At www.bbc.com/​news/​magazine-​24399599. Gunni, Dr. (Hjálmarsson, Gunnar Lárus) 2013. Blue Eyed Pop. The History of Popular Music in Iceland. Reykjavík: Sögurútgáfa. Ingold, T. 2010. Epilogue. In Conversations with Landscape, ed. K. Benediktsson and K. Lund, 241–​252. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Jóhannesdóttir, A., and Á. Eysteinsson. 2010. “Transporting Nature: Landscape in Icelandic Urban Culture.” In Conversations with Landscape, ed. K. Benediktsson and K. Lund, 137–​156. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Jóhannesdóttir, G. 2010. “Landscape and Aesthetic Values:  Not Only in the Eye of the Beholder.” In Conversations with Landscape, ed. K. Benediktsson and K. Lund, 109–​124. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Louder, R. 2012. “You’re Just too Krútt to Be True.” Icelandic Grapevine, April 17. Lund, K., and K. Benediktsson, eds. 2010. Conversations with Landscape. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Lund, K., and M. Wilson. 2010. “Slipping into Landscape.” In Conversations with Landscape, ed. K. Benediktsson and K. Lund, 97–​108. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Magnason, A. 2008. Dreamland:  A  Self-​Help Manual for a Frightened Nation. London: Citizen Press. Mitchell, T. 2009. “Sigur Rós’s Heima: An Icelandic Psychogeography.” Transforming Cultures eJournal 4(1). At http://​epress.lib.uts.edu.au/​journals/​TfC.

162   Geography Mitchell, T. 2012. “A Bedroom Community in Reykjavík: Interview with Ben Frost and Valgeir Sigurðsson.” Cyclic Defrost, August. At www.cyclicdefrost.com/​blog/​2012/​08/​a-​bedroom-​ community-​in-​reykjavik-​interview-​with-​ben-​frost-​and-​valgeir-​sigurdsson/​. Mitchell, T. 2015. “‘Icelandic hip hop:  From Selling American Fish to Icelanders’ to Reykjavíkurdaetur (Reykjavík Daughters).” Journal of World Popular Music 2 (2): 240–​260. Møller, B. 2005. “In and Out of Reykjavík: Framing Iceland in the Global Daze.” In Transnational Cinema in a Global North: Nordic Cinema in Transition, ed. Andrew Nestingen and Trevor G. Elkington, 207–240. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Nordfjörd, B. 2010. Dagur Kari’s Noi the Albino (Nordic Film Classics). Seattle: University of Washington Press. Oxfeldt, E. 2005. Nordic Orientalism:  Paris and the Cosmopolitan Imagination 1800–​1900. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Picard, J. 1999. “Jón Leifs (1899–​1968).” Tempo 208: 9–​16. Prior, N. 2015. “‘It’s a Social Thing, Not a Nature Thing’: Popular Music Practices in Reykjavik, Iceland.” Cultural Sociology 9(1): 81–​98. Schram, K. 2011. “Borealism: Folkloristic Perspectives on Transnational Performances of the Exoticism of the North.” PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh. Sigurðardóttir, Y. 2010. “Murder Is Everywhere:  Hesteyri.” At http://​murderiseverywhere. blogspot.com.au/​2010/​06/​hesteyri.html. Sigurðardóttir, Y. 2012. I Remember You. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Snæbjörnsdóttir, B., and M. Wilson 2010. “The Empty Wilderness:  Seals and Animal Representation.” In Conversations with Landscape, ed. K. Benediktsson and K. Lund, 211–​ 226. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Sullivan, P. 2003. Waking Up in Iceland. London: Sanctuary Publishing. Waage, E. 2010. “Landscape as Conversation.” In Conversations with Landscape, ed. K. Benediktsson and K. Lund, 45–​58. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Winton, E. 2010. “One of the Best Environmental Films Ever Made, Dreamland Shakes the Soul.” Art and Threat. At http://​artthreat.net/​2010/​01/​documentary-​dreamland/​.

Discography Hilmarsson, Hilmar Örn. 1996. Children of Nature (CD). London: Touch. Hilmarsson, Hilmar Örn. 2000. Dust to Dust: From the Films by Friðrik Þór Friðriksson (CD). Reyjavik: Smekkleysa. Hilmarsson, Hilmar Örn, and S. Rós. 2001. Englar Alheimsins (Angels of the Universe) (CD). London: FatCat Records. Sigurðsson, V. 2009. Draumalandi∂ (CD). Reykjavík: Bedroom Community. Slowblow. 2003. Nói Albínói (CD). Reykjavík: Kitchen Motors.

Chapter 8

M u sic a nd Environm e nta l i sm in Icel a nd Nicola Dibben

How much would we accept for a mountain? Two billion? Twenty billion? —​Draumalandið (2007)1

At the end of the trailer for the television eco-​documentary Draumalandið (2007), an interviewee questions the monetary value placed on landscape. The question encapsulates ongoing controversies over ownership, valuation, and use of the natural environment in the Nordic region and beyond. It presents an implicit opposition between, on the one hand, economic valuation of the natural environment, epitomized by natural capital accounting (measurement and incorporation into markets of natural resources and ecosystems), and on the other hand, the idea that nature is, and should remain, in the realm of the “beyond human.” My argument is that music, as with other cultural practices and products, has a role in environmentalism as a means by which people experience the natural world vicariously, and through which alternative meanings and valuations of nature are asserted. What notions of the natural world does music help construct, given a situation in which the environment can be both a particular place to which music might pertain (with implicit connotations of ownership) and an “ecological commons” (the natural resources shared by humans)? While popular music studies, and musicology more generally, has a long history of investigating representations of and relationships with landscape, especially in the Nordic region (Grimley 2005, 2011; Korsgaard 2011; Mitchell 2009; Richardson 2012), it has only recently begun to explore the relationship with the

164   Geography natural world from an environmental perspective (Dibben 2009a; Pedelty 2011). Where this chapter differs from other approaches in Nordic popular music studies is in understanding the environmental crisis as a failure of culture as much as it is a failure of engineering, science, and politics (Allen 2011a). The history of environmental thinking and action differs across the Nordic region (Jamison et  al. 1990), so in order to understand music’s role in environmentalism, I  investigate it through a case study of Icelandic popular music and the contested Icelandic Highlands. Investigating the transnational dynamics of this Icelandic example allows a detailed unpacking of some of the issues at stake. Indeed, it quickly becomes clear that both environmental degradation and protection, and the apparent national origins of the music discussed here, have to be considered transnationally. As I will go on to argue, narratives surrounding the development and protection of the Icelandic Highlands speak of the Highlands variously as an ecological commons (or natural resource to be exploited) that surpasses national and regional boundaries, of the global interests of multinational corporations, and of Iceland’s national economic interests, depending on the speaker and audience. Environmental protestors form communities bounded by ideals and actions, rather than national or regional borders, just as “Icelandic” music finds its audience globally. I argue that in order to fully realize music’s role in environmental thinking, we need to move beyond the place-​bound perspective on music.

Rethinking “Place” in Music The relationship between music and place has a long history in scholarly research. There are persuasive accounts of how music enables people to form attachments to particular locations that become imbued with meaning as “places,” how these bonds are maintained over time as part of particular identities, and the ideological purposes these serve (Bohlman 2011; Leyshon, Matless, and Revill 1998; Stokes 1994; Stokes and Bohlman 2003; Whiteley, Bennett, and Hawkins 2004). Recently, musicological research has taken on a more explicitly environmental focus. This eco-​musicological approach investigates music’s relationship to ecology and the environment, addressing the way that musicians and composers react to and communicate about environmental issues in their work, how listeners respond to these experiences, and how musical practices and sound-​worlds reflect, inform, and structure society (Allen 2011b). Yet, with a few notable exceptions (Guy 2009; Pedelty 2011), the current ecological crisis is hardly evident within eco-​musicological scholarship on music, nature, and place. This is despite the fact that the focus on place in musicological research would seem to fit well with environmental perspectives that have been equally committed to notions of place. As argued by Heise (2008, 28), American environmentalist discourse posits that “in order to reconnect with the natural world, individuals need to develop a ‘sense of place’ by getting to know the details of the ecosystems that immediately surround them.” This “ethics

Music and Environmentalism in Iceland    165 of proximity” assumes that a sensory experience of place is necessary to environmental awareness and activism, and is further characterized by an association between “spatial closeness, cognitive understanding, emotional attachment, and an ethic of responsibility and ‘care’ ” (33). Musicological research attends to the way music constructs and maintains attachments to particular locations and is therefore commensurate with such thinking. However, it is my contention that, for all its many strengths, a place-​based approach is inadequate to the current situation: excessively place-​focused musicological research and environmentalist thinking sometimes ignores the ramifications of increased interconnectedness in the late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries. In its most extreme formulation, some take the resultant “phantasmagoric” separation of place from space (Giddens 1990, 19, 108–​109), and increasing “de-​territorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari 1977) to argue that place is less important in popular music than it used to be (Pedelty 2011; Guy 2009): “Distant places, mobile lifestyles, and a general sense of placelessness preside over much of the world’s musical imagination” (Pedelty 2011, 201).2 Meanwhile, others point to the persistence of place as a focus for musical identification. The defining phenomena in this scenario are transnationalism and music’s part in our experience of “mediated commonality” (Hesmondhalgh 2013, 130). Greater interconnectedness due to reduced cost and increased ease of transportation, and the availability of wireless and Internet technologies, means individuals may be more connected to distant places than to those nearby. Consequently, our identities are not confined to the local or national but, rather, may be marked by different types of belonging. Turino (2003), along with other scholars (Stokes 2007; Regev 2007), points to the way that framing music in terms of cosmopolitanism, instead of globalization, enables more precise investigation of the way that musical ideas, behaviors, sounds, and technologies circulate and tie together people culturally who are otherwise unrelated by place or heritage. “Cosmopolitanism,” in the vernacular sense, acknowledges the way that cultural forms and people may not be grounded in a single place—​in contrast, for example, to immigrant communities and diasporas characterized by an emphasis on a homeland—​and in its philosophical sense (c.f. Hesmondhalgh 2013, 151), denotes a moral stance on the equality of all individuals and groups. Cosmopolitanism is helpful to environmental thinking in that it recognizes that transnational cultural flows and social formations provide a different route for environmental awareness. The discourse around environmental protection tends to view the natural environment as the responsibility of everyone, by appealing to appreciation of the beauty of natural landscapes, to the need for biodiversity, and to the interspecies dependencies of ecosystems. The challenge, as argued by Heise in her critique of American environmentalist discourse, is to envision how ecologically based advocacy on behalf of the human world as well as on behalf of greater socioenvironmental justice might be formulated in terms that are premised no longer primarily on ties to local places but on ties to territories and systems that are understood to encompass the planet as a whole. (2008, 10)

166   Geography This type of environmental world citizenship, which is premised on a sense of planet as opposed to a sense of place, is what she terms “eco-​cosmopolitanism.”3 Scholars have not yet examined how recorded popular music, a transnational phenomenon, can help people see themselves as part of a global biosphere. The transnational perspective opens our eyes to the circulation of popular music between groups who may be at a distance geographically yet have close social and environmental ties. It also highlights music’s role in seeing ourselves as planetary citizens who can care about degradation to environments we have not witnessed first-​hand. So, while music may help construct a “sense of place,” one question is whether it may also be able to create a “sense of planet” (c.f. Heise 2008). In an article on the international flow of media, Jenkins (2004, 117) claims that “transcultural flows of popular culture inspire new forms of global consciousness.” Can one such global consciousness be a heightened environmental awareness? The various ways in which music may help people to see themselves as part of a global biosphere have yet to be codified, but I  identify and examine two routes here: first, the creation of bonds to far distant places that have never been experienced first-​hand by that individual; and second, by expressing meanings and values that are not about specific places but, rather, about the planet and the “ecological commons”—​those aspects of the natural world that are common to humans. In order to examine these routes in more detail, I focus on a case study of a particular site of intervention into the natural environmental within the Nordic region—​the hydroelectric development of the Icelandic Highlands—​and associated musical artifacts and practices.

The Case of Iceland Hydropower in the Icelandic Highlands Iceland sits on the Mid-​Atlantic Ridge, a widening gap between the North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean sea floors. It is geologically active and characterized by lava fields, glaciers, and mountains. According to the World Bank, it is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world, with a population of only 326,000 people, two-​thirds of whom live in the capital Reykjavík (the most northern European capital city) and the rest in scattered coastal villages.4 Iceland underwent rapid modernization in the twentieth century, which transformed it from a colony dependent on subsistence farming and fishing to one of the richest nations in the world, measured by GDP per capita.5 Iceland’s economy is now based on fishing, manufacturing, service industries, and an expanding ecotourist industry marketed in terms of Iceland’s unique and beautiful landscape, which brings in over twice as many visitors a year as the island’s population (Óladóttir 2013). It also has the highest number of Internet users in the world.6 Notably, all Iceland’s electricity is produced from hydropower and other renewable energies (including

Music and Environmentalism in Iceland    167 geothermal),7 and it is also the world’s largest producer of electricity per capita,8 with major hydroelectric projects operating and more planned in largely uninhabited areas. The Icelandic nation’s relationship to the natural environment shares with other Nordic nations a tradition of respect for the environment and environmental issues: Iceland is party to many international environmental agreements (e.g., the Kyoto Protocol), is nuclear-​free, and is proud of its self-​sustainability in green energies. However, the development of hydroelectric power in Iceland has been contentious. Construction of the Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Project in eastern Iceland created huge controversy and conflict between wilderness conservation interests and those advocating economic development. The project involved rerouting and damming two glacial rivers through forty-​five miles of tunnels and nine dams, erecting thirty-​two miles of overland transmission lines through uninhabited highlands, and building a large aluminum smelter. Unlike environmental movements in the other Nordic countries, the Icelandic environmental movement is relatively young9 and operates at a grass-​roots level (Newson 2010; Jamison et al. 1990); internal environmental movements and protests are a relatively new phenomena, previously having been restricted to environmental protests against Iceland (in the form of opposition to Iceland’s whale hunting and fishing practices; see Newson 2010). Rather than simply accept that human intervention in the landscape is automatically and always a form of degradation, it is worth considering the factors contributing to the controversy over development of the Highlands. First, conservation of nature is a particularly emotive topic in the Icelandic context, since it encroaches on the very idea of what it means to be Icelandic in a context where nationalism is still a potent force (Dibben 2009a; Newson 2010).10 After settlement in the late ninth century, Iceland came under the rule of Norway and then Denmark, until the emergence of an independence movement in the mid-​nineteenth century that resulted in home rule in 1918 and republic status in 1944. One way in which nation-​states are bound to particular territories is by conceiving of nature as land and landscape, and so, unsurprisingly, nature has been particularly important in defining social movements and giving people a sense of national identity in Iceland in the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries (Jóhannesson 2001).11 Second, Iceland is typified by a local community perspective (as opposed to Sweden and Denmark’s technocratic and in some cases countercultural approach), which valorizes the idea of local communities’ rootedness in an organic way of life linked to nature through their use of natural resources. The dominant environmental ideology of living in harmony with nature, yet taking a pragmatic and potentially unsentimental view toward natural resources, leads to internal conflicts that are exacerbated by the social and political disjunction in Iceland between urban core and rural periphery and their associated perspectives (Newson 2010). Perceptions of center and periphery also operate at the national level, where different sides of the debate conceive of Iceland’s natural resources as a way the nation can contribute internationally, either through the unique aesthetic beauty of “Europe’s last wilderness” and biodiversity (the environmental protection lobby), or through provision of cheap “clean” energy to other nations (the energy lobby). The view of the place of Iceland as national territory contrasts with an

168   Geography environmentalist perspective that sees it as a bioregion defined by ecosystems rather than political geography. From this transnational perspective the development of the Highlands is contentious owing to its status as part of the Arctic ecosystem, and as one of the last uninhabited areas in Europe. Describing uninhabited Highlands as “wilderness” is already an ideological act: the very idea of “wilderness” is a construction resulting from historical and cultural processes (Nash 2014). As Sæþórsdóttir, Hall, and Saarinen point out (2011), the physical characteristics of the place (deforestation, transportation routes) and the idea of wilderness as embodied in the Icelandic landscape have changed over time: from a landscape feared (with connotations of uninhabited and uninhabitable wasteland, outlaws, and supernatural beings), to a romantic sublime Highland wilderness, to commodified tourist attraction. Today the idea of the Highland wilderness, regardless of its empirical reality, is an important part of the cultural economy, especially for tourism, but also for film and music.

Icelandic Popular Music and Environmentalism From an eco-​musicological perspective, music forms part of the discourse and experience of environmentalism in Iceland, both explicitly through direct involvement of musicians and audiences in environmental action and advocacy and from an eco-​ critical perspective, implicitly via musical practices and products. Icelandic musicians and music events have been prominent in environmental action, advocacy, and fund-​raising. Music and musicians featured prominently in protest activities about the Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Project, including concerts (Stop the Dams, 2006; Náttúra, 2008; and Stopp 2014, all in Reykjavík), a karaoke marathon, a single release (Björk, “Náttúra,” 2008), music within solidarity meetings, and carnivalesque direct action to disrupt activities in Iceland and numerous other countries.12 Many of these activities enable the community to come together and “appear to itself ” (Stokes 1994). Internationally renowned artists, both nationals and nonnationals, spoke against the development: post-​rock band Sigur Rós performed at the protest camp itself, and lead singer Jonsi was reported on the SavingIceland website as having been arrested in Reykjavík City Hall for his part in protests; the musician Björk was vociferous in her protests against the project, most notably in a series of open letters exchanged with the CEO of Magma Energy, Ross Beaty, which drew international attention to the energy rights granted to this company.13 The actions went beyond protest and included a search for alternatives; for example, a venture fund, BJÖRK, was co-​founded by Björk to “invest in sustainable businesses that create value through leveraging Iceland’s unique resources, spectacular nature, vibrant culture and green energy” (Audur 2008). In addition to direct action and advocacy, music creates meanings and values for the Icelandic landscape; it is one of the cultural practices by which the very idea of what we take to be “natural” and warranting protection is established and maintained (Dibben 2009b). The neglect of the environmental perspective in musicology and beyond has

Music and Environmentalism in Iceland    169 been attributed to a suspicion of and avoidance of environmental materiality whose basis in scientific realism is at odds with the prevailing focus on “nature” as a social-​ cultural construct (Heise 2008; Guy 2009; Titon 2013). Yet I would argue that admitting that nature is a construct does not mean it does not exist nor that it cannot be protected; it requires an acknowledgment that we are simultaneously defining what it is that needs protection. This is not a regression into reification of Nature (c.f. Morton’s Ecology without Nature [2007]) but a recognition of the natural world as relational. Popular music’s construction of the Icelandic landscape and the way this relates to and helps construct Icelandic national identity have been discussed elsewhere (Dibben 2009a, 2009b; Grimley 2005; Korsgaard 2011; Mitchell 2009; Richardson 2012; Webb and Lynch 2010). That scholarship shows how musical material and its reception inside and outside Iceland and the Nordic region is inspired by and expresses particular views about the natural environment as “pure wilderness” through its visual, sonic, and linguistic representation.14 Moreover, music, particularly in its audiovisual forms such as music video and film, offers a way to experience nature vicariously. Benediktsson (2007) notes the role of visual aesthetics in mobilizing resistance to the Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Project (see also Benediktsson 2007, 2008; Benediktsson and Lund 2010). He argues that documentary photography was a particularly powerful force in creating Kárahnjúkar for those who had never have been there, describing a three-​part photographic essay by Ragnar Axelsson (journalist for Morganbladið, Iceland’s main newspaper) which showed the beauty of the landscape that was about to flooded by dams; the way these photographs were linked to natural history, mythology, and nationalism; and their powerful ability to “activate moral sentiments of care” (Benediktsson 2007, 213). Music is also a means by which people encounter the Icelandic landscape and through which individuals form affinities with it. Music criticism, Internet blogs, and personal testimonials evidence the way popular music from Iceland is heard in terms of its landscape often by nonnationals who have never been to Iceland, and often associated with strong attachments.15 However, my aim is to go beyond identifying the meanings and values constructed by popular music for the natural landscape, and the affective bonds to particular places that music may afford, and instead to examine the way in which music affords a sense of place and a sense of planet following Heise’s (2008) distinction. The two examples I present illustrate contrasting conceptions of the human relationship with the natural environment: topophilic sentiment toward a particular place as afforded by Icelandic post-​rock band Sigur Rós’s music documentary Heima (2007) and biophilic tendencies expressed by Icelandic musician Björk’s Biophilia (2011).

Topophilia: The Case of Heima by Sigur Rós The 2007 documentary film Heima (At Home or Homeland) tracks a free, unannounced concert tour given by Sigur Rós16 in Iceland in 2006. The tour travels the rural communities and links music to specific landscapes and their history of settlement. Unusually

170   Geography for modern rock, each track on Heima is performed in a different, named location to small local audiences, and the tour diary and other surrounding discourse make explicit connections to local landscapes and people. One track, “Vaka” (Untitled #1), has an explicitly ecological interpretation: director Floria Sigismunidi’s music video elaborates the simplicity of the song’s harmonically and texturally sparse repeating five-​bar sequence with a linear narrative of schoolchildren playing in a post-​apocalyptic world—​a vision of our children’s inheritance if we don’t look after the planet. Text accompanying the documentary describes “Vaka” as “the song that started it all,” explicitly linking it to the Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Project (figure 8.1): when sigur rós decided, on the spur of the moment, to take a detour from their filmed tour of iceland to go and play at the protest camp at the karahnjukar dam -​which would soon flood many square kms of pristine icelandic wilderness close to the east fjords they took almost nothing with them. […] a small generator had been dug into a shallow hole to provide minimal power for the performance, but since the protest was against a dam built to provide electricity for an american aluminium smelting plant, the band decided to go unplugged for the first time in their career. […] they played to a hardy audience, numbered in the tens, performing the few songs they had worked out acoustically, but it was watching the lone camera recording of ‘vaka’, with mountain wind whistling in the mic, that decided them on the acoustic route for this project. (Sigur Rós 2014)17

Figure 8.1  Sigur Rós, at Snaefell, near Kárahnjúkar, Iceland, 2006

Music and Environmentalism in Iceland    171 A number of scholars have noted the nostalgic character of Sigur Rós’s Heima (Dibben 2009a; Hall 2014; Richardson 2012). Hall’s critique focuses on nostalgia for the rural: interpreting the signs of Iceland’s rural past (disused buildings and past industries) and traditions (rímur, feasts), and musical aspects of the album as a lamentation for lost culture and a “going back to nature,” as a response to Iceland’s rapid transition from rural agrarian to urban capitalist economy. Making a slightly different reading, Fletcher (2012) argues that Sigur Rós’s performances do not simply dwell in this imagined past but draw attention to the damage done to it as a way of providing critique of the present. He notes that the sequence of performances, which link the ghost community of Djúpavik and its disused herring factory oil silos, now a long-​defunct industrial site owing to overfishing, to the Snæfellsskála protest camp against the Kárahnjúkar dam, and a future potential site of environmental degradation: [W]‌hat Heima clarifies is the specific narrative of spatial memory, or nostalgia, operative within post-​rock, one that is not so much a conservative reiteration of or regression into what is inevitably a lost origin, but an implicit critique of modernity as perpetual progress, which draws attention to those experiences, locations and traditions that are otherwise forgotten or destroyed by it. (Fletcher 2012)

The distinctive treatment of time and space in Sigur Rós’s music has been alluded to as engendering a particular kind of listening phenomenology: the idea that the music offers space for reflection, contemplation, or reverie (a spaciousness that is both temporal and physical; Dibben 2009a; Hall 2014; Richardson 2012). Richardson notes of the filmed performance of “Heysátan” on Heima, that it can be understood as representing the cessation of the mechanized flow of media, the ubiquitous discourses of the digital age, and a second silence that flows into and out of an ecological discursive space. In the digital age, we are never truly at one with Nature, but rather with an idea of what Nature has become in an age of media flow and digital surround sound. (Richardson 2012, 281)

In a similar vein, but in relation to the visual arts and immersive nature walking tours, Benediktsson argues that what these kinds of experiences can do is offer an experience of the natural world that is of the sublime, or an enchantment that is useful as a “counter-​ narrative to technological hyperbole”; it is an aesthetic of enchantment characterized as “an emotional state frequently and rather easily afforded by the sublime and grandiose, but also by less spectacular landscapes, once one allows oneself to dwell therein” (Benediktsson 2007, 214). This vicarious encounter with the natural environment reached a wide international community of fans of Sigur Rós, owing to the transnational networks of recorded music circulation. The transnational identities it affords are those of eco-​cosmopolitan environmentalist and/​or Icelandic (alternative) nationalist identity. Music’s role here might be understood as “sociable publicness” (Hesmondhalgh 2013)—​a way of participating in particular values and identifications afforded by the music in its social contexts.

172   Geography The fact that there is a focus on the local seems inevitable and necessary, given that a particular environmental threat (in this case, the building of a dam) is located in a particular place (the Icelandic Highlands). Yet, we should question this seeming inevitability. The building of a dam is both local (the destruction of a particular habitat or ecosystem) and global (that ecosystem is part of a larger transnational bioregion and ecosystem), and could conceivable be responded to in different ways. An alternative is to reconceive the Icelandic Highlands ecosystem as part of the “global commons,” as natural resources whose management lies beyond the remit of a single state, such as the oceans or the atmosphere; and it is to an example of this approach that I turn next.

Biophilia: The Case of Biophilia by Björk Compared to the title of Sigur Rós’s album Heima, with its implication of a particular place, Björk’s Biophilia suggests something more global—​literally, a love of the natural world.18 Biophilia is a multimedia album project that includes audio and app albums (2011), a world tour of a live show with residencies (2011–​2013), and a school educational programme supported by the Nordic Council. The album project coincided with the height of Björk’s engagement in the Icelandic environmental movement. Björk’s rhetoric concerning the hydropower projects stressed its transnational significance: in media coverage of the campaign she pointed out the similarities between Iceland and other countries—​notably how to grow the economy yet “stay sustainable and in harmony with nature.” Her stated intention with the release of the track “Náttúra,” which predated the album Biophilia, was to “spread out the message” that it is possible to work with nature in sustainable ways rather than by continuing to build megaprojects that change the natural landscape (ITN Consulting 2008). Significantly, the “Náttúra” single was released on the digi-​pack edition of the Biophilia album, indicating the continuity between the Biophilia project and Björk’s consciousness of environmentalism. The Biophilia project was described by Björk as “a meeting point of music, nature and technology” in which the idea was not to go back to some idealized, romanticized past but, rather, to use new technology to go “forward to nature”: What I want to do is not go, “Okay, let’s have it how it used to be—​all nostalgic and nationalistic.” I want to use this energy… . I want to use it to go high-​tech, and so do a lot of people, not just me. I don’t want to do what England or what Europe had to do—​200 years of building factories. We don’t have to do that. We can go straight into high-​tech, solar power, wind farms … and then we can come into the 21st century. (quoted in Turner 2011)

In Biophilia, Björk embodies nature using similar techniques to those in her previous work (Dibben 2009a), but the treatment of the natural world differs in two important respects. First, the natural world is more explicitly foregrounded as the thematic content of the album in Biophilia than in other albums. Natural phenomena become the

Music and Environmentalism in Iceland    173 instruments and interfaces for musical creativity; in the Biophilia live show, nature is theatricalized in the custom-​built instruments that harness features of the natural world to make musical sound (gravity harp—​gravity; teslacoil—​electricity/​lightning; organ—​air). In the case of the Biophilia software, the graphic user interfaces of the app are styled as natural world phenomena, and naturally occurring patterns are conceived as algorithms structuring music. Even the interface for track selection (and the “Cosmogony” app) is a representation of an aspect of the natural world—​a stellar constellation (figure 8.2). Second, the natural phenomena explored are global, in the sense that they affect all humans and are (thus far) beyond human ownership: viruses, lightning, DNA, dark matter, the moon and tides. In this sense, Biophilia marked something of a departure for Björk in that the celebration of the natural world focuses on nature conceived as fundamental elements and forces, rather than as topographical features of the Icelandic landscape. Potentially, this shift of emphasis calls on a broader understanding of the natural world as something we are all part of, and therefore all have responsibility for. The absence of specifically Icelandic markers (with the exception of the implicit reference in “Mutual Core” to the Mid-​Atlantic Ridge) also means there is less romanticization of a specifically Icelandic landscape and its nationalist affordances. Biophilia constructs the natural world not as particular geographies (and therefore property or resources to be owned) but as universal natural forces and elements.

Figure 8.2  Graphic user interface for song selection in Björk’s Biophilia app, 2011

174   Geography Biophilia also embodies a particular view of the relationship between the natural environment and technology. Underlying some ecopolitics is the tenet that technologies are instrumental—​that is, they are seen as tools for domination of others and of nature. The spoken introduction to the Biophilia app and live show, written by Björk and poet Sjón, and performed by the natural history broadcaster David Attenborough, is explicit that Biophilia’s aim is to use technology to go “forward to nature.” This relationship between nature and technology manifests in Biophilia in a variety of ways, not least of which is realization of the album as an interactive app, on what in 2010 during the album’s making, was state-​of-​the-​art tablet technology (the Apple iPad), and creation of instrument technologies to sonify nature (e.g., harnessing gravity in the pendulum harp and electricity in the tesla coil). Both these examples embody the idea that technological innovation is not just compatible with nature but is also a way we can access the beyond-​human world, thereby bringing humans to a more productive relationship with it. As Sean Cubbitt (2005, 4) points out in his analysis of the television series Blue Planet,19 “both scientific and entertainment media rely on technologies to communicate between human and natural worlds.” Technology is therefore a mediator, an aid, rather than “evil force” of some ideological position toward the environment (59). Nonetheless, there is a seeming contradiction between ecopolitics and the technological means to celebrate “pure” nature in the case of both examples from Sigur Rós and Björk. Sigur Rós went to a remote part of Iceland to protest the building of a hydroelectric dam, but needed a generator for their amplified sound. Their solution was an acoustic album, but this of course needed electricity for its production and distribution (a criticism often leveled against the material impact of rock and pop tours that claim to be about sustainability yet make excessive use of resources and are polluting [Pedelty 2011]). In addition, Björk’s Biophilia has a rhetoric of sustainability yet was initially made for the Apple iPad, product of a company renowned for encouraging unsustainable consumption practices and for contributing to environmental degradation (Maxwell and Miller 2012). In defense of such contradictions, Cubbitt takes the position that, despite their complicity in environmental degradation, technologies provide a means to experience enchantment as a counter to instrumentalist conceptualizations of the natural world. He argues that the Blue Planet series provides “the necessary Temporary Autonomous Zone which we need … because without some experience of liberation, the struggle to achieve it would be abstract and empty” (2005, 50). Björk’s Biophilia shares with Attenborough’s Blue Planet series a sense of wonder at the beauty of the natural world and its ecosystems; both rarely make direct mention of rarity or endangerment. Thus the naivety and sentimentality that characterize Björk’s artistic output for some can be seen as an alternative valuation of the natural environment. This is not confined to Björk, but can be seen as an aesthetic stance common to the krútt generation of musicians. It is perhaps no coincidence, for example, that the soundtrack to the trailer for the BBC Planet Earth TV series (2006) was Sigur Rós’s “Hoppipolla” (Takk…, 2005).

Music and Environmentalism in Iceland    175

From Place to Planet My analysis of two high-​profile proponents of Icelandic popular music illustrates for the first time two different perspectives on the environment. I argued that Sigur Rós’s Heima offers a critique of the present by highlighting failures of the industrial past in a particular place, whereas Björk’s Biophilia celebrates the beauty of the natural world conceived as an interconnected system common to all humans. What the case of Heima also illustrates is how people (both the musicians themselves, as articulated in interviews, and the audiences) may long for a sense of place and emplacement in the face of de-​territorialization—​a longing affirmed by marketing strategies of the music industry in which place-​based identities are a means of market differentiation. Even so, the sense of place is hardly secure, destabilized as it is by music’s mediation, partly as simulacra and partly by virtue of its global circulation. The examples also differ in their sense of ­mobilization: Biophilia’s use of the natural world as the algorithms and interface for music making structure the user’s relationship with the natural world as something pragmatic, dynamic, and interactive (Dibben 2013), whereas Heima’s camera work and sound suggest a place to be looked at and listened to rather than acted upon, albeit in critical reflection (Dibben 2009b; Fletcher 2012). Moreover, Biophilia (re)frames technology as a means to work with nature, rather than merely opposing despoilation. These examples raise a question regarding the mechanism by which music entails a particular idea of and relationship to nature. Taking the perspective of human geography (c.f. Benediktsson), we could argue that the affective and immersive experience of music provides a particularly effective means of disturbing dualist boundaries to productive ends.20 According to this perspective, immersion and affect enable the experience of enchantment with nature and rejection of the natural capital agenda as it manifests in “commonsense,” techno-​scientific valuations (Brosius 1999, 281). However, this line of reasoning is not without its problems. Human geographers’ turn to affect can be seen as part of an (unproblematized) acceptance of romanticism in which we are seduced by the idea of nature and its associated aesthetic experience in cultural forms.21 Hence, too, Sigur Rós and Björk are sometimes criticized for the perceived sentimentalism and nostalgia of their music and their essentialist, romantic visual images of the natural world. According to Morton (2007, 194), art that is ecological would be so “not because it compels us to care for a pre-​existing notion of nature but because it questions the very idea of nature.” He draws attention to the cultural turn toward aesthetic experience of the natural world, which is predicated on the idea that “If we could not merely figure out but actually experience the fact that we were embedded in our world, then we would be less likely to destroy it” (63–​64). Arguably, both musical examples could be viewed as downplaying the romantic notion of “nature,” and presenting nature as a human category, albeit in different ways: Heima provides a space for critical reflection on, rather than immersion in, a historicized natural environment; Biophilia frames nature as human

176   Geography discovery and knowledge.22 Analyzing the means by which music affords particular ideas of and relationships with the environment continues to be an important avenue for future work. By arguing for a transnational perspective on popular music and its relevance for environmentalism, I am arguing for a reorientation of disciplinary perspectives. Critical musicology’s focus on social formations of gender, race, and sexuality need to be supplemented by a focus on the environment in order to show the way in which music participates in environmentalist beliefs and practices. I have also highlighted limitations of eco-​musicology’s focus on place-​bound musics and an associated “ethics of proximity,” arguing that human geographers’ focus on the affective dimension of music is not the only means by which music may counter the techno-​scientific capital agenda. In the realm of international politics, my analysis shows how music can express political worldviews through nonverbal means as part of a broader postinstitutional and postnational politics (Franke and Schiltz 2013). For reasons of space and argumentation, I have not included close analyses of musical texts here, relying instead upon published music analyses referenced above. My primary focus has been on ideological-​political readings of musical artifacts, and is one comment among many generated by a given music (c.f. Gustafsson and Kääpä [2013, 6] on ecocinema). The routes by which music is relevant to environmental thinking must now be explored through empirical work that looks at its actions in the world. How and to what extent does transnational music enable people to develop a sense of environmental world citizenship? This exploratory analysis highlights the potential role of music in shaping our fantasies and realities of the natural world—​and, to return to my start, how music may be complicit in how we value a mountain.

Notes 1. Draumalandið 2007. 2. However, the importance of transnational connections to cultural traditions and practices does not exclude the possibility that people will continue to subscribe to territorially based identifications, whether those of state, nation, or region. 3. The power of an eco-​cosmopolitan perspective, Heise (2008, 60) argues, is that it can help us see a local problem as part of a global one, as when a struggle for power over natural resources in one locale can be viewed as part of a larger, transnational debate over climate change and nature protection in the global biosphere, and it can get individuals to think “beyond the boundaries of their own cultures, ethnicities, or nations” and consider the health of the world beyond the human. 4. Population density, World Bank data; see http://​data.worldbank.org/​indicator/​. 5. GDP per capita (current US$), World Bank data; see http://​data.worldbank.org/​indicator/​. 6. Internet users per 100 people, World Bank data; see http://​data.worldbank.org/​indicator/​. 7. World development indicators:  electricity production, sources, and access. World Bank data; see http://​wdi.worldbank.org/​table/​3.7. 8. Electricity production, World by Map data; see http://​world.bymap.org/​Electricity Production.html.

Music and Environmentalism in Iceland    177 9. Landvern, Icelandic Environment Association, a national nongovernmental organization with an emphasis on environmental protection, established 1969; Icelandic Nature Conservation Association, established 1997; Saving Iceland (2006), who describe themselves as a “a network of people of different nationalities” and direct action group, website established 2004; plus a number of separate campaigns, including Náttúra, which was co-​ founded by Icelandic musician Björk in 2008. 10. Contrary to claims that nationalism is “past its peak” (Hobsbawm 1990, 192) due to the internationalization of economic, information, and cultural networks, we can see the resilience of nationalism in Iceland as an example of the broader European and Nordic resurgence in nationalism noted by Andersson and Hilson (2009), which they claim is mobilized by perceived threats. In the case of Iceland, I argue, the perceived threats come from globalization (the prevalence of English and perceived threat to the Icelandic language), industrialization (the development of Iceland’s natural resources and perceived threat to its landscape), and economics (a perceived influx of foreign companies and the threat to indigenous, local economies particularly salient in the aftermath of the 2008 banking collapse). 11. This contrasts with Danish and Swedish environmental movements, for example, which were mobilized by the anti-​nuclear movement (Jamison et al. 1990, 70). 12. The protests were transnational in character, happening beyond as well as within Iceland and linking geographically distant campaigns—​for example, in 2006 a protest was held in London against the same company’s actions in two nations; the call to participate in what was described as an “interactive funeral march to mark the murder of Kárahnjúkar, Iceland, and the impending murder of the Cedros Peninsular, Trinidad, at the bloody hands of Alcoa and heavy industry” included the request to “please bring musical instruments” (Saving Iceland 2006). 13. The series of open letters in the free English-​language magazine The Reykjavik Grapevine ran during 2010: Björk, May 21, 2010, “Bjork on Magma Energy”; Ross Beaty, July 16, 2010, “Ross Answers Bjork’s Questions”; Björk, July 19, 2010, “Energy Source Goes Pop:  An Exclusive Björk Interview on Geothermal Power”; Ross Beaty. July 19, 2010, “Ross Beaty’s Got a Proposal”; Björk, July 20, 2010, “You Totally Miss My Point”; Björk, July 22, 2010, “We Shouldn’t Complete This Deal.” 14. The exact genesis of the association between Icelandic popular music and landscape has yet to be detailed, but likely arises from the confluence of musical representations of Icelandic landscape with nationalist ideologies of the natural landscape as “pure” and “wild,” the marketing of Icelandic ecotourism in terms of its natural landscape (Einarsson 1996) and music, and the promotion and reception of popular music from Iceland in terms of its Icelandic origin as a means of differentiation in the capitalist free market. 15. In many cases, encounters with the music become a motivating force for ecotourism. For an example see “Heima—​The Inspiration for Our Trip to Iceland,” www.last.fm/​group/​ sigur+ros/​forum/​25557/​_​/​2201547. 16. Sigur Rós are one of the most famous exponents of Icelandic popular music and are widely perceived as representing qualities of the Icelandic landscape in their music. Their particular version of post-​rock is characterized by an instrumental palette of rock guitar and kit, plus strings, piano, and falsetto voice singing in Icelandic, or sometimes “Hopelandic” (glossolalia), with minimalist and classical stylistic elements. From an Icelandic perspective, they can be seen as part of the krútt (cutesy or twee) generation of musicians, characterized as sharing a certain childlike innocence. The krútt ideology has variously been

178   Geography criticized for its failure to engage with the political process, and celebrated for the alternative it offers to consumerist lifestyles, and for the time and space its music offers for reflection (Hall 2014). 17. The commentary goes on to point out that the recorded version is “not, in fact, the raw, Kárahnjúkar recording, but another exterior version made outside the band’s studio in april 2007.” 18. The idea of the “global commons” appears earlier in Björk’s work, most notably in the track “Oceania” (2004), written for the opening ceremony of the Athens Olympic Games. In this track, Björk personifies the beyond-​human unity of the oceans that surround the separate nation-​states on which the games are predicated, and who (in the lyrics) is the maternal evolutionary source from which all humans ultimately evolved (Dibben 2009b, 64). 19. The treatment of the technological in Biophilia has an interesting and perhaps not entirely coincidental association with that in David Attenborough TV series Blue Planet, given that Björk had watched numerous eco-​documentaries in the course of researching this album, and was a long-​time fan of Attenborough (personal communication to author). 20. Elsewhere I have argued that Björk’s artistic output is predicated on unity between dualities (Dibben 2009b). 21. He claims that our current idea of nature derives from the romantic reaction to the despoliation of mid-​eighteenth-​century European capitalism and industrialization, and that this myth is perpetuated in ecomimetic visual art and writing whose aim is to “reconnect” us to the nonhuman world. 22. Speaking of the Blue Planet series, but in a way applicable to Biophilia, Cubbitt (2005, 58) argues: “Its portrayal of nature is of an innocent world, a world of intrinsic values like food and reproduction, whose beauty arises from its interconnected and systemic order. But it is beautiful rather than sublime to the extent that nature arises as knowledge and therefore as something which is also simultaneously deeply, indeed intrinsically human.” It is in this regard that Biophilia treats nature as human knowledge and therefore neither entirely separate from nor identical with the human, even if ultimately it accepts rather than questions the idea of a preexisting nature.

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180   Geography Jenkins, H. 2004. “Pop Cosmopolitanism. Mapping Cultural Flows in an Age of Media Convergence.” In Globalization: Culture and Education in the New Millennium, ed. M. M. Suárez-​Orozco and D. Qin-​Hilliard, 114–​140. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jóhannesson, I. 2001. “Dark Sands or Green Forests? On the Construction of Nature as Cultural Capital in Iceland in the 1990’s.” In Bright Summer Nights and Long Distances: Rural and Regional Development in the Nordic-​Scottish Context, ed. Ingi Rúnar Eðvarðsson, 75–​93. Akureyri: University of Akureyri. Korsgaard, M. 2011. “Emotional Landscapes: The Construction of Place in Björk’s Music and Music Videos.” In Globalizing Art: Negotiating Place, Identity and Nation in Contemporary Nordic Art, ed. Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen and Kristin Ørjasæter, 205–​ 224. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag. Leyshon, A., D. Matless, and G. Revill, eds. 1998. The Place of Music. New York: Guilford. Maxwell, R., and T. Miller. 2012. Greening the Media. New York: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, T. 2009. “Sigur Rós’s Heima: An Icelandic Psychogeography.” Trans/​forming Cultures eJournal 4. At http://​epress.lib.uts.edu.au/​journals/​index.php/​TfC/​article/​view/​1072. Morton, T. 2007. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nash, R. F. 2014. Wilderness and the American Mind, 5th ed. New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press. Newson, S. 2010. “Preserving Wilderness Versus Enabling Economic Change: Iceland and the Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Project.” Geography 95: 161–​164. Óladóttir, O. Þ. 2013. “Tourism in Iceland in Figures, April 2013.” Reykjavík: Ferðamálastofa. http://​www.ferdamalastofa.is/​en/​recearch-​and-​statistics/​tourism-​in-​iceland-​in-​figures. Pedelty, M. 2011. Ecomusicology:  Rock, Folk, and the Environment. Philadelphia:  Temple University Press. Regev, M. 2007. “Cultural Uniqueness and Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism.” European Journal of Social Theory 10(1): 123–​138. Richardson, J. 2012. “On Music Criticism and Affect.” In Critical Musicological Reflections: Essays in Honour of Derek B.  Scott, ed. S. Hawkins, 139–​158. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. Saving Iceland. 2006. “Funeral of the Wild—​Trinidad and Iceland March, London, 27 October.” October 9. At www.savingiceland.org/​2006/​10/​funeral-​of-​the-​wild-​trinidad-​and-​iceland-​ march-​london-​27-​october/​. Sæþórsdóttir, A. D., C. M. Hall, and J. Saarinen. 2011. “Making Wilderness: Tourism and the History of the Wilderness Idea in Iceland.” Polar Geography 34(4): 249–​273. Sigur Rós. 2014 “Heima—​A Film by Sigur Rós.” At www.sigur-​ros.co.uk/​band/​disco/​heima-​ hvarf.php. Stokes, M., ed. 1994. Ethnicity, Identity, and Music. The Musical Construction of Place. Oxford: Berg. Stokes, M. 2007. “On Musical Cosmopolitanism.” Macalester International Roundtable. Paper 3. At http://​digitalcommons.macalester.edu/​intlrdtable. Stokes, M., and P. V. Bohlman, eds. 2003. Celtic Modern: Music at the Global Fringe. Oxford: Scarecrow Press. Titon, J. T. 2013. “The Nature of Ecomusicology.” Música e Cultura 8(1). At http://​musicaecultura.abetmusica.org.br/​index.php/​revista/​article/​view/​83. Turino, T. 2003. “Are We Global Yet? Globalist Discourse, Cultural Formations and the Study of Zimbabwean Popular Music.” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 12(2): 51–​79.

Music and Environmentalism in Iceland    181 Turner, L. 2011. “Interview: Bjork.” TheStoolPigeon.co.uk, August 18. At www.thestoolpigeon. co.uk/​features/​interview-​bjork-​biophilia.html. Webb, P., and J. Lynch. 2010. “‘Utopian Punk’: The Concept of the Utopian in the Creative Practice of Björk.” Utopian Studies 21(2): 313–​330. Whiteley, S., A. Bennett, and S. Hawkins. 2004. Music, Space and Place: Popular Music and Cultural Identity. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Pa rt  I I

H I STORY

Chapter 9

A M etahistori c a l Inquiry i nto Hi storio gra ph y of N ordic P opul a r Mu si c Antti-​V ille Kärjä

In the twenty-​first century, there has been a clear interest in the past of popular music of different Nordic countries. In Denmark and Finland, large research projects have been conducted on the topic (Michelsen 2013; Jalkanen and Kurkela 2003), and the vicissitudes of popular music in Iceland have been chronicled for the first time by musician-​ journalist Dr. Gunni ([Gunnar Lárus Hjálmarsson] 2013). In Sweden, similar quests have been executed a decade or two earlier (Malmström 1996; Brolinson and Larsen 1994), and while in Norway one is still waiting for a similar endeavor to be published, the historical interest is vividly present in the activities of Rockheim, the national museum of popular music that was opened in 2010. These attempts to chart the main trajectories of popular music in general in a given country are further supported by a plethora of accounts that focus on the myriad subcategories of popular music. Examples of the latter include—​but are not limited to—​histories of Danish and Finnish rap (Skyum-​ Nielsen 2006; Mikkonen 2004; Paleface 2011), Finnish and Swedish progressive rock (Oksanen 2004; Lahger 1999), and Finnish and Norwegian female pop and rock (Aho and Taskinen 2003; Breen 2006). These “grand narratives,” as well as the more partial ones, of popular music in the Nordic countries are yet to be subjected to a more detailed scholarly scrutiny. While there have been some theoretically informed takes, for instance, on “complexification” of popular music historiography by deconstructing assumptions of cultural homogeneity (Michelsen 2004) and on multidimensional processes of canonization (Kärjä 2006), it is the national context that has constituted the primary frame of reference for scholars. The same applies to accounts of Latin American influences in Swedish popular

186   History music (van der Lee 1997), development of visual conventions of entertainment music in Danish television (Lindelof 2007), and the changes in the relationship between cultural policy and music export in Finland (Mäkelä 2008). Thus, it is apparent that popular music historiography in the Nordic countries as a field of research is predisposed to a significant degree to the principles of methodological nationalism, especially in terms of “naturalization, i.e., taking for granted that the boundaries of the nation-​state delimit and define the unit of analysis [and] territorial limitation which confines the study of social processes to the political and geographic boundaries of a particular nation-​state” (Wimmers and Glick Schiller 2003, 578). A rare exception to this tendency to naturalize and delimit the investigation on the basis of national boundaries is Finnish cultural historian Janne Mäkelä’s book on the international history of popular music (2011)—​though thus far available only in Finnish language. In the book there nevertheless is a chapter dedicated to the “noisy North” where it is maintained that, in general, music ideas about a common Nordic identity have been subordinated to assumed and sometimes even deliberately fabricated national traits. In addition, as it has been laborsome to conceive a distinct pan-​Nordic cultural foundation, more emphasis has been placed on justifying the existence of “an institutional entity called the Nordic countries” (Mäkelä 2011, 154). On the basis of both institutional practices and collective memories and myths, Mäkelä (154–​72) then goes on to suggest that in popular music, the Nordic countries have been historically connected through such phenomena as domesticating Anglo-​American post-​rock ‘n’ roll styles, lobbying cultural policies through organizational activity, subsidizing cultural export with public resources, developing (short-​lived) forms of pan-​Nordic media collaboration, and exploiting certain musical styles and genres as “Nordic.” Examples of the last aspect include “Scandinavian jazz” in the 1950s and “Nordic jazz” more recently, “Scandic pop” in the 1970s and 1980s, “Scandinavian action rock” in the early 2000s, and extreme metal, particularly in its “Viking” incarnation. Mäkelä puts forth the possibility that through the zeal for mythology, extreme metal bands are related more to the Nordic tradition than for instance their own countries. At issue is interaction with historical knowledge; the bands find inspiration from the past, especially from mythology, but at the same time they draw [influences] selectively and reconstruct the past. (170)

Alongside the mythic Nordicness provided by Viking metal, there is yet a more mundane sphere of musical activity that indicates a presence of transnational dynamics within the Nordic region—​namely, the various forms of Saami music. Here, the porosity of national boundaries may, however, often be replaced by forms of ethnic absolutism that are further linked to the politics of indigeneity. Whatever the case, the history of Saami popular music since the 1950s demonstrates how both traditional Saami music (joik) and more “global” genres of popular music have been appropriated, recontextualized, and fused in different ways at different times. For some artists, these “new” forms of music have represented a critique of excessive traditionalist obsession with the past, while others have

A Metahistorical Inquiry    187 embraced the more “popular” idioms as a means to raise awareness especially among the younger generations and to bring “Saami concerns to a world stage.” (Jones-​Bamman 2001, 207–​209; see also Chapters 14, 19, and 20.) The cultural and political dynamics of indigenous peculiarity, as well as the exploitation and reconstruction of ideas and myths of a pan-​Nordic identity, are closely linked to questions and risks of exoticization. In the Nordic context, these issues have been recently discussed in terms of the notion of borealism that in its simpliest form can be defined as the ways in which the North is treated as a stereotypical and exotic region, imbued with forms of extremity that may range from banal marginalization to ennoblement (Schram 2011, 97–​99). The extent to which borealism serves as another point of departure for investigating common traits in the historiography of popular music in the Nordic countries is nevertheless yet to be examined in more detail (see Chapters 1, 5, and 11). In order to further the scholarly discussion on popular music historiography in the Nordic countries—​and in more general—what follows is a comparative analysis of select accounts on the musical pasts in the region. Owing to their societal similarity and historical interrelations both politically and culturally, the Nordic countries provide a plausible context for such an endeavor. At the heart of the interrogation are the ways in which national histories of popular music are constructed and intertwined, and through questioning the hegemony of the national framework, it is my goal also to develop an analytical approach for a critical study of the historiography of popular music.

Metahistory and Pre-​Positional Politics of (Music) Historiography The critique of the methodological nationalism inherent in the historiography of popular music—​and historiography in general—​entails a conscious subscription to a broader metahistorical concern. Following historian Hayden White (1973, 4), I use the notion of metahistory to refer to a mode of investigation whereby histories are considered as “models of historical narration and conceptualization” that hinge on “the preconceptual and specifically poetic nature of their perspectives on history and its processes.” What this means is that history should not be conflated with the past; instead, what is crucial is to consider any history in terms of its usage in addition to its assumed truth-​value. In other words, histories need to be recognized as political and ideological constructs that are, to quote White (1973, 22–​27) further, based on “a set of prescriptions for taking a position in the present world of social praxis and acting upon it,” and on “the value accorded to the current social establishment” (emphasis in original). In his “alternative history of American popular music,” Elijah Wald (2009, 9) expresses the same ideas by noting that “[t]‌here are no definitive histories because the past keeps looking different as the present changes.”

188   History The metahistorical stance is pronouncedly present already in the demarcation of my research material. In other words, the availablity of historiographical material on popular music in different Nordic countries constitutes, in itself, a metahistorical dimension. In addition to the political and commercial factors, there are broader cultural and historical determinants involved; the availability of material is conditioned not only by considerations of what kind of historical research is worthy of public support and profitable for publishing houses but also by the general linguistic environment in particular. For instance, because Finland is officially a bilingual country, one is much more likely to encounter Finnish-​and Swedish-​language accounts on the history of popular music in the public or university libraries in Finland than accounts written in Danish or Norwegian. In addition, owing to the dominant “Anglo-​seam” (Mäkelä 2011, 16) of popular music, as well as Finland’s adherence to the Western cultural sphere, the availability of English-​language publications on the topic is generally good in the country. But, as the basic metahistorical tenets dictate, there are also other significant nuances to be considered here. These pertain to “theories of truth[,]‌archetypal plot structures[, and] strategies of ideological implication” (White 1973, 426–​427). With this in mind, my primary material to be analyzed consists of two book-​length accounts on the vicissitudes of popular music in the Nordic region that share certain similarities. The books in question are Dan Malmström’s (1996) take on events in Sweden, and Pekka Jalkanen and Vesa Kurkela’s (2003) exploration of developments in Finland. The books are rather alike with respect to release date, scope, approach, and authorial stance. They are fairly contemporaneous and cover, in temporal terms, the last two centuries, give or take a year. For Sweden, the coverage extends until the mid-​1990s, whereas in the case of Finland, the last section terminates in 1990. They also proceed chronologically rather than, for example, thematically (cf. Brolinson and Larsen 1994; Michelsen 2013). Moreover, all three authors hold a Ph.D. in musicology, and they all are male. As a set of secondary material, I will refer to less uniform sources that I have been able to access through the institutionally defined and restricted metahistorical field of popular music in the Nordic countries, as perceived from Finland. The overall metahistorical approach is furthermore intimately tied up with postcolonial theorization. In the simpliest terms, at issue is, as always, “Whose history?,” which in turn is linked to the idea of “the artifice of history” (Chakrabarty 2000, 27), the latter referring to the ways in which Eurocentric, nationalistic historiography has been a powerful discursive tool in justifying and maintaining colonial dominance and exploitation. In relation to the Nordic countries in particular, this historiographical “power to narrate” with its associated essentializing, deterministic, and teleological argumentation (Featherstone 2005, 167) brings forth questions about how the imperial, if not colonial, relations within the region have affected the musical past and the ways in which it is both remembered and forgotten. For example, it has been documented reliably that most of the major record companies in Finland started their operations as subsidies of Swedish ones, and not least because Swedish ownership has strong historical roots

A Metahistorical Inquiry    189 on the northeastern shores of the Baltic Sea (known as the “Eastern Sea” in Finland, although west from there). Another metahistorical dimension is put forth in the titles of the books in question. When translated into English, one can note a juxtaposition between “Popular Music in Sweden” and “Popular Music of Finland.” These may be further compared to the accounts of “music in Denmark” (Ketting 1987), “music in Sweden” (Jonsson and Åstrand 1994), “history of popular music in Iceland” (Gunni 2013), and “rock in Denmark” (Michelsen 2013). It would appear, then, that it is of particular importance for Finnish authors to emphasize the national quality (of), rather than the national context (in), of the music. Jalkanen and Kurkela’s (2003) book is by no means an isolated example, as evidenced by accounts focusing on “the history of Finnish rock” (Bruun et al. 1998), “the history of Finnish female rock” (Aho and Taskinen 2003), and “the rise and balls of Finnish hip hop music” (Mikkonen 2004). Linguistic differences need to be taken into account here, though, since to translate the phrase “history of popular music in Finland/​Sweden/​etc.” into Finnish (with its suffixes) is arguably more cumbersome than to do so into the Scandinavian languages (that utilize prepositions). Yet this does not diminish the ideological implications; rather, it foregrounds the link between language and modes of thinking. The emphasis on national qualities is not unheard of in the case of other Nordic countries and their languages, either; alongside an excavation into “Swedish rock:  music–​lyrics–​history” (Lilliestam 1998) and the “fifty years with girls in Norwegian rock and pop” (Breen 2006), several chapters in the “Rock in Denmark” collection (Michelsen 2013) deal with different strands of “Danish” popular music. Regarding this, the editor of the collection noted a decade earlier, at the beginning of the project: It is always problematic to delimit an object of study by nationality or geography… . The project title might have been “Rock Culture in Denmark,” but by naming it “Danish Rock Culture” it is intended to stress that it is an international tradition as negotiated, appropriated and performed by specific people living in a specific place, that is, Danes and foreigners living in Denmark. Danish rock culture is not only a local version of US rock culture, but a meeting of several cultures taking place in specific places delimited as the area within the old nation state. Notions of Danishness come in the plural and exist in a constant flux. (Michelsen 2004, 20)

Regardless of the choice between in and ish and its justification, one might distinguish between an emphasis on “national character,” on the one hand, and “national significance,” on the other, thus making a difference between those musical events and works that are taken to be “truly” national and those that have been utilized actively and demonstrably in the construction of particular national histories and identities (Weisethaunet 2007, 194–​195). This distinction is quite obvious in the use of prepositions of and in. In fact, the significance of prepositions points to what I have decided to call “prepositional politics of historiography,” or “pre-​positional,” to be more precise. In other words, the prepositions used in explicating the type of historiography,

190   History dealing with popular music or not, lead to considerations of presuppositions and interpretive positions that condition and determine the whole endeavor of making sense of the past.

Swedish Explosions, Finnish Unity, and the Survival of the Fittest Genres The pre-​positional politics are clearly detectable in the two books, particularly when one considers the topics covered. In general terms, Malmström (1996) is more attentive than his Finnish colleagues to international trends that have affected also the musical practices in Sweden. For instance, when writing about film music and jazz of the 1920s, he relates the phenomena to both U.S. and Central European developments. Occasionally, however, the events in Sweden are inundated by an extensive discussion of Anglo-​American points of comparison in particular; regarding the period from the late 1950s to the late 1960s, much of the treatment centers on U.S. rhythm ‘n’ blues, rock ‘n’ roll, protest songs, and hippie culture, as well as the influence of the Beatles, while only very few Swedish artists or bands are mentioned. The coverage of rock ‘n’ roll is a case in point; of the fifteen pages reserved for expounding the peculiarities of the genre, roughly one-​third deal specifically with Sweden (Malmström 1996, 163–​179). Furthermore, with respect to the 1970s, the importance of U.S.-​derived “black music” emerges as overwhelming, challenged only by the success of Abba. Also, the commentary on the emergence and significance of music videos in the 1980s consumes lengthy sections without providing much information on video production in Sweden. In comparison, though, while Malmström (1996, 282–​291) devotes several pages to “the visual explosion,” his Finnish counterparts mention music videos in one sentence only: “The development of music video into a central marketing device of rock accelerated [the] development [of defining genres extra-​musically]” (Jalkanen and Kurkela 2003, 618). Furthermore, when comparing, for instance, the books’ subheadings regarding the 1980s (see table 9.1), one may note a slight emphasis on nationally significant artists (i.e., Agents, Dingo) on the Finnish side. One may also detect a central difference between the two in terms of the professed historical outcome; while Malmström (1996) argues for explosion, fragmentation, splintering, and a multitude of genres, Jalkanen and Kurkela (2003) advocate unity and fusion through Finlandization, nostalgia, and “rockization” in particular. One might furthermore argue that the emphasis on “rockization” by the Finnish historiographers has led to some moot omissions, most notably of hip hop and rap. In their introduction, the authors duly recognize the impossibility of covering everything and maintain that regarding the post-​WWI years, they have been compelled to concentrate only the most popular genres, thus excluding many “musicohistorically significant phenomena and styles—​local or otherwise marginal” (Jalkanen and Kurkela

A Metahistorical Inquiry    191 Table 9.1 List of Subheadings in Books on Nordic Popular Music Malmström (1996, 275–​325)

Jalkanen and Kurkela (2003, 596–​618)

From a Developing Country to an Industrial Country in 100 Years

Rock of the 1980s—​General Features

The Breakthrough of CD and Synths

Female Energy of Suomirock*

Music and the 1980s Economy

THE GREAT FUSION

Visual Explosion

Finnish Schlager Gets Finlandized

Fragmentation or Splintering

Nostalgia and Self-​Moaning

Music and Daily Press

Cassette Trade and Hit Albums*

Equality between Sexes?

Rock Sound and Machine Music

The Era of the Musical

New Generation Studio Musicians*

Rock, punk or pop—​a genre discussion

Agents-​Schlager

Multitude of Styles and Trends

Phenomenal Dingo

Hip Hop, Rap, and Remix

“Rockization” of the Soundscape

Dance Music Some Names A Word on the Significance of Popular Music Afterword and Summary Subheadings in Malmström’s (1996) and Jalkanen and Kurkela’s (2003) accounts regarding the 1980s. An asterisk indicates an auxiliary box story. Capitalization indicates a main section title. It should be also noted that one page in Jalkanen and Kurkela equals roughly two and a half in Malmström in terms of writing; thus the passages are quite equal in length.

2003, 12). Yet nowhere in their 600-​page excavation is rap discussed even en passant. On the basis of this, one might be induced to question their final assessment about the prevalence of “singing, songlikeness, melodic inventiveness” and nineteenth-​century melodic gestures in the “aesthetics of Finnish rhythm music” (Jalkanen and Kurkela 2003, 618). Here, however, the pre-​positional politics of historiography emerge once again, as the alternative of course is to consider rap as a genre that essentially is not Finnish, or of Finland. Curiously, though, in Bruun et al.’s Jee jee jee, another brick of a history book on the country’s popular music, focusing explicitly on rock and released five years earlier, the apparition of Finnish-​language rap in the late 1980s is noted. The genre’s success in the early 1990s is also acknowledged, albeit framed with references to debates about the orthodoxy and seriousness of the performers and the commercial exploitation of the genre in general (Bruun et al. 1998, 441–​443). Given the release date of Jalkanen and

192   History Kurkela’s book, it would have been possible for them to address also the emergence of the alleged second generation of suomiräp that coincided with the new millennium. The same applies by and large to the spread of different subgenres of metal music since the mid-​1980s, not to mention their international success a decade later (cf. Bruun et al. 1998, 489–​490). To be sure, a volume carrying the word “rock” in its title and focusing on post-​1955 events is more likely to include perusal of metal minutiae than one centering on “popular music” since the early nineteenth century; yet in the latter there are no explanations whatsoever as to why the treatment ends at the turn to the 1990s. This lack of justification becomes further puzzling when one considers it in relation to the demographic changes in Finland during the 1990s that pertain to migration and multiculturalism in particular. Thus, while Bruun et al. (1998, 490–​493) note the appearance of various “ethnic”—​and in many cases, African or otherwise “black”—​ingredients in Finnish rock and pop in the mid-​1990s, Jalkanen and Kurkela (2003, 562–​563) only hint at this when they deal with the “bona fide world music” of Piirpauke, the “real oddball in the musical stage of the [mid-​1970s]” that was otherwise dominated by groups of progressive rock. But lest this appear overtly critical of Jalkanen and Kurkela’s impressive survey, it should be noted that Malmström (1996, 308, 314–​316), too, is rather terse in his description of metal and rap, as he provides the reader with not much more than a listing of metal styles and hip hop dimensions. He does not mention a single metal or rap act from Sweden. The same goes for world music to a considerable degree; he nevertheless relates the phenomenon to the decade-​long “interspersion with other cultures” in Sweden, and he points to the national variants of salsa, reggae, tex-​mex, cajun, and zydeco, also mentioning a couple of Swedish groups by name (Malmström 1996, 309–​311). In the end, then, it is crucial also to consider the historiographical expertise and bias of a given historian; as Tim Wall (2013, 12) remarks, “pop history is authored” and comprise “acts of interpretation, and arguments constructed about each music’s meaning, causes and effects.”

Rock Imperialism Within popular music studies, the metahistorical ideas have been echoed not only in the writings of Wall (2013) but also in the work of Keith Negus (1996) in particular. Both scholars warn against assumptions about the neutrality of history and emphasize the need to think of histories always as produced. With respect to the historiography of popular music in particular, they point to the tendency to canonize the so-​called rock era that allegedly began in the mid-​1950s and came to an end by the late 1970s. This has led to aggrandizing the significance of the 1960s as a phase when popular music reached its zenith. Negus (1996, 136–​139), for example, maintains that the year 1967 has been constructed as the evolutionary peak of the rock era, and Wall (2013, 12) adds to this claims about an overarching “rock aesthetic” that has its foundation in the practices of the late

A Metahistorical Inquiry    193 1960s (see also Regev 2002, 253–​255), as well as about an increased fragmentation of popular music since the “rock era.” Wall (2013, 13) criticizes these claims for producing totalizing forms of historical explanation whereby emphasis is laid on linear timelines, key moments and individuals, and a quest for points of origin. Instead, he maintains, it is more productive “to ask why moments in popular music history are presented as part of a coherent pattern of progress (or decline)” (Wall 2013, 14–​15). Moreover, Negus (1996, 136–​139) introduces the concept of “rock imperialism,” which for him denotes “an attempt to ignore differences between musical sounds and to define rock very loosely so that numerous musics can be accommodated and claimed as rock” (emphasis in original). This is furthermore connected to the hegemonic status of the so-​ called rock era in accounts that deal with popular music history. For Negus (1996, 138–​ 139), the notion of a rock era signals “a particular way of disrupting the dialogues with the past” that “is based on a particular experience of rock . . . which fails to allow for how musical forms are transformed and move on in different ways across the planet, acquiring new significance in different situations and as part of other dialogues.” To a considerable degree, the prestige of rock is detectable in the historiography of Nordic popular musics. In Finland, the dominance of suomirock—​that is, Finnish-​ language mainstream rock—​has been acknowledged since the early 1970s; and indeed, Jalkanen and Kurkela’s (2003, 618) book concludes with the suggestion that at the end of the nineteenth century, “the common denominator of sounds and rhythms was all-​ embracing ‘rock.’” Moreover, it is of no minor significance that in the “boom” of music historiography in the country during the late 1990s, the first book-​length account on the country’s popular music past was the aforementioned “History of Finnish rock” by Bruun et al. (1998). Also, the volume on “The History of Finnish Female Rock” was released in the early 2000s (Aho and Taskinen 2003). Here, one could ponder the significance of generic labeling as a means to increase historiographical authority in a case that is implicated in gender dynamics; in other words, at issue is the extent to which “rock” gives credibility to a historical survey that focuses on women. Interestingly enough, when measured against a contemporaneous account on “fifty years with girls in Norwegian rock and pop” (Breen 2006; emphasis added), the rock-​centeredness of Finnish-​ness emerges once again. Nevertheless, indications of a broader rock imperialist tendency are present in the historiography of Nordic popular musics in more general. This is evident on the basis of such headlines as “A Swedish Rock History” (Lilliestam 1998, 70) and “Rock in Denmark” (Michelsen 2013). Also in the book Music in Denmark (Ketting 1987), one encounters rock as the primary if not the sole genre of popular music, juxtaposed with art, folk, stage, and jazz music. Another portent of rock imperialism is the use of the generic label for institutionalizing and legitimizing purposes at the expense of more nuanced, localized, and historical generic distinctions. According to Negus (1996, 162), this leads to arbitrary methodology whereby different genres may be either included in or excluded from the category of rock in a purpose-​oriented fashion. As a consequence, various musical practices and forms are subjected to generalizations based on the specificities, particularities, and transformations of rock. An example of this tendency is

194   History provided by Lilliestam (1998, 95–​96), as he remarks that “not all music in Sweden in the 1960s was not of course rock—​or pop as was the term used then.” In other words, while he points to the multiplicity of genres and the commercial significance of schlager in particular, as well as to the anachronistic use of the label “rock,” he nevertheless has chosen to construct a narrative that builds on retrospective conceptualizations of the genre, justifying the endeavor by noting that rock is “an important part of Swedish contemporary cultural history” and “a quantitatively dominant musical idiom today” (Lilliestam 1998, 145). Moreover, Negus (1996, 162) explicitly mentions rap as a genre that is often, let us say, colonized by rock in this way, on the basis of preconcerted inclusion or exclusion. Jalkanen and Kurkela’s (2003) tome constitutes an example of the latter, whereas in the explicitly rock-​oriented Jee jee jee (Bruun et al. 1998) and Lilliestam’s (1998) account, rap is treated as if it were a subgenre of rock. In Jee jee jee, the authors link the first phases of Finnish-​language rap fleetingly with punk rock, especially in term of the promise of equality and “the same irony, similar ‘stupid’ rhymes and . . . the same funny social commentary” (Bruun et al. 1998, 443). Lilliestam (1998, 25–​26), in turn, emphasizes the importance of a broader “rock tradition” that is implicated in various processes of cultural and musical eclecticism, dialogue, continuity, and blends. Thus for him, the label “rock” may include “everything from rap and heavy metal to ‘pop,’ dance band music and folk rock,” and maybe even to world music, techno, and house. Lilliestam (1998, 25) notes, however, that musicians who identify with these genres may not consider their activities as rock and “have difficulties in understanding what they have in common with the rock tradition.” Later on, when discussing musical hybridity especially in terms of national variations, he nonetheless abandons this sensitivity to interpretive communities by treating hip hop straight-​forwardly as a subdivision of rock (Lilliestam 1998, 34). A similar kind of rock-​imperialist ambivalency is present in the volume on rock in Denmark, as it includes a chapter on hip hop (Krogh 2013). In the introduction to the book, this inclusion is not addressed directly, but the implicit justification rests on the idea of rock as “a genre culture” where a premium is placed on ideological factors such as “authenticity, opposition, uproar, communality, marginality, anticommercialism, freedom and originality” (Michelsen and Kirkegaard 2013, 21). In the chapter itself, in turn, hip hop is approached as a historical, discursive, and context-​specific label, and it is pointed out that while it was initially met with some interest and (exoticist) enthusiasm within the established confines of rock journalism, from the very beginning there was a tension based on different value judgments concerning commercialism, and materialism in particular. Later on, as self-​contained hip hop journalism begun to emerge, ideals of rock criticism came to represent nothing less than a “fundamental outsider’s challenge” (Krogh 2013, 379–​382, 424). At the same time, the category of rock has proved once again useful in asserting historiographical authority and credibility. With respect to hip hop in Denmark, “[o]‌ne of the ruses used in arguing for [its] vitality, is drawing parallels with genres that already have shown their worth”—​and rock constitutes a prime example of these genres (Krogh 2013, 395). Also, in the volume on Finnish female rock, among the seventy-​seven artists

A Metahistorical Inquiry    195 featured, there is one who is explicitly labeled as “a rapper,” namely MC Mariko of the group Kwan. In this case, the label rock covers also such phenomena as “the pioneers of Finnish machine music” (Taikapeili), “dance pop in the Finnish way” (Päivi Lepistö), “a synthetic pop pearl” (Aikakone), and “a dance duo whose sound was, depending on the listener, either creakingly lovely or altogether empty-​headed nasal whingeing” (Nylon Beat); see Aho and Taskinen (2003, 213–​219, 227–​230, 264–​267). Regarding the “rock era” debate and the alleged predominance of the 1960s as the pinnacle of that era, there exist, however, somewhat different evolutionary trajectories. When measured in crude quantitative terms—​that is, relative page counts (­figures 9.1–​ 9.3)—there is, first of all, a clear difference between Malmström (1996) and Jalkanen and Kurkela (2003), in that in the former there is a rather steady rise toward the end of the twentieth century, whereas in the latter the mid-​century events attract the most of attention. In comparison, in the accounts written by scholars from the United States, there is a stronger emphasis on the 1960s, occasionally embracing more than three-​ fifths of the treatment. This applies also to a Swedish-​language book on “the styles and trends of rock music” (Brolinson and Larsen 1999). There is nonetheless one anomaly 0.25 0.20 0.15 0.10 0.5 0

20s

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50s

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Figure 9.1  Relative page counts (Y axis) by decades (X axis) in Malmström 1996 (grey) and Jalkanen and Kurkela 2003 (black). 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 –40s

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Figure 9.2  Relative page counts by decades in select U.S. accounts: Friedlander 1996 (black), Curtis 1987 (dashes), Covach 2007 (grey), and Garofalo 1997 (hyphens).

196   History 0.6

0.45

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Figure 9.3  Relative page counts by decades in select Nordic accounts: Brolinson and Larsen 1999 (black), Lilliestam 1998 (grey), Bruun et al. 1998 (black dash line), Aho and Taskinen 2003 (dotted line), and Gunni 2013 (grey dash line).

in this body of research into the mainstream of Anglo-​American popular music history, as Reebee Garofalo, in his Rockin’ Out (1997), dedicates less to the 1960s than to the adjacent decades. But then again, the subtitle of his book reads “Popular Music in the USA”—​popular music, not just rock. In the case of national rock(-​imperialist) histories, for their part, the curves are similarly moderate—​with the exception of Finnish female rock, where there is a peak in the 1980s. Also, the trajectory of popular music in Iceland (Gunni 2013) is comparatively regular, albeit exhibiting a clear rise in the 1980s; an obvious explanation for this is the international success of Sugarcubes, and Björk in particular.

Exceptionalist Anachronism Alongside rock-​imperialist tendencies, it has been pointed out in relation to the historiography of popular music that in many instances “the national” is invested with ideas about something that is utterly unique. This feature may be regarded as a more general one, extending to all forms of music and cultural expression. Weisethaunet (2007, 188), for example, writes explicitly about music history in general when he remarks that the narrative strategies that promote uniqueness are problematic, especially because “musical objects are continuously reified and described as inhering national characteristics and traits . . . based on hearings that are dependent on specific beliefs or the uncritical adoption of an overriding national perspective.” With respect to popular music in particular, Weisethaunet (2007, 189–​191) stresses the importance of language, especially in relation to processes of glocalization. “Unquestionably,” he writes, “language is the key factor that produces ‘national’ popular musics, in that musical expression is commonly uttered in local language and thus shared in a community.” He nevertheless also asks if “a love song performed by a Danish rock band, [is] necessarily a ‘Danish’ expression, even

A Metahistorical Inquiry    197 if it is performed in the Danish language?” In addition, he refers to a tendency to juxtapose “an imagined international ‘youth’ or ‘pop culture’” with different national folk or traditional cultures. As a result, one may easily enough enter an “awkward position [in which] ‘popular music’ is not really considered a part of [national] music history; that is of ‘music’” (Weisethaunet 2007, 189). The linguistic national dynamics of popular music can be taken as one form of glocalization at work. Originally coined in social sciences by Roland Robertson (1995, 28–​29), the term refers to a process whereby global goods and practices are accommodated to local markets and cultural contexts. Weisethaunet (2007, 190–​191), however, points to the exoticizing risks in this kind of construction of consumer differentiation and institutionalized expectations of uniqueness, as this leads easily to “a renewed quest for ‘otherness’” in music, too. As an example, he mentions Anglo-​American jazz critics’ ideas about a distinct “Nordic sound” that ostensibly bear a naturalized connection to Nordic landscapes, and Norwegian fjords in particular. With recourse to Homi Bhabha’s (1995) ideas about different ways of “narrating nations,” Weisethaunet (2007, 191) further situates the emphasis on national uniqueness in music historiography in a broader context of “a period when national political discourse has returned to the most simplistic of binary logocentrisms” and a resulting “heightening of ‘ole country’ as the most telling commodified objects and a revisiting of ‘roots’ nostalgia and nationalistic prose.” In recent studies about multiculturalism and postcolonialism in the Nordic region, these ideas are echoed especially in relation to the notion of exceptionalism. Writing about racism in Finland, sociologist Anna Rastas (2012, 89–​91) defines an exceptionalist discourse as one that relies on differentiating one’s own people from others on the basis of moral superiority. Thus, while the grounds for differentiation may not be unique, the important point is that they are continuously represented as such. Rastas links exceptionalism openly to historiography, too, as she claims that the potentialities of the notion of exceptionalism lie in its utility for describing how particular interpretations of histories and “our” . . . involvements in specific developments are constructed and employed for strategic purposes: for “selective amnesias” and for avoiding moral and ethical judgements related to our responsibilities towards those who are not included in the national . . . “us.” (89)

The exceptionalist discourse is prevalent also in the accounts on the history of popular music in the Nordic countries. Sometimes, however, the uniquely national is interwoven with that which is considered to be international; Flemming Madsen (1987, 82), for instance, writes about the emergence of progressive rock in Denmark in the early 1970s thus: “Under the solid influence of San Francisco, Dylan, Velvet Underground, Doors, and English groups like Procol Harum and Deep Purple, the first genuinely Danish rock music milieu was created.” The implication is, then, that to some extent at least it is the way in which the “Anglo-​seam” is domesticated or indigenized that constitutes the “genuinely” national. In relation to Finnish popular culture in general, cultural historians Hannu Salmi and Kari Kallioniemi (2000) have remarked that maybe one

198   History should indeed consider the ways in which foreign influences are “aped” as the strongest indications of a distinct national identity. This has also some resemblance to Homi Bhabha’s (1995) notion of “colonial mimicry,” which refers to the idea that no matter how much the subaltern, colonized population—​in this case, the Nordic popular music community—​wishes to imitate or “ape” the dominant practices of the colonizer, the imitations are always poorer than the originals, and therefore only help to maintain and reinforce colonial relations. Thus, the theory of “aping” may not be that appealing after all, not to mention that it rests on a taken-​for-​granted idea that there indeed is something called national identity. By and large, the same applies to Lilliestam’s (1998, 21, 36–​37) account on Swedish rock, as he describes the phenomenon as “a force field where Anglo-​American models . . . meet older domestic traditions”; he also claims that it has been often difficult for Swedes to realize that their “own newly created stylistic hybrids” are based on adopting and appropriating foreign models in ways that are conditioned by local circumstances. Here, the reference to stylistic, and by implication cultural, hybridity links the discussion once more to postcolonial theorization, as for instance Bhabha (1995) has emphasized the “always already” condition of hybridity; thus, the emphasis on distinct national hybrids in the case of Swedish rock also rests on an unfounded assumption about national uniqueness. Furthermore, on the basis of Madsen’s (1987, 85–​88) account of Danish rock, it becomes apparent that the assumed and celebrated national quality can reside virtually wherever one wishes it to do so, as for him “another milestone in the history of Danish rock” rests on “simple, melodious rock numbers, as flat as the Danish landscape, with an obvious textual and structural debt to the medieval ballad”; on the other hand, he has “the pop rock wave, where a whole series of new groups specializing in pleasant sounds, singable melodies and banal, harmless texts combined techno-​pop, funk, reggae etc. into a special Danish form.” The issue of celebrating national qualities raises further questions concerning teleology and anachronism. At issue here are the ways in which past events are taken to represent straightforward processes of evolution that in a natural, or naturalized, manner progress toward a goal that in turn is based on retrospective knowledge and aspirations. When, and crucially not if, this happens, the cultural politics of metahistory become clearly apparent, as the past is interpreted for purposes of the present. Frequently, this type of anachronistic discourse centers on debates about the authenticity of given genres of music, the prime example being the denominator “jazz” in the 1920s and ‘30s. Regarding Sweden of those days, Malmström (1996, 71–​73, 82) writes, first of all, that it is “doubtful if the music that was performed deserved the label jazz music,” and later refers to occasions when jazz was played “in the right meaning of the word.” He also refers to a particular category of music called bonnjazz, or “rustic jazz” (see Edström 1999), as an attempt “to execute jazz before one really had learned what jazz meant” (Malmström 1996, 117). In a similar vein, Ib Skovgaard (1987, 71) writes about jazz in the 1920s in Denmark as “nothing more than syncopated dance music”; according to him, it was in the 1930s when “jazz began to be a real concept and a real factor.” Interestingly, in

A Metahistorical Inquiry    199 relation to the pre-​positional politics of historiography, he claims that jazz in Denmark in the 1920s was merely “a kind of prelude to the history of Danish jazz” (Skovgaard 1987, 71; emphasis added), thus implying not only that the forms of music that were called jazz in the 1920s were not really jazz but also that the real jazz of later years has acquired a distinct national character. This of course connects the discussion also to the exceptionalist discourse. With respect to Finland, in turn, Jalkanen and Kurkela (2003, 255, 291) likewise implicitly valorize “authentic jazz,” for example, over “polka racket” and “tango pounding.” An additional, somewhat contradictory layer to the anachronistic discourse of authenticity, as it were, is provided by the fact that some of the authors in question explicitly address the issue. Malmström (1996, 128–​129, 148, 305) for one discusses, however briefly, the conceptual changes that have taken place in relation to the label “jazz,” and occasionally also decorates it with quotation marks to emphasize its contested contents. Jalkanen and Kurkela (2003, 267), for their part, explicitly question some of the stories that have been told about the arrival of jazz in Finland. One may also note that in terms of a broader metahistorical attitude, Malmström (1996, 10), in his introduction, openly acknowledges the possibility to write history in different ways. What is nevertheless curious is that, despite all intentions and possibilities, the histories in question emerge in a form that leaves very little room for questioning the narratives and interpretations offered.

Conclusion While discourses of rock-​imperialism, exceptionalism, and anachronism may be integral features in the historiography of popular music in, or of, the Nordic countries, the question still remains whether this can be considered as a particularly Nordic phenomenon. Based on my personal experience with non-​Nordic historiography of popular music, I do not think it can. Neither do I think the pre-​positional differences constitute a peculiarly Nordic dimension; yet, I am convinced they make a significant difference. Malmström’s (1996) account of the events in Sweden is telling in that it includes lengthy sections on the “foreign” phenomena, such as the emergence of rock ‘n’ roll in the United States and music videos in general, implying that these for their part constitute also what popular music has been in Sweden—​and, quite possibly, gradually Swedish. I am also convinced that on the basis of a handful of books, with all their variations in terms of scope and approach, one can only point to general tendencies. Thus, an apparent challenge for any metahistorical analysis of popular music historiography is constituted by the abundance of material, especially if and when multiple languages are involved. One should also recognize the existence and importance of other forms of popular music historiography than merely the literary ones. In relation to the many genres of popular music in Finland, for instance, the narratives have first been released on radio or television. Also, various record compilations, sometimes devoid of any

200   History contextualizing verbal content, pose methodological challenges of their own. But all this merely ensures that there will be continuous possibilities and thus needs to investigate the ways in which the past of popular music is accounted for, for historians and metahistorians alike.

Note This article is based on research funded by the Academy of Finland. I thank also Dr. Gunni for the help in acquisition of the research material.

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A Metahistorical Inquiry    201 Ketting, K., ed. 1987. Music in Denmark. Copenhagen: Det Danske Selskab. Krogh, M. 2013. “B-​boys Are You Ready? Forhandlinger af hiphop i dansk populærmusikkritik.” In Rock i Danmark. Studier i populærmusik fra 1950’erne til årtusindskiftet, ed. M. Michelsen, 377–​428. Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag. Lahger H. 1999. Proggen. Musikrörelsens uppgång och fall. Stockholm: Atlas. Lilliestam, L. 1998. Svensk rock. Musik, lyrik, historik. Göteborg: Bo Ejeby Förlag. Lindelof, A. M. 2007. “Look! It’s Rock ‘n’ Roll! How Television Participated in Shaping the Visual Genre Conventions of Popular Music.” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 1(2): 141–​159. Madsen, F. 1987. “Rock Music.” In Music in Denmark, ed. Knud Ketting, 81–​92. Copenhagen: Det Danske Selskab. Malmström, D. 1996. Härligt, härligt men farligt, farligt. Populärmusik i Sverige under 1900-​ talet. Stockholm: Natur och Kultur. Michelsen, M. 2004. “Histories and Complexities: Popular Music History Writing and Danish Rock.” Popular Music History 1(1): 19–​36. Michelsen, M., ed. 2013. Rock i Danmark. Studier i populærmusik fra 1950’erne til årtusindskiftet. Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag. Michelsen, M., and A. Kirkegaard. 2013. “Introduktion: Rockens historier, kulturer, genrer og geografier.” In Rock i Danmark. Studier i populærmusik fra 1950’erne til årtusindskiftet, ed. M. Michelsen, 11–​32. Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag. Mikkonen, J. 2004. Riimi riimistä. Suomalaisen hiphopmusiikin nousu ja uho. Helsinki: Otava. Mäkelä, J. 2008. “The State of Rock: A History of Finland’s Cultural Policy and Music Export.” Popular Music 27(2): 257–​269. Mäkelä, J. 2011. Kansainvälisen populaarimusiikin historiaa. Helsinki:  Suomen Jazz & Pop Arkisto. Negus, K. 1996. Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Oksanen, T. 2004. Suomalainen progressiivinen rock—​synty ja kehitys vuosina 1967–​1974. Tampere: POP-​lehti. Paleface [K. Miettinen]. 2011. Rappiotaidetta. Suomiräpin tekijät. Helsinki: Like. Rastas, A. 2012. “Reading History through Finnish Exceptionalism.” In Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region: Exceptionalism, Migrant Others and National Identities, ed. K. Loftsdóttir and L. Jensen, 89–​103. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. Regev, M. 2002. “The ‘Pop-​Rockization’ of Popular Music.” In Popular Music Studies, ed. D. Hesmondhalgh and K. Negus, 251–​264. London: Arnold. Robertson, R. 1995. “Glocalization: Time–​Space and Homogeneity–​Heterogeneity.” In Global Modernities, ed. M. Featherstone, S. Lash, and R. Robertson, 25–​44. London: Sage. Salmi, H., and K. Kallioniemi. 2000. “Pohjan tähteiden tuolla puolen: Suomalaisuuden strategioita populaarikulttuurissa.” In Pohjan tähteet. Populaarikulttuurin kuva suomalaisuudesta, ed. H. Salmi and K. Kallioniemi, 7–​12. Helsinki: BTJ Kirjastopalvelu Oy. Schram, K. 2011. “Borealism: Folkloristic Perspectives on Transnational Performances and the Exoticism of the North.” PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh. Skovgaard, I. 1987. “Jazz Music.” In Music in Denmark, ed. Knud Ketting, 71–​ 80. Copenhagen: Det Danske Selskab. Skyum-​Nielsen, R. 2006. Nr. 1—​Dansk hiphopkultur siden 1983. København:  Informations Forlag. Van der Lee, P. 1997. “Latin American Influences in Swedish Popular Music.” Popular Music and Society 21(2): 17–​45.

202   History Wald, E. 2009. How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Wall, T. 2013. Studying Popular Music Culture, 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Sage. Weisethaunet, H. 2007. “Historiography and Complexities: Why Is Music ‘National’?” Popular Music History 2(2): 169–​199. White, H. 1973. Metahistory:  The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-​ Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wimmers, A., and N. Glick Schiller. 2003. “Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology.” International Migration Review 37(3): 576–​610.

Chapter 10

E choes of the C ol onia l Past in Dis c ou rse on North At l a nt i c P opu l ar Mu si c Kimberly Cannady

This chapter examines discourses on popular music and Nordic exoticism in Iceland and the Faroe Islands, drawing on the concept of borealism (see also Chapter 1). Iceland and the Faroe Islands have historically been rendered as exotic outposts of the Nordic region and of Europe. The argument in this chapter is that these historically grounded tropes of exoticism are now being revived and reinvigorated in the realm of popular music making by foreigners and locals alike. Popular music is now one of the foremost sites of exotic image making in Iceland. The chapter builds on the growing literature on Icelandic popular music (Dibben 2009a, 2009b; Mitchell 2009; Prior 2014), which has identified tropes of nature and landscape in visual culture and marketing. Based on longitudinal fieldwork in the North Atlantic region, I extend this research to demonstrate that the evocation of nature in popular image making is deeply rooted in Iceland’s history as a former Danish colony. The Faroe Islands are included in the analysis to more fully contextualize these processes within a larger Nordic context (see also Chapter 5). Iceland’s landscape quickly shifts from aged lava fields covered in delicate moss, to lush farmland, to jagged sea cliffs home to nesting puffins, gannet, and other sea birds. The landscape forms a striking visual and sensual experience for both foreign visitors to Iceland and Icelanders out exploring their own country. This same landscape has fascinated travelers for centuries and has fueled countless travelogues and books on the subject of Iceland’s exotic geological features (Oslund 2011). This exotic perception of the country extends into the cultural and social realms as well, with neo-​pagan religious practices (Ásatru) and a wide range of folk beliefs (including the huldufólk, usually translated to “elves” in English) regularly evoked by foreign journalists as markers of difference.1 Today, music journalists, documentary filmmakers, and travel writers commonly

204   History link such descriptions of the Icelandic landscape and folk beliefs to the sounds of Icelandic music and the behaviors of musicians. The Reykjavík nightlife and the city’s dynamic musical life also stimulate foreign interest, but many of these musicians find themselves contending with the exotic image of their homeland projected through the landscape, folk beliefs, and music. The growth of tourism to Iceland in the past few years has intensified those projections of the island as an exotic escape. Other scholars, most notably Kristinn Schram, have discussed the exotic images of Iceland commonly found in tourism and marketing campaigns as borealism, or a specifically northern version of Edward Said’s theory of orientalism (1979). Schram positions the Far North’s exotic image back to at least 140 bce with the depiction of the North Atlantic islands as “Ultima Thule” in Polybius’s Histories (Schram 2011b, 100). Schram also connects such perceptions to the North Atlantic’s colonial experience under Denmark. This issue of colonialism in Iceland has been extensively explored in the research of Icelandic anthropologist Kristín Loftsdottír (2012b) and is one I return to later in the chapter. Schram demonstrates that these historical perceptions of Iceland as an exotic locale continue into the present and argues: To this day an exotic image of Icelanders is perpetuated, and increasingly so, through the medium of books of photography and film …wool-​clad ancients explore the boundaries of past and present, nature and the supernatural. These are among the images of Icelanders represented through contemporary mediums, literature, film and art in recent years. (Schram 2011b, 106)

Schram’s analysis of such imagery in contemporary Iceland demonstrates that an exotic Iceland is found not only in marketing campaigns or is projected on to the island by foreigners but also that Icelanders themselves continue to explore such tropes in their literature, art, and film. At the same time, some Icelanders strategically use the exotic image of Iceland for economic gain in marketing campaigns for a wide range of Icelandic products and experiences.2 This material intersects with larger conversations about the marketing category of “world music” as explored by authors such as Feld (2000) and Stokes (2004). This chapter proceeds with a discussion of the North Atlantic in relation to the larger Nordic region. It expands on the concept of borealism, as well as the usefulness of postcolonial theory for understanding Iceland and the Faroe Islands today. I then examine trends in music journalism by foreigners on Icelandic music in recent years. Through this material I argue that music journalists have contributed to the exotic element in Icelandic popular music more significantly than any other in the realm of popular music I then turn to other forms of marketing and image making in relation to popular music, including documentaries, festivals, initiatives from within Iceland itself, and musicians themselves. The focus is on musicians who have gained both local and international success in terms of recognition, record sales, and overseas airplay, and who have a demonstrable local presence through domestic performances. I then turn the conversation to a discussion of how the success of Icelandic popular music and of the tourism industry in Iceland has served as inspiration for the Faroe Islands.

Echoes of the Colonial Past    205

Iceland and the Faroe Islands as Danish Colonies Iceland was granted home rule within the Danish kingdom in 1874, and then completely severed ties with Denmark in 1944. The Faroe Islands, on the other hand, remain a part of the Danish Kingdom, although they are self-​governing. Prior to the late nineteenth century, hegemonic power relations between Denmark and the North Atlantic islands shaped the daily lives of individuals on the islands through a repressive economic policy, suppression of local languages and religions, and overall power imbalances with Copenhagen. The political landscape shifted substantially during the twentieth century, when Iceland gained independence from the Danish crown and the Faroe Islands were granted home-​rule (in 1948). While the larger Nordic region itself is at times perceived as a peripheral, homogenous region of Europe, the experiences of the North Atlantic highlight the internal Nordic power structures at play and also bring the region into global conversations of postcolonialism and cultural sovereignty. Discussing Iceland and the Faroe Islands as postcolonial is potentially provocative. Colonialism in Iceland and the Faroe Islands differed significantly from more brutal practices in parts of Africa, Asia, South America, and even Greenland, Denmark’s other North Atlantic colony. The Danish governance that spread throughout the North Atlantic in the sixteenth century had imperialistic roots planted in the idea that this control was a natural continuation of the Viking age of expansion that led to the initial settlements in the region in the ninth century. Still, policies starting in the sixteenth century, including a strict trade monopoly with both the Faroe Islands and Iceland by the Danish king, severely limited the ability of islanders to develop economic markets separate from Copenhagen (Gunnarsson 1983). This restrictive economic policy, combined with Danish control of educational and religious institutions, as well as governance of the islands, effectively turned Iceland and the Faroe Islands into the Danish colonies they would be until well into the nineteenth century. The political trajectory of Iceland and the Faroe Islands deviated from each other substantially in the late nineteenth century. While national independence movements sprung up in both locations, particularly among Faroese and Icelandic students studying in Copenhagen, only Iceland has since gained full independence from the Danish crown. One of the key strengths that Icelandic nationalists were able to draw upon in their push for independence was a perception that their cultural practices and language were a preserved form of old Danish and Norse culture. Anthropologist Inga Dóra Björnsdóttir has argued that, during the nineteenth century: It became a commonly accepted view that due to Iceland’s distance and isolation, the original and pure Nordic culture had been preserved in Iceland, while it had been diluted or disappeared altogether in the other Nordic countries. Thus Icelanders were now believed to be, in some ways, superior to other Scandinavians as they alone possessed the authentic Nordic language and spirit. (Björnsdóttir 1997, 4)

206   History This supposed preservation of “the original and pure Nordic culture” was considered to be most visible in the Icelandic language and in the preserved medieval sagas. Björnsdóttir continues her argument by pointing out that Iceland is probably one of the few former colonies in the world that was believed not only by its inhabitants but also by its colonizers to be culturally superior to its colonizers, and to have preserved the original and purer version of the colonizer’s culture (4). Iceland was clearly in a privileged position in relation to Denmark’s other colonies,3 owing to both internal and external perceptions of Iceland as a sort of deep-​freeze for a shared Old Norse heritage (Oslund 2011; Oxfeldt 2009). This perception of Iceland as a repository of pan-​Nordic culture aided the Icelanders in gaining independence, and even served as a model for the Danish romantic nationalists, including N.  F. S. Grundtvig, who argued that “the true but lost core of Danishness” could be found in the old Icelandic manuscripts (quoted in Hálfdanarasson 2000, 98). This perception of Icelandic culture simultaneously helped the Icelanders gain independence while it solidified perceptions of Iceland as an Old Norse holdout. Johannes Fabian (1983) identified such temporal differentiation as one of three main tactics used by colonizers to distance themselves from the colonized. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000, 8) has similarly described the “waiting room of modernity,” in which a coeval status is denied to those not conforming to a specific Western European notion of modernity. These ideas of temporal distancing between contemporary peoples today is seen in language that describes some locations as “primitive” and others as “modern.” Thus, contemporary discourse on Iceland as an innocent or exotic locale taps into the region’s postcolonial legacy. In a way, the current collaborations between Iceland’s popular music industry, the Icelandic government, and the Icelandic tourism industry demonstrate local agency to use the island’s cultural positioning for artistic and economic gain. As previously mentioned, recent large-​scale tourism campaigns in Iceland tend to draw together public and private organizations to present a unified marketing strategy. This includes collaborations between the national Icelandic Tourist Board (Ferðamálastofa), the public-​private partnership Íslandsstofa and its participation in campaigns such as “Iceland Naturally” and “Inspired by Iceland,” and the national airline carrier Icelandair, as well as music-​ specific entities such as Iceland Music Export. These campaigns have been wildly successful in their efforts to build export demand for Icelandic goods and to increase the number of foreign tourists to Iceland. This is demonstrated by their presence on social media and the staggering increase in tourists to Iceland. Faroese politicians, musicians, and music-​industry workers now look to Iceland as a successful model for economic and artistic benefit. This too has some connection to historical trends, in which nineteenth-​century Faroese nationalists and linguists looked to the Icelandic language as a model on which to develop a new orthography for their own language. This strategic alignment with Iceland was in part driven by a desire among Faroese nationalists to align their own cultural practices with those more revered forms in Iceland (Nauerby 1996). To this day, Iceland and the Faroe Islands are often depicted as existing in a space between the Old World and the New World, between European modernity and

Echoes of the Colonial Past    207 primitivism (Einarsson 1996, 226). This perceived marginality of Iceland and the Faroe Islands has deep links to historical trends dating back to at least the sixteenth century, but their geographic positioning as islands has more recently contributed to this perception. John R. Gillis has argued that perceptions of islands as isolated and remote, particularly in the North Atlantic, began to develop in the eighteenth century, as power structures shifted away from monarchies possessing land and people and toward the nation-​state with its boundaries based on geography (Gillis 2004, 127). As these transitions spread across the globe, island locations were increasingly rendered peripheral and isolated from the main seats of power, which were almost always on the continent. At the same time, these peripheral areas tended to be seen as living museums for old ways of life that had been lost on the mainland. Gillis writes: Now the sea was perceived a vast moat, and the islands were taking on an aura of insularity that has haunted them ever since. In the age of industrial capitalism and the nation-​state, history turned its back on Atlantic civilization, forgetting that it had ever existed. The nineteenth-​century progressive imagination turned inward to focus on roads and bridges, ignoring waterborne forms of transportation. No longer stepping-​stones to the future, islands retreated into the mists of history, to remain in obscurity until much nearer our own times. (100)

Gillis’s study examines multiple islands across the Atlantic, but he distinguishes Iceland as not only a geographic island but also what he terms a “cultural island.” Gillis notes that “[Iceland’s] constructed insularity and aboriginality have served it well” (120). The constructed nature of insularity and aboriginality in both the Faroe Islands and Iceland is reflected in writings and perceptions of popular music in both locations.

Music Journalism and Icelandic Popular Music Rolling Stone rock critic David Fricke (1988, 67)  ushered in a new way of writing about popular music in Iceland when he opened his 1988 Rolling Stone article on the Sugarcubes with “Welcome to Iceland—​Pop Music’s Final Frontier.” Fricke played a major role in directing the readers of Rolling Stone to the Sugarcubes, and he continues to write about music in Iceland over thirty years after his first article on Iceland for the magazine. Such external conceptions of Icelandic music often involve a sound thought to be inextricably linked to landscape, folk beliefs, and heritage. Fricke’s 1988 writing was emblematic of this approach to Icelandic popular music, as demonstrated by the following passage: There is no such sign [Welcome to Iceland—​Pop Music’s Final Frontier] greeting you as you turn onto the coastal highway leading from the international airport at

208   History Keflavík, Iceland. But there should be. Because the vista that hits you as you drive northeast to the capital city of Reykjavík gives brand-​new meaning to the words rock and roll. ( 66)

Fricke invokes pagan customs still thought to survive on this fringe of Europe, including belief in elves (huldufólk) in his description of Björk Guðmundsdottír, the lead singer of the Sugarcubes, as “an elfin young beauty” (68). Here, Icelandic music is portrayed as familiar enough for an American to appreciate—​at times echoing U2 and Blondie, according to Fricke, but still fundamentally apart, just like Iceland itself. Fricke continues, “But while you have heard the bits and pieces before, you have never heard it all like this. Because the Sugarcubes make music that is very much like Iceland itself, a collision of extremes that can be at once forbidding and mysteriously compelling” (68). Fricke’s depiction of Iceland as a land of mystery, and the Sugarcube’s music as akin to its extreme homeland, evokes a fantastical version of Iceland as seen from the outside. Finally, Fricke solidifies his view of the Sugarcubes as related to Icelandic geography by noting a “unique symbiotic relationship between Icelandic geology and the Sugarcubes’ electric kick” (68). This writing by Fricke demonstrates a specific way of associating Icelandic popular music with place that echoes earlier discourse of othering and temporal differentiation. The 2005 documentary film Screaming Masterpiece: 1000 Years of Icelandic Popular Music took the themes present in Fricke’s article to even greater lengths. This was one of the first professional documentaries about Icelandic popular music to be geared to an international audience, and it remains one of the most critically acclaimed. Nearly every clip of musicians either playing or being interviewed is interspersed with footage of the Icelandic landscape: vast stretches of cratered volcanic land mirrored by foreboding mountains covered in snow; the ethereal aurora borealis; icy water flowing down jagged cliffs; and ravens flying overhead in the gray sky. The interviews are nearly just as evocative, with central themes emerging of the music’s connection to landscape, pagan spirituality, and the importance of Viking heritage in Iceland (for further discussion of the role of landscape in Icelandic popular music, see Chapter 7). While the film offers an impressive soundtrack and compelling interviews with a number of musicians, the viewer never hears the questions or prompts given to the musicians. This style of editing allows the filmmakers to craft an overtly whimsical and nature-​bound discourse throughout the film. When the composer Jóhan Jóhannsson states that if you live in a country like Iceland, you will be influenced by the landscape, the viewer does not know whether Jóhannsson was asked what his influences are, or if he was asked specifically whether landscape has influenced his music. When the Faroese musician Eivør explains that she wants to stay true to her roots in the old rhymes and psalms she learned from an elder relative, we do not know whether she was specifically asked about how her roots influence her. Nor are we told that Eivør—​and the elder relative who taught her music—​is Faroese, not Icelandic. When Björk offers an explanation of how Icelandic nationalism has influenced popular music, we do not know what her prompt was to give such an explanation. I point this out because the documentary paints

Echoes of the Colonial Past    209 a picture of Iceland in which nationalism, heritage, landscape, and paganism seem to be on the tip of every musician’s tongue. The viewer, however, remains unaware of the degree to which this is a carefully and strategically cultivated image. A few interviews included in the film, however, do offer a counter-​narrative and also provide a glimpse of the sort of questions these musicians might have been asked in order to elicit such responses. The singer Mugison explains:  “Foreigners always ask about elves, trolls, Sigur Rós, and Björk. And whether we are, you know, all dancing in and out of cliffs. That’s OK. On a bad night, I fear the ghosts as much as anyone else. But I grew up with the country balls, that’s my inspiration. Farmers and fishermen, rather than elves and trolls” (Screaming Masterpiece 2005). Björk had expressed similar sentiment in an earlier interview for The New Yorker, saying that “when record company executives come to Iceland they ask the bands if they believe in elves, and whoever says yes gets signed up” (Ross 2004, 49). This discourse, in which Iceland is portrayed as inherently set apart from modern Europe, is rooted in Iceland’s postcolonial inheritances and is closely related to the less frequently discussed Faroe Islands.

The Marketing of Popular Music in Iceland This section continues the analysis of representations of Icelandic popular music through an analysis of the marketing of popular music in Iceland after the 2008 economic crash. I focus on a few key examples of how discourse on popular music has also been actively constructed by Icelanders. These examples are a local music shop in Reykjavík that has itself become a tourist destination, the internationally renowned Iceland Airwaves Music Festival, the state-​sponsored Iceland Music Day, and the efforts of the musician Mugison. When I  conducted an interview with one of the owners of Reykjavík’s 12 Tónar4 record shop in 2012, I started to explain the interviewing procedures when he gently interrupted me to assure me he knew how this would go. He shrugged the explanations off and said he does four to five interviews with foreigners every year about Icelandic popular music. As the interview progressed, he explained that he is always surprised by how much tourists know about Icelandic music. Iceland, he argued, has even become a site of “pilgrimage” for the fans of Sigur Rós: The music and the power of it and what it has done for the Icelandic tourist industry, we see it. People come here just because they have been touched by the music of Sigur Rós and they want to make a pilgrimage to this place. And now it’s more, now it’s not only Björk or Sigur Rós, there are other bands as well. People want to, they want to taste this atmosphere, they want to experience where this sound comes from. So, I’m always surprised when I talk with people that come from different countries, how

210   History much they know about Icelandic music… . We have a saying here that, clear is in the eye of the guest, glöggt er gests augað. So we can learn many things from what they have to say. And they see, especially after they’ve travelled around the country, they see Iceland in the music. Or they hear the landscape in the music, I know it sounds maybe like a cliché, but this is the experience, year after year I get so many people that tell the same stories.5

The saying Glöggt er gests augað (clear is the guest’s eye) suggests that the outsider’s perspective should be valued for the clarity it can bring to a situation. In the context of this conversation, the man being interviewed describes how the outside perspective also influences how Icelanders themselves end up viewing their own home and Icelandic music. This further demonstrates that the processes discussed in this chapter are not merely unidirectional but, rather, that both Icelanders and foreigners alike continue to actively seek and construct a certain perspective on both Iceland and its music. In the post-​2008 economic climate, businesses such as this music shop have significant financial incentives to foster collaborations that combine music and tourism.

Iceland Airwaves Music Festival The Iceland Airwaves Festival began in 1999 and offers the most significant example of how tourism and popular music have joined forces in this country. The music festival began in part to encourage tourists to visit Iceland in the former post-​summer off-​season. Over fifteen years later, there is hardly a tourism off-​season in Iceland, but the music festival remains a major draw for tourists who are drawn to Iceland for its popular music. Since its inception, the festival has continued to grow in notoriety and success, as demonstrated in part by the number of attendees from abroad and the growth in financial revenue from the festival. In an interview I held with the public relations officer for Icelandair, she explained that the festival’s brand is so successful they hardly have to market the festival. The tickets sell out quickly with little effort on their part.6 The particular branding of Iceland Airwaves as capitalizing on exotic landscapes and hipster aesthetics is clear in the publicity material available on the festival’s website: It’s 4 a.m. You’ve been to five cool clubs, seen ten great bands, made fifteen new friends and fallen in love twenty times. You’re tired. You’re wired. You’re ready to find a bed. You’re ready to find the after-​party. You can’t believe you’re here. You’re already making plans to come back next year. And guess what? It’s still Day One. Roll out of bed, hose the party remains out of your hair and hop on a bus. Before you can remember what you did the night before, you’re looking at geysers, waterfalls, lava fields—​all the best that a volcanic island has to offer, including the world-​ famous Blue Lagoon, favorite soaking spot of the international hung-​over glitterati. Mmm! You can really taste the hipster! (Iceland Airwaves 2014)

Echoes of the Colonial Past    211 The hipster aesthetic of the Iceland Airwaves Festival’s marketing can of course also be found in the marketing of other music festivals around the world. Yet in the Icelandic context, it is difficult to disentangle it from the larger discourse on northern exoticism. I conducted interviews with three employees of Iceland Music Export and the Iceland Airwaves Festival, during which I asked them to what degree they intentionally market Iceland as a sort of hipster isle. The publicity manager explained that it is now quite conscious because it is successful. When I asked if they had a long-​term plan for how to keep the festival fresh once the fad element has passed, she explained that they will keep going with this plan for as long as it is financially successful. The economic viability of the festival and related marketing is, not surprisingly, one of the main concerns of the organizers, particularly after the economic collapse of 2008. When Iceland’s economy, which had been heavily inflated by questionable banking practices, began to crumble in 2008, people throughout the country had to think of new ways to economically sustain themselves. Even before the economy crumbled, individuals started to quantify the success of Icelandic popular music in terms of the tourists who were coming specifically for the music. After the economic collapse, this realization that tourists were indeed inclined to come to Iceland for the music led to increased collaboration between the music industry and the tourism industry. Icelandair, the national airline, had a stake in the Iceland Airwaves Festival prior to the collapse, but now the airline teams up with local hotels and tourism companies to offer appealing package tours for North Americans to come to the festival and explore Iceland at the same time (Young 2011). Yet, Icelandic popular music does not exist solely for the consumption of foreigners, and the internal perspectives on the music tend to differ drastically from the outsider-​focused approaches described here. Iceland is home to numerous initiatives and programs to cultivate appreciation and engagement with popular music, ranging from education opportunities, festivals geared toward Icelanders, and award schemes. Of those programs focused on cultivating domestic engagement with Icelandic music, Degi íslenskar tónlistar (Icelandic Music Day) stands out as a prime example of a nationwide initiative entirely inwardly focused. This day, December 1, is intended as an opportunity for people across the country to join together and sing the same songs at the same time. When I lived in Iceland in 2011, on December 1 at 11:15 a.m., every radio station in Iceland played the same three songs in succession. The songs chosen were “Kvæðið um fuglana” (The Song about Birds) with text by Davið Stefánsson and music by Atli Heimir Sveinsson; “Manstu ekki eftir mér?” (Don’t You Remember Me?) by Ragnhildar Gísladóttir and Þórðar Árnasonar; and “Stingum af” (Slip Away) by Mugison. This effort to unify a nation in song represents a kind of sonification of Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined community”: it attempts to create a sense of camaraderie and shared experience among a diverse population of 320,000 people (Anderson 2006, 7). But it also creates a space in which Icelandic music, particularly Icelandic popular music, is localized and temporarily disengaged from external marketing.

212   History

Mugison In addition to the national initiatives and the other efforts discussed in this section, certain artists in Iceland have specifically tried to cultivate networks and opportunities within Iceland, without necessarily focusing on their international prospects. In early 2012, Mugison swept the Icelandic Music Awards by winning the categories of album of the year (for Haglél), songwriter of the year, and song of the year (for “Stingum af”). Mugison further endeared himself to his fellow Icelanders when, in December 2011, he held a free concert in Harpa. His 2011 album Haglél (Hail Storm) was packaged in a white paper jacket with embossed pencil scratches on the cover. The album’s title appeared handwritten in pencil on the jacket and sketches drawn by Mugison himself appeared throughout the accompanying booklet. Haglél, in contrast to his previous releases in English, comprised lyrics exclusively in Icelandic. The lyric booklet’s cover was stamped with the word “Landsbókasafn.” Lándsbókasafn is the national and university library of Iceland, and it is renowned for its efforts to collect every book written by Icelanders, as well as foreign works about Iceland. Mugison’s decision to place mention of the library in his booklet can be understood as a playful self-​reference to the importance of the text. All the lyrics, acknowledgments, and other text in the booklet are exclusively in Icelandic without English translations. Háglel proved to be a great success in Iceland, as demonstrated by Mugison’s taking home the awards just mentioned, in addition to that of lyric writer of the year at the 2012 Icelandic Music Awards. As previously mentioned, “Stingum af” was also selected as one of the three songs to be sung in unison while broadcast on every radio station in the country during the 2011 Icelandic Music Day. While this was not Mugison’s first album to receive national recognition, as his 2007 album Mugiboogie was awarded the Icelandic Music Award for best rock album for that year, Háglel had clearly struck a deep chord with the Icelandic public, as demonstrated by record sales, awards, and national celebration. In December 2011, Mugison arranged a free concert in Reykjavík’s new concert hall, Harpa, as a community event. A  television advertisement for this concert showed Mugison seated at a desk, wearing a suit jacket and tie, and a safari-​style hat. The state seal of Iceland was fixed on the wall behind his left shoulder, and his guitar was resting by his right side. He addressed the viewers as “Góða Íslendingar”7 and explained that he warmly invited everyone to a free concert in Reykjavík’s new concert hall on December 22. He went on to explain, with “Stingum af” playing in the background, how tickets could be acquired for the event. This concert was a collaboration with Fjállabræður (Mountain Brothers), a Reykjavík-​based male chorus with roots in Iceland’s West Fjords, known for recording and performing new rock-​oriented choral compositions. The concert promotion was a success and tickets to the event, while free, quickly were snatched up. On May 19, 2012, Mugison was a guest performer for the 100-​year celebration of Karlakórinn Þreystir, another local male chorus, along with the Icelandic musician

Echoes of the Colonial Past    213

Figure 10.1  Mugison, with the male chorus Karlakórinn Þreystir in Reykjavík, 2012

KK and the Faroese musician Eivør (see fi ­ gure 10.1). Mugison’s work with these local male choruses, as well as his performances with both Eivør and KK on May 19, demonstrate the importance of camaraderie and collaboration within North Atlantic popular music. For the May 19 performance, over 300 people filled Langholtskirkja, a church on the outskirts of Reykjavík. The audience included people of all ages, from very young children toddling around the front of the church during the performance, to elderly individuals assisted by middle-​aged friends and family. More than any other Icelandic musician in recent years, Mugison has crossed generational and genre boundaries. His career, as opposed to that of Of Monsters and Men or Sigur Rós, demonstrates that local and foreign popularity do not necessarily go hand in hand. Through this work, Mugison in effect mediates internal senses of Icelandic identity and place.

Emerging Marketing of the Faroe Islands and Popular Music In this section, I turn to a discussion of similar issues as played out in the Faroe Islands. As previously mentioned, the Faroe Islands increasingly look to Iceland as a model for how to symbiotically market popular music and locale. While the two islands share an entwined postcolonial inheritance, their respective positionings in the international realm deviate significantly. Compared to the Faroe Islands’ population of roughly 48,000 people, Iceland’s population of 320,000 is relatively large. Iceland also has more

214   History political agency as an independent nation-​state, while the Faroe Islands remain largely dependent on Denmark to navigate international relations. The Faroe Islands have also not yet become a major international tourism destination, although it is clear that there is growing emphasis on building a tourism infrastructure and implementing new airline routes to reach the islands. In this section, I examine how the Tórshavn-​based record label and shop Tutl and the Faroese singer Eivør negotiate issues of borealism in music making, marketing, and tourism campaigns.

Tutl One of the most iconic aspects of popular music in the Faroe Islands is the local record label Tutl. Tutl, which is onomatopoeic for the sound of a water drop, has operated since 1977 as a record label and later as a record shop in the heart of Tórshavn. The label focuses on Faroese artists, but releases albums from non-​Faroese artists as well. Albums released on the Tutl label range from new choral compositions to heavy metal arrangements of traditional ballads; yet, regardless of the genre, albums from Tutl are often explicitly marketed as “world music.” Steven Feld (2000, 146) traces the emergence of this term to academics in the early 1960s, who wished to promote and celebrate musical diversity. Martin Stokes (2004, 52) focuses on the term within the realm of music marketing and explains that “world music” emerged in London in 1987 as a way to market commercial recordings of popular musicians from all around the world to British consumers. But whether as an academic concept or a marketing tool, “world music” represents a binary division between “world music” and music that is not “world music.” It is worth noting that Faroese popular music is far more likely than Icelandic popular music to be marketed internationally as “world music.” Feld (2000, 147) argues that this dividing line runs straight along the old colonial line that separated out colonized and marginalized subjects such as non-​Europeans, European peasants, and marginalized minorities. Thus the marketing of Faroese musicians as “world music” is linked to the murky colonial positioning of the Faroe Islands within a Nordic framework. In an interview I conducted with one of the individuals behind Tutl, he explained that Scandinavians do not tend to buy each other’s music—​ that Swedes are not that interested in what is happening in Norway and the Finns tend not to buy Danish music. He posited that the Faroe Islands are perceived to be ethnically different and exotic enough from the Scandinavians that, with proper marketing of the music as “world music,” there is a better chance the Faroese music will be purchased in Scandinavia. Furthermore, he noted that playing up the “ethnic” nature of the Faroese helps to sell Faroese records to audiences even outside of Scandinavia.8 This is in some ways a significant difference from how popular music from Iceland is marketed abroad, but is likely due to the Faroe Islands’ remaining relatively unknown outside the Nordic region. While Icelanders have an international reputation to draw upon, people in the Faroe Islands are still working to construct such a reputation.

Echoes of the Colonial Past    215

Eivør Pálsdóttir The quest for individual identity is seen in the music of some of the most prominent contemporary Faroese musicians, including Eivør Pálsdóttir. Her first commercially recorded solo album, the 2000 self-​titled album Eivør Pálsdóttir, featured sparse rock instrumentation and jazz influences on most of the tracks. The track “Í Gøtu ein dag” (In Gøtu One Day) combined these sounds with her characteristic vocals and an archival recording of a man singing a traditional Faroese ballad by the same name. This track most clearly asserts the locality of the Faroe Islands in Eivør’s album, as Gøtu is the town in which Eivør grew up and with which she is closely associated. Other tracks on this album also featured material taken from existent textual and musical sources in the Faroe Islands, including the tracks “Jesuspapín” and “Føroyar, Mín Móðir.” This album stands out in Eivør’s discography as perhaps the most firmly fixed to the location of the Faroe Islands. Her most recent album, as of this writing, Room, was released in September 2012; Eivør explains that it was a very personal recording in its exploration of the themes of loss and healing following the sudden and unexpected death of her father. In a conversation with Eivør about her potential success in the United States, I asked her whether she would prefer to be introduced to international audiences as a “world music” artist or if she thought her music should be marketed internationally without embracing tropes of exoticness. Her preference was for her music to speak for itself and stand on its own, without necessarily being promoted as a packaged cultural artifact from the Faroe Islands.9 Eivør has, however, regularly been promoted as the literal face of Faroese culture, as demonstrated by the 2011 tourist brochure produced by visitfaroeislands.com. She was featured on the cover of this brochure in a beautiful photograph exhibiting the striking beauty of the islands. This publication demonstrates efforts to cultivate symbiotic interest in the Faroe Islands as a tourist destination and in Faroese popular music. While these efforts are not as expansive as those made in Iceland, there is a concentrated effort in the Faroes to push both the music industry and the tourism industry in the same direction as has been done by their neighbor (see Chapter 5).

Conclusion In this chapter I have contextualized popular music practices in the Faroe Islands and Iceland alongside their colonial histories and, to a degree, their postcolonial presents. This material in many ways only skims the surface of how the exotic tropes of the Far North continue to influence diverse forms of cultural expression in the region. While this material is strongly connected to histories of disempowerment in the region, the current situation reveals increasing agency on the part of Icelanders and Faroese to capitalize on their peripheral positioning. As demonstrated by the interview material with a key individual behind Tutl, musicians and those who market them are keen to embrace

216   History elements that set particular artists apart from the crowd. The connections between these marketing efforts and the larger discourse on popular music in Iceland and in the Faroe Islands offer another way of understanding processes of borealism and Nordic exoticism. At the same time, this material begins to demonstrate that the production and dissemination of popular music forms, even in relatively small settings, is not always outwardly focused. As discussed in relation to Mugison’s recent domestic success in 2011 and 2012, locally popular musicians continue to contribute to internal understandings of place and belonging. According to Simon Frith, music making is a key site for social groups to come to understand not only others, but themselves. Frith (1996, 110) argues, “My point is not that a social group has beliefs which it then articulates in its music, but that music, an aesthetic practice, articulates in itself an understanding of both group relations and individuality, on the basis of which ethical codes and social ideologies are understood.” In this chapter I have focused on how discourse about Icelandic and Faroese popular music includes longstanding tropes of the North Atlantic as an exotic outpost on the margins of Europe. In significant ways, those tropes have not dissipated; instead, this study of popular music in the North Atlantic demonstrates how local musicians and music industry professionals knowingly use those tropes for both artistic and financial reasons.

Notes 1. See, for example, Wainwright’s 2015 Guardian article:  “In Iceland, ‘Respect the Elves—​ or Else’ ”; Jacobs’s 2013 article in The Atlantic:  “Why So Many Icelanders Still Believe in Invisible Elves”; Lapidos’s 2009 Slate article “Elf Detection 101: How to Find the Hidden Folk of Iceland.”; Fomferk’s 2007 German-​language article in Der Spiegel:  “Verborgene Welten in Island: Der Troll im Stein.” The last further demonstrates that this is not merely an English-​language journalist obsession. 2. For example, recent marketing campaigns for Icelandic outdoor clothing brands, such as 66 Degrees North and Cintamani, rely heavily on images and statements about the harsh realities of living in Iceland. 3. In addition to the Faroe Islands and Greenland, Denmark retained control of the present-​ day U.S. Virgin Islands until 1916. 4. This record shop is frequently listed in tourist guides as a “must visit” site for visitors to Reykjavík. The business owners are very aware of this and cater to tourists and locals alike. 5. Author interview with Jóhannes Ágústsson, April 24, 2012, Reykjavík, Iceland. 6. Author interview with Kamilla Ingibergsdóttir, May 14, 2012, Reykjavík, Iceland. 7. A formal greeting meaning “Dear Icelanders.” 8. Author interview with Kristian Blak, March 13, 2012, Reykjavík. 9. Author interview with Eivør Pálsdóttir, August 5, 2012, Tórshavn, Faroe Islands.

References Anderson, B. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso.

Echoes of the Colonial Past    217 Björnsdóttir, I. D. 1997. “Nationalism, Gender and the Body in Icelandic Nationalist Discourse.” NORA –​Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 5(1): 3–​13. Chakrabarty, D. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dibben, N. 2009a. Björk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dibben, N. 2009b. “Nature and Nation: National Identity and Environmentalism in Icelandic Popular Music Video and Music Documentary.” Ethnomusicology Forum 18(1): 131–​151. Einarsson, M. 1996. “The Wandering Semioticians: Tourism and the Image of Modern Iceland.” In Images of Contemporary Iceland: Everyday Lives and Global Contexts, ed. Gísli Pálsson and E. Paul Durrenberger, 215–235. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Fabian, J. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Feld, S. 2000. “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music.” Public Culture 12(1): 145–​171. Fricke, D. 1988. “The Collest Band in the World.” Rolling Stone 530/​531: 166–​173. Fricke, D. 2012. “Sigur Ros Close Icelandic Airwaves with Hits, New Direction.” Rolling Stone, November 6. At www.rollingstone.com/​music/​blogs/​alternate-​take/​sigur-ros-close-­ iceland-airwaves-with-hits-new-direction-20121106. Frith, S. 1996. “Music and Identity.” In Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, 108–​127. London: Sage Publications. Gillis, J. 2004. Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gunnarsson, G. 1983. Monopoly, Trade, and Economic Stagnation: Studies in the Foreign Trade of Iceland, 1602–​1787. Lund: Ekonomisk-​Historiska Föreningen. Hálfdanarson, G. 2000. “Iceland:  A  Peaceful Secession.” Scandinavia Journal of History 25(1): 87–​100. Iceland Airwaves. 2014. “About Iceland Airwaves Music Festival.” At http://​icelandairwaves.is/​ #about. Loftsdóttir, K. 2012b. “Colonialism at the Margins: Politics of Difference in Europe as Seen through two Icelandic Crises.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 19(5): 597–​616. Mitchell, Tony. 2009. “Sigur Rós’s Heima:  An Icelandic Pyschogeography.” Transforming Cultures 4(1): 172–​198. Nauerby, T. 1996. No Nation Is an Island: Language, Culture and National Identity in the Faroe Islands. Århus: Århus University Press. Oslund, K. 2011. Iceland Imagined:  Nature, Culture, and Storytelling in the North Atlantic. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Oxfeldt, E. 2009. Nordic Orientalism. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Prior, Nick. 2014. “‘It’s a Social Thing, not a Nature Thing’:  Popular Music Practices in Reykjavík, Iceland.” Cultural Sociology 9(1): 81–​98. Ross, A. 2004. “Björk’s Saga.” The New Yorker, August 23. Said, E. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Random House. Schram, K. 2011b. “Borealism: Folkloristic Perspectives on Transnational Performances and the Exoticism of the North.” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Edinburgh. Screaming Masterpiece. 2005. DVD. Directed by Ari Alexander Ergis Magnússon. Milan Records, Los Angeles, CA. Stokes, M. 2004. “Music and the Global Order.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 68. Young, T. 2011. Study of Foreign Guests Attending Iceland Airwaves 2011. Reykjavík:  Iceland Music Export.

Chapter 11

Swedish Pro g Ro c k and the Sea rc h for a Timeless  U topia Sverker Hyltén-​C avallius and Lars Kaijser

This chapter offers new insights into the dynamics of the popular music past in the globalizing Nordic region through a multi-​sited study of the global revival of Swedish prog rock. The musical movement evolved in the late sixties and flourished during the early seventies. It was highly politicized. This movement had its own monthly magazine, record companies, distribution channels, and a loose network of smaller venues located throughout Sweden. The movement was framed in opposition to the popular music industry, as epitomized by ABBA and their manager, but was subject to ongoing reinterpretations in the subsequent decades. The chapter is a case study of how a music and its cultural meanings can be transformed when that music circulates beyond its time and space of origin. How are national and regional histories reinterpreted, and how are the often fragmentary bits and pieces of another time and place pieced together in a new setting? This chapter shows how the history of popular music is co-​produced and bridges long distances while at the same time creating new distances. The Swedish prog-​rock revival illustrates how a Nordic popular music is recontextualized and reinterpreted in the image of an exotic North within the familiar dynamics of borealism. The chapter uses a model of popular historiography that distinguishes three analytical levels: fragments, affective alliances, and retrologies. Here, we are particularly interested in the years in the first decade of this century. The empirical basis for this chapter is a transnational fieldwork project carried out from 2008 to 2012, following networks of people and artifacts that in different ways relate to the Swedish progressive music scene of the 1970s. We begin by introducing the history of Swedish progressive music and its dissemination into a transnational psych/​prog scene before we embark on an analysis of two central themes in the Swedish progressive music revival. The first theme is a communal feeling that could be suggested verbally in interviews but also can be embodied in

220   History imagery and band names. The second theme is a historicizing, even mythological, view of Sweden and the Nordic countries.

Literatures and Concepts This chapter is inspired by memory studies, but it also draws from a number of literatures and disciplines. This obviously includes the area-​studies literature on Swedish progressive music, which has researched political implications (e.g., Arvidsson 2008; Fornäs 1985; Thyrén 2009); produced empiricist-​encyclopedic accounts (e.g., Eriksson, Gerdin, and Wermelin 2006; Henningsson and Pettersson 2007; Lahger 1999); biographies of bands and artists (Palm 1996; Svedberg 2010); and more personal recollections (Thörnvall 2005). The Swedish music scene was—​influences from Swedish and international folk music notwithstanding—​deeply rooted in its Anglo-​American influences (Gudmundsson 1999). This ties the Swedish music scene to what Motti Regev (2013, 6ff) has coined “the field of aesthetic cosmopolitanism.” We approach music as a socio-​discursive and sonic-​material phenomenon (Small 1999; Kopytoff 1986) at the disciplinary intersection of popular music studies and memory studies. In our approach to social memory and how history is made in a broad sense, we analyze performances and “inscribed” memories (Connerton 1989; White 1981). Swedish music from the 1970s can be understood as an ongoing process of interpretations and reinterpretations. An underlying assumption in contemporary memory studies is that history is produced and mediated in myriad practices, from retro fashion to historicizing youth subcultures (see, e.g., Guffey 2006; Samuel 1994). In research on popular music, we see two main strands in approaching history: a more theoretical one, with roots in Adorno and cultural studies (Longhurst 1995, 3), and a more empirical one, focusing on histories and biographies (Negus 1996, 136). From the cultural studies standpoint, we will show how biographies are socially and historically situated. To deconstruct narratives and other representations of the past, the chapter analysis conceives of “the seventies” as a set of fragments that are being combined in multiple yet specific ways (see also Kaijser 2010). A fragment could be the basic facts and figures of data and events, but it also could be stories, images, artifacts, songs, sounds, or lyrics. A fragment can appear as a picture, music, memorabilia, and stories in newspapers or a personal recalling. Basically, fragments are all those bits, pieces, and traces that are left from activities relating to the seventies. However, there is no closed, sealed, and stable collection of fragments; new fragments are constantly added. We assert that the glue binding these fragments together is affect, following Lawrence Grossberg’s (1997) notion of affective alliances. The affective alliance is built upon a shared direction toward similar cultural expressions—​in this case, expressions that can be labeled “seventyish.” In our analysis, affect has to do with identification and recognition, or ways of acting toward and reacting to cultural expressions in processes of identity formation (Hall 1996). According to Sara Ahmed (2010), affect has to do with directedness,

Swedish Prog Rock   221 intentionality, and orientation in a phenomenological sense. Affect is a register that helps people relate to each other and, important in this argument, to relate to fragments and to arrange fragments. The continuous process in which a multitude of people, artifacts, sounds, and stories are involved in creating larger semantic chains will be referred to as retrologies, which literally means “ways of thinking backwards” (Hyltén-​Cavallius 2010, 2014). If logos suggests logic and structure, retro points to direction—​backward—​as opposed to other meanings of the prefix re, such as “return,” as illustrated by discourses of revival. In recent ethnological debates on popular historiographies and cultural memory, similar processes have been understood in terms such as “narrative,” “enactment,” and “history use” (Aronsson 2004). Such conceptualizations have limitations, as they suggest specific orders, beginnings and endings, a “script” ready for enactment, or even a clean-​cut past waiting to be used. By contrast, retrology offers a more dynamic and open-​ended understanding, as well as a useful way of conceptualizing arrangements of sounds, melodic fragments, visual styles, or dress. To look for a narrative order in all manifestations of the past would be to presuppose a specific ordering. As Elisabeth Guffey (2006) points out in her book Retro: The Culture of Revival, retro styles are characterized by an eclectic and anachronistic bricolage where irony and playfulness can be more important than memory or context. Our understanding of progressive music departs from Franco Fabbri’s (1982, 52) notion of musical genre as “a set of musical events (real or possible) whose course is governed by a definite set of socially accepted rules,” or in our understanding, conventions. To analyze musical events, Fabbri has proposed a set of culturally ordered generic rules that help to categorize what defines a musical genre, including sound, performance techniques, instrument characteristics, and musical skills. Genre, moreover, involves communicative and multisensory aspects of music as articulated in the choice of band name, clothing style, speech style, and behaviors of performers and audiences at concerts. To Fabbri, genre is also defined through social and ideological rules, which helps explain the often biased identifications of a genre such as progressive rock with elitism or pop music with commercialism. These aspects of the genre concept shaped how we identified fragments and related them to each other. Sound was only one important factor along with clothing style, gestures, visual aesthetics of album covers, and industry organization.

A Brief Outline of Swedish Progressive Music The Swedish progressive music scene was parallel in time and comparable to an early international progressive scene in its wish to expand the popular song structure and in its influences from folk music. Swedish prog rock, though, was almost an entirely local

222   History Scandinavian formation owing to language, distribution networks, and not least ideology. The scene was mainly part of a movement with varying names like the progressive movement (proggrörelsen), the alternative movement (alternativrörelsen), or the music movement (musikrörelsen), often referred to as progg or proggen. “Progressive” was primarily understood in a political sense, even though some of the musicians also related it to musical aspects as well. According to its members, the movement began as a string of outdoor festivals held at Gärdet, a field on the outskirts of central Stockholm (Lilliestam 1998, 103). The first festival was illegal and held in late June in 1970. The approach was do-​it-​yourself (DIY) and both amateurs and professional musicians took part. It is not possible to narrow the music played at Gärdet to a certain sound; it consisted of a mix of rock, jazz, cabaret music, and folk music from Sweden and other parts of the world. Most of the artists composed their own music and sang in Swedish. The festival has become a key symbol in representations of the progressive movement (Ortner 1973). Soon the movement would organize itself, launching record distribution channels, papers, and a network of concert clubs. With the movement’s focus on DIY and anti-​ establishment profile, an internationally acclaimed band such as ABBA were dismissed on both ideological and aesthetic grounds, thus forming an important other element. The first issue of the movement’s central paper Musikens makt (The Power of Music) shows the face of ABBA manager Stikkan Andersson as an inflated balloon, pointing to how central they were to the movement’s self-​image. The emblematic festival is a token of a new era, of new ways of producing and consuming music, and of a combined political and musical awareness. Several conflicts eventually arose in the movement. One was about the ideological purposes and ambitions of progressive music, with an opposition between a political emphasis (Henningsson and Pettersson 2007, 11) and a musical emphasis on the meanings of the word “progressive.” The latter involved an expansion of the boundaries of rock and jazz by incorporating elements of folk music and improvisation, as illustrated by bands such as Träd, Gräs och Stenar (Trees, Grass, and Stones, abbreviated TGS), Fläsket Brinner (The Flesh Is Burning), and Kebnekajse. Other dichotomies in the movement included progressive versus alternative (Lilliestam 1998, 108) and Stockholm versus Gothenburg (Lahger 1999, 181). These divisions defined the movement but also contributed to its disintegration. This chapter focuses on the musically progressive part of the movement. They were sometimes labeled flumproggen, the prefix flum suggesting a drug-​influenced, dreamy approach. This music had grown out of an underground scene in Stockholm that had been established around 1967 (Lagher 1999, 69–​82; Lilliestam 1998, 97–​102). The influences came from blues-​rock pioneers like Jimi Hendrix and Cream and psychedelic bands such as The Doors and Grateful Dead. Baby Grandmothers and the duo Hansson and Karlsson were early and important on the Stockholm scene. Another important band was the aforementioned Pärson Sound, with their influences from experimental and improvisational music like the minimalist art music of Terry Reilly. The new music was in congruence with an awakening political left-​wing concern and protests against

Swedish Prog Rock   223 the bombing of Vietnam. It is not possible to find a definite end point of the movement; it slowly faded and other musical expressions took over. The music of the progressive years was apprehended and then it vanished from mainstream media during most of the eighties and into the nineties. Since the early 2000s, Swedish music journalists have commented, often with astonishment, on a small but growing international interest in Swedish rock music in countries such as the United States, Japan, and South Korea. An illustrative example is a 2001 article in the Swedish music magazine Sonic, in which the American independent musician Stephen Malkmus was invited to interview Träd, Gräs och Stenar (TGS), one of the prominent bands from the late sixties and early seventies (Larsson 2001). Malkmus had on several occasions showed his appreciation of the band. The interview covered aspects of the music they played, as well as their left-​wing ideals and how they had lived in co-​ housing, growing vegetables and building a community around expressive culture. It is apparent how the interest in music was accompanied by an interest in social and cultural contexts of the music scene. We conducted research on this revival in the United States in spring 2010. One stop was El Suprimo, a second-​hand vinyl record store in Baltimore. Approaching the store, owned by one Jack Moore, we heard music. He had put two speakers up on the street and was playing a collection of Swedish progressive music called The Essence of Swedish Progressive Music 1967–​1979: Pregnant Rainbows for Colourblind Dreamers. We could hear Samla Mammas Mannas’s “Minareten” and TGS’s “Sanningens Silverflod.” For about an hour, while the storeowner waited to close his store, we browsed through the records and other items on the shelves, which the owner called “eye candy.” A large number of empty beer cans, a few hydraulic jacks, a gorilla mask, and Kiss dolls were a few of the items displayed around the store. Apart from this, there were loads of vinyl records, organized partly by genre, such as jazz, rhythm and blues, and soul, and partly alphabetically. The store also communicated an alternative style, both in its at-​first-​glance untidy overall impression and in some of the constellations of items. A “family” of paper dolls was displayed on one of the shelves. Moreover, a few plastic snakes were curled up on the floor, as a small marker of the opposition to mainstream norms: snakes threatening a perceived middle-​class idyll. In vinyl record stores in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Baltimore, Tokyo, and Osaka, we have found Swedish seventies’ artists such as Gudibrallan, International Harvester, Kebnekajse, and Älgarnas Trädgård, together with contemporary acts such as Dungen, Lisa and Piu, and Life on Earth, labeled progressive, acid folk, and psych. Sharing an interest in record labels such as Subliminal Sounds in Stockholm, Disk-​ Union in Tokyo, or Finders Keepers in London, the Baltimore store had adopted an aesthetic grammar common to independent record stores in many places: if you know how to handle a record store in Stockholm or Tokyo, you will find your way in shops in Baltimore, New York, or San Francisco. The mixture of mainstream kitsch, unexpected paraphernalia, and hard-​to-​find records blends with detailed knowledge of popular culture and music history from mainstream to the obscure. The mixture reappears in other contexts, from recording companies to record-​store web pages, in the United States,

224   History Japan, or Sweden. This kind of aesthetic knowledge unites participants in a network of common affective directedness. The larger constellation of objects in the store, along with Jack Moore’s verbalized ideas on music, Swedishness, and origin, can be read as a series of assembled fragments. Important dimensions of this assemblage include a longing for deeper rootedness and a playful negation of what he considers mainstream. In this way, Jack and his store have harnessed ideas about Swedish progressive music that we have met again and again in different places in the course of our study. In the early nineties, Swedish second-​hand record stores also saw visits from Japanese and Korean record collectors. The pursuit of Swedish progressive music has been recognized by journalists as pioneering the interest in this music. One might add that the youngest musicians developed an interest in it only after hearing an intermediary generation making its own “seventyish” sound. The progressive scene slowly returned by the end of the eighties and became more widely known a decade later. This evolution could be described as part of an emerging international neoprogressive music scene, with festivals, band reunions, and reissues of recordings—​a scene constituting younger musicians who started to work in a progressive tradition. And in those years, interest in progressive music spread internationally across Europe, America, and Asia along several different channels. One musician told us that he first met TGS through a Korean bootleg copy; others had experienced them at a website for progressive music or through friends. Common references, on Swedish ground, were seventies progressive recording companies such as Silence, or more recent ones such as Mellotronen and Subliminal Sounds, which did reissues and also recorded newer artists. These neoprogressive networks are part of present-​day alternative musical networks, which mix electronica or folk with inspiration from the progressive era in music and clothing. Examples include the recording company Finders Keepers and the band Animal Collective’s collaborations with Vashti Bunyan. TGS was one Swedish band to be counted in this patchwork of collaborations, from the work with Swedish recording company Silence to performing at US record stores. Important disseminators of Swedish progressive music in an international progressive arena include record shops such as Aquarius in San Francisco, Disk Union in Tokyo, and Other Music in New York. One milestone was the release in 2001 of a double CD compilation with previously unissued recordings by Pärson Sound. The Pärson Sound record, described with words such as shamanism or spirituality, became important in networks of alternative and independent musicians, entrepreneurs, and audiences with an interest in psychedelic and progressive music. The numbers of people in each city who were part of these networks shall not be exaggerated. In an interview with Otto Hauser,1 of the band Vetiver, the musician said that in the town he came from (Rochester, New York), there were about eight or ten people interested (out of a current population of 215,000). He even started to name them. The preferred music was not limited to Scandinavia, but to the seventies progressive scene as a whole. German kraut, Swedish progressive, and English folk prog worked together. The Swedish artists who were highlighted were

Swedish Prog Rock   225 primarily the artists who could be described as musically progressive, the flumproggen. The neoprogressive networks reorganize the past when they uncover songs that had never been issued and organize festivals with lesser-​known artists from the seventies in Swedish and English for a transnational market. The networks that could be traced to the interest in progressive music contain shared knowledge of LPs, recording companies, and the people making and distributing the music. These networks consist of dispersed people and heterogeneous materials linked together by an affective dedication to a certain music, aesthetics, and attitude toward creativity. The networks are driven by passionate musicians, festival organizers, collectors, and producers of reissues. However, what was once part of a local movement now lives in separate spheres around the world. Samla Mammas Manna and TGS, for example, once part of the same network, are living their current “afterlives” in the United States and Japan, respectively, largely separated from each other in terms of genre, social networks, and distribution. In the following, we will discuss these networks in terms of affective alliances.

Natural Togetherness In the Malkmus interview mentioned (Larsson 2001) earlier,2 Stephen Malkmus talked with TGS about their late sixties communal life in a small house south of Stockholm. Thomas Mera Gartz, the drummer, described how some of the band members shared a house with other people, living a communal life centered on music, art, literature, and film. This way of life continued during their touring, with the band bringing their harvested beans, carrots, onions, and potatoes along with them on the road. They also let the audiences borrow and play their instruments during the shows. The interview echoes a theme present in most representations and descriptions of the Swedish 1970s progressive scene, the association of music and sound to togetherness, nature and the elements. During the interview, Malkmus also asked Mera Gartz about his experience in playing with Jimi Hendrix. Gartz recalled how Hendrix seemed to disappear up into the sky when playing his guitar. This memory furthermore stressed a Swedish progressive music stance as rooted in the soil, as opposed to the ethereal character of Hendrix’ playing. On our visit to the United States, we interviewed David Nuss,3 a New York musician. He and his group No Neck Blues Band toured with TGS on their first tour in the United States, in 2003. Nuss told us how he got into Swedish progressive music through a friend who had a Korean-​made vinyl bootleg copy of International Harvester’s Hemåt (Homeward). The Swedish music was a mystery to him; it could be linked to the German seventies kraut-​ rock scene, sounding similar to bands like Can or Faust. But the Swedish music preceded the German scene and was more original. He was puzzled by the sound: How was it possible to develop music like International Harvester’s Sov Gott Rose-​Marie? Music like that of The Doors and the Grateful Dead that, according to Håkan Lahger, opened up

226   History the Swedish progressive scene was, from Nuss’s point of view, “major American shit.” He was intrigued by the sound and aesthetics of Swedish progressive music, however. The closeness or togetherness that he found in it manifested in different ways, one important part of the affective alliances of the seventies retrologies. Nuss was fascinated by the photo from International Harvester’s Sov Gott Rose-​Marie showing the band in front of Vårby Grillen: “Who are these people and why are there children in this photo? Who are the people in this photo? It is like a family gathering.” But beyond this, Nuss wanted to know more about the cultural environment that enabled music like TGS. The sound was original, it had political connotations, and it forged a “communal feeling,” as Nuss phrased it. For him, the Swedish progressive scene was part of a more general interest in social movements from the sixties and the seventies. Nuss had made reference to pictures from outdoor festivals and people partying in a field. In a similar fashion, the festival at Gärdet has become a pivotal image in the affective alliances forming around an interest in Swedish seventies music. Nuss’s affection for the nakedness and authenticity of the music, the communal feeling, and enigmatic aesthetics are what keeps his interest. Materialized into words, the sound is described as improvised, melodically based, having a “communal feel,” “formless,” “naked,” “honest,” “beautiful,” and “original.” The sound of the music and the spontaneity of its recording is important, depicted as “drums, flutes, nje-​nje, a Jew’s harp, and then there is a record.” Nuss found that the progressive music embraces things he does not find in American popular music: history, authenticity, and a sense of tradition. Instead of trying to look like professional artists or stars, they seem to emulate their audience, with kids, laughing together, and sometimes focusing on each other rather than on the camera lens. This way, they evoke informality and egalitarianism. Perhaps this everyday, casual, and communal spirit has appeal across transnational contexts because it corresponds to stereotypes of Swedish or Nordic societies as egalitarian and democratic. One important fragment working this way is the album Festen på Gärdet (1970). The record cover shows a child on stage at the second festival on Gärdet in August 1970. When unfolding the gatefold sleeve, one finds a picture of an audience of people of different ages and Bo Anders Persson, guitarist of TGS, tidying up the festival grounds. A key ingredient in this affective alliance is the longing for the communal, the embracing of social cohesion and togetherness (but important, without the socialist ideology with which it came to be associated during the 1970s). This effect is partly accomplished through a uniting skepticism toward the music industry and an understanding of independent music as more authentic. This could also be said of the Gärdet Festival itself, easily viewed as a symbol of an awakening new era of togetherness in both a political and a musical sense. The do-​it-​yourself ethos that has been ascribed to the festival would, from this viewpoint, better be described as “do it together.” As we also have shown, nature and the natural form a common strand in this field, from band names to visual representations. But also, aesthetic ideals about the form and function of music harmonize with the strand: music must be allowed to grow organically, and for that, it needs time in a way that formats established by the music industry and its technologies of distribution seldom allow.4 Admiration of the natural is also

Swedish Prog Rock   227 related to a more hedonistic appreciation of the festival at Gärdet. In the Nuss interview, pictures of Gärdet were compared to Woodstock, a huge outdoor music festival held on a farm in upstate New York in 1969. That festival is remembered for its scenes of people dancing naked, its peaceful atmosphere, and the heavy rain showers that didn’t dampen people’s enthusiasm. One aspect of this organic idea is the recurrent notion of the psychedelic as something earthy, primitive, but also deep and mind-​expanding (its literal sense). The festival at Gärdet, along with other images and sounds suggesting an outdoor music experience, play an important part in imagining the Swedish seventies. The picture of Gärdet is on the cover of several CD collections of that era’s music scene, distributed since the 1990s. “The music is all that’s needed to make you wish you’d been born old and Swedish enough to have been at one of the free-​rock happenings documented here!”5 The iconography of both the 1970s bands and younger bands emulating a 1970s sound suggest roots and nature. Younger bands like Dungen, Samling, and The Amazing would pose in outdoor settings, with tall grass and shrubbery; even band names such as Dungen (the Grove) and Mylla (Soil) suggest natural settings, as so their forebears such as TGS (Trees, Grass and Stones). These are settings far removed from the suburban settings of contemporary Swedish hip hop or the occult scenography of heavy metal. The attachment of Swedish progressive music to nature is reminiscent of Tony Mitchell’s and Kimberly Cannady’s (Chapters 7 and 10) on the uses of Icelandic landscape. However, whereas the Icelandic landscape is construed as harsh, barren, or dramatic, the landscape of Swedish progressive music is gentle. The collectivity, earthiness, and naturalness that was seen in Swedish progressive music defined it as a good Other, in contrast with American rock music. There were, however, also more mythical dimensions of this borealism, and we will now turn to those.

Gnomes and Dragon Trainers After our interview with Jack Moore,6 of El Suprimo record store in Baltimore, we went together with his wife to a restaurant in the same area. As the restaurant was very popular, we had to wait outside for a table, and found ourselves talking about travel. Jack and his wife found a similar laid-​back atmosphere in both Baltimore and San Francisco, and  their affective framing of place was part of a larger aesthetic and ethic pattern. Jack said he prepared himself for our meeting by reading a bit about Norse mythology. His wife asked if we had seen the film How to Train Your Dragon, which is an animated family movie about coastal Vikings threatened by dragons. Had it not been for the previous interview, we might have taken this as an isolated and perhaps strange but genuine attempt to understand people from a foreign place, seeing them in terms of their tradition and culture and using whatever sources were available. In the interview, however, Jack had described an elaborated idea of how progressive and psychedelic music from the Swedish 1970s was much more rooted in tradition than was

228   History its American counterparts. Some people would poke fun at that music, referring to it in terms of “Hobbit rock” or “gnome rock,” but it was only good fun, he said. Jack:  And there’s, like, I’ve heard some of the Americans poke fun at the music, calling it a “Hobbit rock” or … Sverker: Hobbit rock? Jack:  Hobbit rock, yeah, because it is kind of like middle-​earthy, you know, a little bit. And “gnome rock” is another term I’ve heard thrown at Swedish music. “Gnome” rock. But it’s all a good fun, I think. Cause obviously there’s heavy heavy forms of Swedish rock too, but there is definitely, like, a very nice earthy feeling, a noncommercial feel to it that draws me to it.

Even if Jack referred to other people’s use of the expression “gnome rock,” it is striking how it suggests the same kind of mythical frame of reference as the animation movie. Importantly, his mention of it was evoked by our questions and by our presence as interviewers from Sweden. It could very well have been the first time he verbalized the idea. The confluence of mythic imagination, communal ideology, and music perhaps illustrates how a retrology can make sense of the music far beyond its context of origin. What is “Hobbit rock,” really? Jack said it is a way to poke fun at a certain kind of music. “The gnome” and “the Hobbit” strike us as closely related concepts—​characters that have an earthy feel to them, as they live close to or under the ground—​and both evoke associations with pre-​capitalist societies:  the gnome is a friendly if somewhat easily irritated helping hand in rural folklore, and the Hobbit was invented by J.  R. R. Tolkien as inhabitants of Middle-​earth, or what was a preindustrial, rural utopia. Atsushi, a record collector we interviewed a month later in Tokyo,7 associated Swedish seventies rock to the Moomin characters—​fictional characters in a series of books and a comic strip by Swedish-​speaking Finnish illustrator and writer Tove Jansson that similarly inhabit a world of their own and seem friendly. These imaginaries are rooted in children’s fiction and they open opportunities for a psychological interpretation of the Nordic revival as a nostalgic childhood space. The borealist notions here also contain an important gendered aspect. The gnome and the Hobbit are aged male figures who enjoy pipe smoking. This symbolic space for aged men correlates to a reverence for a gendered notion of the genius recurrent in our interviews.8 In fact, the networks could to a certain extent be described as relations between younger male disciples and older male role models. These role models have been both exoticized and worshiped.

Echo Affects Dungen—​ta det lugnt Like fellow Swede and AQ-​fave Bjorn Olsson, Gustav Ejstes is a brilliant time-​warped melody maker, though his “solo” project Dungen sounds

Swedish Prog Rock   229 more like a band than Olsson’s album do. Wunderkind Ejstes is certainly enamored of 60/​70’s psych-​pop and his obsession has borne some fabulous fruit. This is his third album to date (the first being a self-​titled since re-​issued on cd in expanded form, the second being the now-​hard-​to-​ find Stadsvandringar cd that Allan raved about on our list three years ago, soon to be reissued we’re told). Ta Det Lugnt rocks more than the last one, being brasher, with more in the way of electric guitar frenzies in a Hendrix kinda style. But otherwise it’s pretty similar, with Ejstes singing his hooked-​filled songs, in the same somewhat nasal, Swedish langage [sic.] voice as before. There is jazz jamming, folk frolics and plenty of fuzz. A retro trip indeed from searing electric rippage to spaced-​out sentimental melodicism. Hard not to love, we’ve found.

This note, printed in a script font, is posted on a CD cover at Aquarius Records in San Francisco. Notes like this have been a common sight when we browsed the record stores in various towns and in different countries; they are a way for the shop owner to highlight new records or interesting reissues. The notes are indexical in genre etiquette and reflective of a common language of popular music, with values and ideas that could be assigned to aesthetic cosmopolitanism (Regev 2013). The people we encountered during our field research distinguished themselves from others through their interest in Swedish progressive music. In our conversations, we met categorizations that work both as positionings and as distinctions that hold together the retrologies mentioned in the beginning of this chapter. Dungen had their commercial breakthrough with the album Ta det lugnt (Take it Easy), released in 2004. Reviews of their earlier albums had been restrained, sometimes even with complaints about the retro sound. But one has to bear in mind a central value in the criticism of popular music: mimicry as opposed to artistry; this is a value scale common to much of the arts since romanticism (cf. Taylor 1991). After an appearance on the TV show Late Night with Conan O’Brien in 2005, there followed tours in the United States; for a couple of years after, the band had a substantial indie following, especially in Europe and the United States. Swedish reviews of Ta det lugnt and the group’s subsequent albums have generally been more positive. Much of the media coverage of Dungen focuses on their “seventyish” or prog sound, while front man Gustav Ejstes in his communications with both the media and his concert audiences tends to mention influences such as folk music, hip hop, and the Aphex Twin—​a central reference in 1990s electronica and drum ‘n’ bass (cf., e.g., Backman 2002). If music critics (and audiences along with them, as can be seen in YouTube comments) try to put a seventies label on Ejstes, he in turn tries to point out other references. Other members of the current band constellation contribute with their historical references—​for example, drummer Johan Holmegard is a schooled jazz musician and guitarist Reine Fiske was once an employee at the Swedish Sound Archive, with the mission to document Swedish psychedelic music of the late sixties and early seventies. Fiske has been responsible both for reissuing Swedish progressive music and issuing previously nonreleased material as Träd, Gräs and Stenar: Gärdet 12.6.1970 (1996).

230   History Among Fiske’s electronic equipment, alongside old tube amplifiers and vintage fuzz pedals, can be found the 1960s tape echo Klemt Echolette. In the Conan O’Brien appearance, for example, it sat right behind him, atop the amplifier. During our interview, Fiske claimed that the main reason he found out about the echo is that his prime sixties and seventies guitar hero Kenny Håkansson (member of Kebnekajse and Baby Grandmothers) used that echo to produce his typical guitar sound.9 Technology as a key fragment in the constitution of retrologies cannot be overestimated. Paul Théberge (1997) notes that the attitude that electronic technology could ruin the authenticity of popular music emerged by the late 1970s, prior to which use of electronic equipment to distort or alter sound was seen as exciting. A way to understand Fiske’s and his followers’ fascination with vintage equipment might, then, be nostalgia—​ for a time when sound technologies encapsulated the future (cf. Hyltén-​Cavallius 2013). In other words, the tape echo and the sound it produces constitute a fragment, which together with the other equipment, music instruments, performances, and artist personas form a retrology in the form of Dungen’s music making. During the Dungen concerts we attended in Boston and Stockholm, audience members before and after the performance came up to the stage and carefully inspected the equipment, discussing it and sometimes even taking photographs of it. And on guitarist forums on the Internet, people exchange information about exactly what equipment is used in connection with what.10 To complicate things, Fiske has for the last few years been a member of aforementioned TGS, now contributing his retro sound in a band that once inspired his search for historical sound sources. Dungen themselves have clearly come to constitute a new historical layer for younger bands, a source in new retrological combinations. This aspect was highlighted in our interview with Lagher, who found it refreshing that the musical sound of Samling (or the likes of First Aid Kit or The Amazing) had a referential base in the present music scene, and not just in bands from the seventies.11 Seen in this light, Dungen’s music represents perhaps more of a temporary halt in an ever-​changing recombination of fragments. That halt acts as a retrology, but in its specific combination of sounds, lyrics, imagery, and artist personas, it also has the building blocks of future retrologies. Here, we find the archeological ethos described earlier. A striving for the unknown and a reaching out for new expressions and experiences, an interest in developing and immersing one’s musical taste beyond the mainstream and the obvious commercial output. Those we interviewed would describe their quest in terms of a “treasure hunt.” Additionally, the exploration of Swedish progressive music emphasizes the ephemeral aspect of popular music consumption; the Swedish progressive music was trendy or hip for a while and, so to say, the new old. But following the rules of consumption, interest in Swedish progressive music settled. TGS could now be identified as alternative mainstream. The interest in Swedish progressive music, sincere as it was, was also an attitude, a flavor for music on the margins. And today, some of the musicians interviewed expressed a feeling of loss for the times when they searched for Swedish progressive music, a time

Swedish Prog Rock   231 when they found out about the music through second-​hand record stores. This interest in Swedish progressive music predates Spotify, YouTube, and a global social media where all music is available. It was built on a vinyl ethos, making the hands-​on search an authentic way of excavating new old music. The music from Sweden was seen as a step further when you had found and appreciated German kraut like Can, Neu, or Amon Düül II. This instead was a quest for music outside the Anglo-​American music scene, a search for more exotic or strange music. Here, the Swedish music was sometimes compared to music originating from Korea, Vietnam, or Argentina.

Concluding Remarks Moving back to our initial question: What happens to music, its social contexts, and its cultural meaning when it is interpreted in another time and another place? We will now address the question from three angles: utopia, myth, and timespace. The interest in Swedish progressive music has gone hand in hand with a more general opening for Swedish music in general. The last decades have changed the routes of Swedish music distribution; and Europe, America, Australia, and Asia are now in a broader sense part of the market for this music. The changing conditions have made Träd, Gräs och Stenar part of an international context for progressive rock—​world prog—​together with, for example, Can and Amon Düül II. What was once considered something apart is now linked to a seventies progressive scene. And in that area, especially Pärson Sound is viewed as ahead of their time. At the same time, this re-​contextualization has lifted these groups from their Swedish frame and made them lose some of their political connotations. It was a reformation that disembedded the early progressive music from its original context of social and political issues, and embedded it in a new context, one that could be viewed more as part of world prog, with ideas of mythical and original Swedishness. It was a victory for flumproggen, but at the same time as they became part of an international scene of counterculture, they lost the special references of flum (whit its indications in a Swedish seventies setting). This also relocates the Swedish prog artist to a context in which they are labeled as hippies. At the same time, a national frame is still valid and becomes evident when we view how Swedish progressive music has been received on different continents. Counterculture, mysterious, gnome rock, exotic, or cultural—​the heritages are different categorizations that can be traced when following the routes of Träd, Gräs och Stenar. Through our conversations with entrepreneurs and musicians in the United States, we can identify a retrology of the Swedish seventies. Sweden is, here, a beautiful and honest place located somewhere off the cultural main road. A timeless utopia, with original music that is at the same time both remote and ahead of the progressive music that would follow. The produced timespace can best be understood as a utopia, an imagined place outside time that can constantly be rearranged, but can never age or wither.

232   History Important dimensions here become a register of specific masculinities formed in intergenerational relations such as the one between disciple and role model, and a kind of exoticist Othering of the North that Icelandic folklorist Kristinn Schram refers to as borealism (2011). The concept is intended to parallel Edward Said’s (2000) analysis of orientalism as a style of imagining the East in relation to a West. Even if relations differ greatly between the imagined East and former colonial powers, and the imagined North in relation to a European South, Schram insists on the value of the term in describing asymmetries of power. Borealism is, then, defined as “the signification, practice and performance of the ontological and epistemological distinction in power between North and South” (Schram 2011, 99). In our use of the term, we focus on ways of imagining the North—​to discern a corresponding South in our field would be going too far. Just as with orientalism, borealism performs an exotic Other—​luring, attractive, and at the same time remote and perhaps also subordinate. But what, then, does exotic mean in this context? With Victor Segalen (2002), we understand exoticism as a kind of transcendence, a way to “conceive otherwise” by performing the Other. Well aware of more widespread notions of a Nordic sound attributed to artists such as Lykke Li or Sigur Rós, we have here focused on cultural representations of Swedish 1970s music. The borealism surrounding the Swedish 1970s music blended well with a corresponding orientalist understanding of psychedelic music from Southeast Asia, making the Swedish seventies music part of an international world prog/​psyche scene. But it is important to keep in mind that all exoticisms tell us more about the exoticist than the exoticized. To a large extent, the notions of a pristine archaic North, removed from capitalist, corporate concerns, constitute an imagined utopia, harnessing core values of the underground scenes that our interviewees were part of. In that sense, they tell us more about the affective strings binding these networks than about the Swedish 1970s as historical timespace. This directedness embraces the things that American music is perceived to lack from this point of view: history, authenticity, and a sense of tradition (Hyltén-​ Cavallius and Kaijser 2012). These retrologies typically harbor ideas about the future as a timeless utopia in which original music is simultaneously distant and ahead of contemporary music. Not surprisingly, some of the interviewees also practiced these utopic visions. If the paradigmatic notion of Swedishness abroad once was “Swedish modern”—​that is, the welfare state, modern design and architecture, Volvo and Ikea—​ in these networks it was, rather, “Swedish modern primitive” that guided thinking. It was modern in the sense of being ahead of its time, but primitive in the sense of being outside time. When positioned in another time and place, the Swedish progressive music thus came to embody some important features. It was associated with borealist notions of a mythic North, characterized by a set of predominantly male aesthetic and ethnic role models. It became a locus of utopian visions of society and music, of nature and community. In that sense, it molded a timespace outside of time itself. And it is perhaps there, where

Swedish Prog Rock   233 fragments and retrologies replace narratives, that music can be reopened, reexplored, and reinvented.

Notes 1. Author interview of Otto Hauser, Stockholm, June 22, 2011. 2. Stephen Malkmus interview of TGS, Sonic 2001:3. 3. Author interview of David Nuss, New York, April 28, 2010. 4. Author interview of Håkan Lahger, Stockholm, December 6, 2011. 5. Posted review of Pärson Sound at Other Music record store, New York City. 6. Author interview of Jack Moore, Baltimore, May 8, 2010. 7. Author interview of Atsushi Sofuni, Tokyo, May 20, 2010. 8. See note 5, for mention of age in regard to Pärson Sound. 9. Author Interview of Reine Fiske, Stockholm, May 15, 2011. 10. “Reine Fiske, anyone?”, http://​www.vintageamps.com/​plexiboard/​viewtopic.php?f=5&t= 82323, Vintage amps bulletin board electronic resource). 11. Author interview of Håkan Lahger.

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234   History Henningsson, U., and T. Pettersson. 2007. The Encyclopedia of Swedish Progressive Music 1967–​ 1979. Stockholm: Premium. Hyltén-​Cavallius, S. 2010. “Rebirth, Resounding, Recreation: Making Seventies Rock in the 21st Century.” IASPM@journal 2. At www.iaspmjournal.net/​index.php/​IASPM_​Journal/​ article/​view/​323/​564. Hyltén-​Cavallius, S. 2013. “Back to the Future? Two Musical Pasts and Their Futures.” Norient Online Academic Journal. At http://​norient.com/​de/​academic/​back-​to-​the-​future-​two-​ musical-​pasts-​and-​their-​futures/​. Hyltén-​ Cavallius, S. 2014. Retrologier. Musik, närverk och tidrum [Retrologies:  Music, Networks and Timespace]. Höör: Symposion. Hyltén-​Cavallius, S., and L. Kaijser. 2012. “Affective Ordering:  On the Organization of Retrologies in Music Networks.” Ethnologia Scandinavica 2012 42: 64–​85. Kaijser, L. 2010. “Authority among Fragments: Reflections on Representing the Beatles in a Tourist Setting.” In Fifty Years with the Beatles: The Impact of the Beatles on Contemporary Culture, ed. J. Jarniewicz and A. Kwiatkowska, 257–​268. Lodz: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego. Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. “The Cultural Biography of Things.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Appadurai, A. (red.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lahger, H. 1999. Proggen: Musikrörelsens uppgång och fall [The Progg: The Rise and Fall of the Music Movement]. Stockholm: Atlas. Larsson, Markus. 2001. “Malkmus, gräs och stenar.” In Sonic 2001:3. Lilliestam, L. 1998. Svensk rock. Musik, lyrik, historik [Swedish Rock: Music, Lyrics, History]. Göteborg: Ejeby. Longhurst, B. 1995. Popular Music & Society. London: Polity Press. Negus, K. 1996. Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction. London: Polity Press. Ortner, S. 1973. “On Key Symbols.” American Anthropologist 75: 1338–​1346. Palm, C. M. 1996. ABBA—​Människorna och musiken [ABBA—​The People and the Music]. Stockholm: Tiden. Regev, M. 2013. Pop-​ Rock Music:  Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity. Oxford: Polity Press. Said, E. 2000. Orientalism. Stockholm: Ordfront. Samuel, R. 1994. Theatres of Memory. Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. London: Verso. Schram, K. 2011. “Borealism: Folkloristic Perspectives on Transnational Performances and the Exoticism of the North.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Edinburgh. At www.era.lib.ed.ac. uk/​handle/​1842/​5976. Segalen, V. 2002. Essay on Exoticism:  An Aesthetics of Diversity. Durham, NC:  Duke University Press. Small, C. 1999. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Svedberg, Ö. 2010. Hoola Bandoola. Om ett band, en tid, en stad [Hoola Bandoola: On a Band, a Time, a City]. Stockholm: Ordfront. Taylor, C. 1991: The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Théberge P. 1997. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/​Consuming Technology. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.

Swedish Prog Rock   235 Thyrén, D. 2009. Musikhus i centrum. Två lokala praktiker inom den svenska progressiva musikrörelsen:  Uppsala musikforum och Sprängkullen i Göteborg [Music Houses in the Centre:  Two Local Practices Within the Swedish Progressive Music Movement:  Uppsala Musikforum and Sprängkullen in Gothenburg]. Stockholm: Institutionen för musik-​och teatervetenskap, Stockholms universitet. Thörnvall, O. 2005. Lång historia. Om rockgruppen Trettioåriga kriget [Long history: On the Rock Band Trettioåriga Kriget]. Lund: Ellerström. White, H. 1981. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” In On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell, 5–​27. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chapter 12

Trajectori e s of Karelian Musi c A ft e r the C old Wa r Pekka Suutari

The Russian Republic of Karelia is located on the border with Finland. The Karelian language1 is a close relative of the Finnish language and has the same roots as eastern dialects of Finnish. Thus, the oldest forms of the oral traditions and folk cultures are similar in eastern Finland and Russian Karelia. Especially in the late nineteenth century, Finnish artists, folklore collectors, musicians, and photographers started to wander across the border to Karelia2 to search for markers of these historical roots. A specific term, “Karelianism,” was developed to define the interests and trips of the Finns to Karelia3 (Sihvo 2003; Hirn 1939). In the national imagination, Karelia was seen as poor, but a morally rich source of oral historical knowledge (Inha 1999, 7). After 1917, the border was closed, and contacts between Karelians in Finland and Russia were severed. Lack of information created a spiritual vacuum and spurred nostalgic fantasies about Karelia. The hegemonic nationalisms of the Cold War repressed Karelian culture and shaped the politics of Karelian and Nordic cultural identity. With Perestroika since the late 1980s, however, a rapidly growing interest in Karelian culture emerged, and its people, culture, and music started to be explored in the Nordic countries, and especially in Finland. Additionally, Nordic folk-​rock groups started to perform traditional Karelian and Ingrian4 songs. At the same time, Russian Karelian musicians gained a foothold in the West. This cross-​border cultural activity has several dimensions, and we might ask whether the same utopian search for a shared identity can be found in cross-​border relations today. And what is the role of the regional transnational identity in the development of Karelian popular music? Currently, it is important to gather knowledge about Karelian popular music within the Nordic region because oral traditions, runo singing, and kantele music have been studied extensively (albeit sometimes mislabeled as Finnish

238   History tradition; see Häggman 1998; Ling 1989), but Karelian popular music remains an unexplored area of studies in Nordic music. This chapter considers the cultural significance of music in the ongoing social and political transformations taking place along the Karelian border and within the geopolitical dynamics of the eastern region of the Nordic North more broadly. We also hope to contribute to the evolving interest in the music and culture of minority populations across the Nordic region.5 Our focus here is on how Karelian identity is performed and experienced in music on both sides of the border, with case studies of two of the most important folk-​rock groups from Russian Karelia:  Santtu Karhu and Talvisovat, and Myllärit. In the process, we consider the significance of these musicians’ musical practices in the formation of identity in this border region.

The Border Area During the Cold War, it was almost forbidden to talk about the problems of Karelia or to long for any Karelian identity within the bounds of the Iron Curtain (Tarkka 2012, 51–​54). Official policies asserted that there were good relations between Finland and its eastern neighbor, though the approximately half million Karelians who had escaped to Finland from the ceded areas had to mute their sense of belonging to the lost Karelian land. Meanwhile, Karelians in the Soviet Union were obliged to adapt to Soviet rule and its dominant Russian language and culture. Beginning in the late 1980s, Perestroika implied a new political reorganization and the possibility of political debate in the Soviet Union. It also led to a cultural reorientation, not only in public affairs but also in people’s everyday lives and personal identities (Boym 2001, 150). Perestroika opened up possibilities for Karelians in both countries, making it possible for them to give vent to their national feelings in new ways (Pronina 1990), and music became an essential medium for doing this. In Petrozavodsk, the capital of the Republic of Karelia, concern about loss of the Karelian language emerged simultaneously with a discovery of what had been silenced nationalism; indeed, music became part of a linguistic revitalization in amateur art (Liikanen 2004; Suutari 2010). In Finland there arose enthusiasm for Russian Karelia; whereas previously crossing the border had been difficult, now the possibility existed for finding anew that land that had been closed for more than half a century. Finnish writers, musicians, and photographers were among the first to develop contacts and bring back their experiences (Stark-​Arola 2000, 2002). They saw the symbolism inherent in the beautiful landscape, down-​to-​ earth lifestyles, and even the poverty, and they responded with romantic compassion. And while in Finland and the other Nordic countries the picture of neighboring Russian Karelia changed, new ideas were also streaming in the opposite direction, into the previously closed country.6 In Europe, there have always been similar border areas where autochthonous minorities live in neighboring countries. Jan Markusse (2011) has described how their status,

Trajectories of Karelian Music    239 size, and self-​recognition vary. According to Markusse, minorities are distinguishable as adverse parties of the state:7 Relations between minorities and the states where they live are often a compromise between the ideals and ambitions of the minorities and those of the state. These compromises can vary between harmonious and tense. The way minorities are incorporated in the state and its national society is changeable. Like the fundamentals of states itself, such as national and state ideologies, also relations with minorities are regularly reconfirmed or renegotiated and revised. The past few decades have seen a general tendency to extension of rights of national minorities. This tendency must be attributed to activism, assertiveness or even struggles from the side of the minorities, as well as to changes in the attitude of states. (Markusse 2011)

However, people such as the Karelians are not easily identified as a group because individuals vary in how they link their background to the ethnic minority. In fact, according to cultural theory, such identities are constantly constructed and consist of various contradictory elements (Hall 1996, 2). In essence, border areas are not simply “us” and “others”; people often belong to several groups at the same time and own multiple identities. In fact, the idea of a national minority is constantly contested, a matter deeply rooted in experiences and elaborations of ethnic affinity. My aim here is to show how musical activity can affect identities in a transnational collaboration. In particular, the process of becoming aware of one’s ethnic roots stem from experiencing local musical identities and may depend on the way culture is met across borders. In the case of the Karelians, we have to ask, following Markusse: Do these people recognize themselves as a separate regional transnational group? And if so, do they also have political expectations for the revitalization and regional unification on the basis of that shared identity? How do they relate to any language revitalization and other cultural processes? Thus, my approach here is to view Karelian music from the border perspective—​that is, from Finland, looking at the meaning that Karelian music has for an international audience and for Karelian identity at large. I have undertaken participatory observation and fieldwork in Petrozavodsk (Russia) since 1992, especially intensively from August to December 2011. I have got to know members of the bands Talvisovat (1989–​) and Myllärit (1992–​2010), interviewing them along with many other musicians and cultural spokespeople in Petrozavodsk. I have also participated8 in many of their concerts and rehearsals, although this chapter primarily draws from these groups’ issued recordings, as well as four CDs of demo recordings by Talvisovat dated 1988 to 1995. These two bands not only are well known in Finland but they also both carry important symbolic meaning (even though in different ways) for the Karelian community in their home base, Petrozavodsk. In the case of Karelian music, the Finnish audience is primarily interested in its effects on ethnicity—​the Karelian heritage and identity today.9 In this chapter, I link the ethnic historical background of Russian Karelia with its relationship to Finland, especially ideas about Karelia and Karelianism. Actual music, and especially lyrics, is analyzed in

240   History combination with interviews that deepen the material and reveal the interplay of music, musicians, music producers, and audience. The internal mobilization of Karelians in Russia is an important factor for Finns who listen to music from their eastern kin. For them, Karelians are an endangered minority. In this context, Karelian culture is not just an exotic Other10; it also stirs the emotions of those worried about the Finno-​Ugric people, a larger ethnic group that includes both Finns and Karelians. There are also those who may have kinship connections with Karelia,11 and those who are in general interested in the survival of native minorities of the Nordic countries (Asplund et al. 2006, 21, 305; Lappalainen 2011, 42, 43). Contemporary folk music is essential for Russian Karelians, and it is meaningful for Finns as well. The spread of Karelian popular culture to neighboring countries has turned traditional cultural expressions into a new means of generating modern music. It may evoke a sense of a community through an imagination of common roots and a particular uniqueness of language and culture. This raises the question of multiple identities (Hall 1996), because these communities, although intertwined with Karelian music, do not share much else in common while living in a different kind of society (Nordic vs. Russian). In the transnational world, people belong to several identity groups and often have “flexible ethnicities” (Slobin 1992, 34): “Musical expression can easily and naturally form a tactic in such a strategy, or merely serve as a rallying point for latent feelings of identity-​flexing.” Is Karelian music such a strategy for developing multiple identities, which in favorable situations can boost political possibilities? Or is it, rather, a mirror for reflecting latent feelings of connection to Karelian backbone? Ethnicity is thus a political and cultural concept instead of a stable natural feature. Cultural aesthetics and expressive categories are essential for making such affinities possible: musical practices can create the space for renewed identities, instead of just reflecting those already in existence (Frith 1996, 121–​124).

Border Crossing in Russian Karelian Society In Soviet society, there was a specific kind of orthodoxy that prevailed (Slezkine 1994). The ideological system dominated cultural life and subsequently directed its cultural practices and social contacts. The truth and ideological explanations were prescribed by the party. Although people were able to criticize the system and “read between the lines” of official news, they nonetheless participated in structuring the prevailing social order. It is telling, for example, that when Santtu Karhu received an invitation to make his first record in Finland in 1988, he had trouble getting a passport to travel to a Western country.12 Despite strong censorship, the most effective tool in the state’s apparatus was social control and self-​censorship (Litvin 2001, 71, 121; Kurki 2006).

Trajectories of Karelian Music    241 In the 1980s, rock music broke through into the Baltic countries, and especially Soviet Estonia, where it became a rebellious voice against Soviet rule (Ruutsoo 2002). From there, its influence spread to other parts of the northwestern Soviet Union. (For further information on this development, see Troitsky 1988.) Estonia was an important center in the Soviet Union for the Finno-​Ugric world. From there, Santtu Karhu heard new voices singing in a Balto-​Finnic language—​Estonian—​and he thought that if Estonian could be used for creating rock, then why not his own Karelian language? (Bogdanov 2009; Karhu 2012). Svetlana Boym (2001, 150) has written: “Perestroika meant a new era for the lives of the Soviet people who invented themselves and their ties anew.” During the Soviet era, early nationality policies had strengthened many smaller minority languages such as Udmurt and Komi (Hirsch 1997, 264). In Karelia, however, Finnish communists—​expatriates of the Finnish civil war of 1918—​could draw up the outlines of a nationality policy in the early Soviet period (Laine 2002), so the Finnish language was used as a “national” language in the Karelian ASSR. Meanwhile, its closest kindred language, Karelian, remained underdeveloped. This was because, although the Finns were a small minority in the republic compared to the Karelians, their Finnish language was considered mature enough for use in cultural and political life. Of course, there was an underlying dream of political reunification behind these attempts, which would imply an increase in Karelian power (Kangaspuro 2000). In practice, though, assimilation to the Russian dominant culture was encouraged as part of achieving the communist monocultural utopia. The Karelian language disappeared from everyday use, especially among the generation born after the Second World War. According to the latest census, the number of ethnic Karelians in the Republic of Karelia has diminished to 45,570, which is equivalent to 7.4% of the total population. The situation is further complicated when we think about Karelia as a divided land. Karelian-​speaking native people have lived on both sides of the border with Finland, and the position of the border has changed several times as well. Natural cross-​border engagement became difficult after Finland’s independence in 1917, and was even more restricted when Karelian areas were ceded to the Soviet Union in 1940 (Hyytiä 1999). The population in the ceded areas was evacuated to Finland, while the ceded area was then repopulated with immigrants from the Ukraine, Belarus, and other distant parts of the Soviet Union. Thus, Karelians in Finland and those remaining in Soviet Karelia were effectively separated from each other (Hakamies 2005). The Karelians in Russia faced practical difficulties during this time, and traditional ways of village life, their language, and many other cultural features were crushed (Laine 2002). Therefore, unlike their parents, the generations raised in Soviet Karelia after the war had only hazy fantasies about Finland. The younger generation in the mid-​1980s dreamed of going across the border; as a singer in the youth ensemble Toive in the 1980s said, “To see Finland and die—​that was the way I thought in my dreams. If I could visit Finland even once”13 (see also Suutari 2012). Possibilities emerged in the late 1980s, though, and the resulting first-​hand contacts with musicians became extremely important for bringing forth new ideas and greater potential. As a consequence, Karelian music gained a new footing in both Finland and Russia.

242   History

Santtu Karhu and Talvisovat When we started, our band was the only rock band in the world who sang in Karelian. Unfortunately we are still the only Karelian rock band. We would like to see rivalry. —​Santtu Karhu14

As the only Karelian-​language rock musician and singer-​songwriter, Santtu Karhu’s audience is still relatively small in Russian Karelia, but his influence is huge for those young people who would like to see the Karelian language reappear as a vital medium in the community. In the mid-​1980s, then a member of the student song and dance ensemble Toive (Hope) in Petrozavodsk, Karhu began to perform Karelian, Ingrian, and Veps folk songs. The ensemble was founded to show the world how Karelian youth celebrated the 150th anniversary of the nineteenth-​century epic poem Kalevala. It was proof of how young people in Russia admired the Karelian tradition—​a Soviet counterpart to Karelianism in Finland.15 Toive toured widely in the Soviet Union, met youngsters from other countries—​for example, at the 1985 World Peace Festival in Moscow—​but first and

Figure 12.1  Santtu Karhu. Photo: Sami Parkkinen 2012.

Trajectories of Karelian Music    243 foremost it created a circle of young Karelians and Finns who stayed together and nurtured an emotional zeal for the Finnish and Karelian languages. Together with his friend Arto Rinne from the Toive ensemble, Karhu spent two years in the army. During that time, they listened to Finnish rock radio stations, and they were heavily influenced by new trends in foreign pop—​primarily the loud masculine voices of late 1980s rock. Their military service close to the Norwegian border also included eavesdropping on NATO’s radiophones, and with this equipment they could also listen to Finnish radio broadcasts. When Karhu returned to Petrozavodsk, he went on developing rock music with lyrics in the Karelian language.16 He contacted the famous poet Vladimir Brendojev, so as to get lyrics for his material. Brendojev replied that he did not like rock music: “It’s like a pain in a tooth: as soon as I hear it, I hope it will stop immediately.”17 But Brendojev sent Karhu some of his books and that inspired him to continue on the path he had chosen. Karhu’s first demo recordings include three using Brendojev’s poetry and one of his own. The latter, “Mustas Kois” (In a Black Chimneyless Hut), was published in the journal Punalippu, and included later in several poetry compilations and textbooks. The song came to represent the voice of the young—​it gave an aesthetic dimension to identity production (Õispuu 2013, 117). Soon Karhu began to concentrate on his own material and by the early 1990s, his group Talvisovat had recorded more than fifty demos of songs written by him. Not only “Mustas Kois” but also several other songs from Karhu’s early career discuss the fate of the Karelian language and its people, a concern of people in Finland as well. His music seems to speak about present problems and the low self-​esteem of the Karelian community, with expressed anguish. In these texts, Karhu tells of the Karelians as “we.” For instance, “Mustas Kois” exclaims the following:  the language is almost extinct, but its touch does not leave the poet in peace. Many have sat in jail because of their language, but there are people who have kindness in their hearts and care about the fate of the people. Žiäli vähä jäi moizii miehii Ket maltettas astuo oigieh päi Kielen surmal sanottas –​myöstäi Moizii harvah vai elaijas näin

It is a pity that such men are few Who would go in the right direction; Say to the death of language—​Retreat! Such people have I rarely seen. (“Mustas Kois,” 1989)18

Allusions to the persecution prevalent during the Stalinism era and the Cold War affairs that followed are evident here. This was the time when the Karelians could readily see the destructive effect of Soviet power on their traditional life and existence as an ethnic group. But at the same time, it was when literature was born, societies were established, and a political consciousness emerged, just as Karhu exemplified all this for the young. The older generation of the national elite helped Santtu Karhu make contacts in Finland in the late 1980s. At the same time, direct travel from Finland to Soviet Karelia became possible, and many of those interested in national traditions and the Karelian issue started making intensive contacts with Russian Karelia. For example, among

244   History artists, sentiments similar to late nineteenth-​century Karelianism emerged (Sihvo 2003), and photographers, filmmakers, and journalists produced artwork, films, and stories about their trips. To search for one’s “roots” was understandable, since life in the Russian Karelian villages was reminiscent of earlier life in Finland; also, many traveled to their birthplaces across the border. Heikki Laitinen, professor in the folk-​music department of the Sibelius Academy, traveled several times to Russian Karelia; he also arranged for young Santtu Karhu to make three single recordings in Helsinki between 1989 and 1991.19 The first was an acoustic recording alongside musicians from the Sibelius Academy and the latter two were folk-​rock performed with his own band, Talvisovat. To produce a record in a Western country was considered an exceptional achievement in Soviet Karelia, and in 1989 Karhu was able to form a rock band with the epithet “the best musicians in the city” (of Petrozavodsk).20 Talvisovat was called on to perform as part of the fiftieth anniversary tour of the Karelian Association (Karjalan Liitto) and for the Karelian cultural foundation Juminkeko in 1990. Their first festival gig in Finland was at the WOMAD (World of Music, Arts, and Dance) Festival in Seinäjoki in July 1991. Their percussive energy, the wall of sound of electric guitar, and the jouhikko (a wooden bowed lyre), as well as announcements in Finnish, had a big impact on the audience in Finland (Suutari and Munne 2013). Santtu Karhu’s relationship with Finland is controversial. The name of the band, Talvisovat (Winter Clothes), associates easily with Talvisota (Winter War), which was the first stage of the war between the Soviet Union and Finland during WWII. War veterans in the audience in Finland in 1990 shouted “We used to shoot you [Russian Karelians] in the last war,” as Karhu himself remembered21 (Ramnarine 2003, 178), but the young rock audience welcomed the newcomers with enthusiasm. Globally common transnational narratives (Hannerz 1998) became locally affective: the fate of the Karelian community in Russia met the evacuee Karelians’ desire to “go back” to Karelia. Karelianism in Finland seemed to meet the interests of Russian Karelian artists. Santtu Karhu wrote on their tour van with big letters Suomi Takaisin (Give Finland Back), a countermove to the desires of Karelian evacuees for Finland to recover ceded Karelia. The open-​mindedness and curiosity of the Talvisovat musicians (who had not traveled much in the West) helped in establishing good contacts with Finnish concert organizers, musicians, and others involved in the music business and in Karelian culture. The impact was widespread. For example, the conductor of the Kantele Orchestra, Aleksandr Bykadorov, left his position in the state ensemble Kantele so as to participate in the Talvisovat tour of Finland in 1991. For him, a former classical musician working in a folk variety show, the energy and sound of the rock performances was unprecedented, a strong experience that very much affected his later career.22 For a couple of years, Karhu and Talvisovat were active in Finland. They also performed in Sweden for expatriate Finnish communities, whereas their gigs in Russia were few in number.23 Unfortunately, the small Finnish record label EiNo Records could not afford to produce the intended full album, and their involvement in the project faded by the mid-​1990s. Karhu’s creative driving force did not end there, however; after a few

Trajectories of Karelian Music    245 quiet years, he started to record two small albums on his own in Petrozavodsk, in the late 1990s. One album was a children’s cassette Kurret24 (Cranes; Karhu 1997), and the other was an acoustic folk-​rock CD Pahoin Brihoin Pajatukset25 (Songs of a Bad Boy), which was accompanied by Karhu’s long-​time guitar player Veps Fedor Astashov. The acoustic album paved the way for a return to Finland, where the rock management office Hot Igloo started to fashion Talvisovat’s gigs for a wider audience. The next Talvisovat albums, produced from 2003 to 2009, were Hyvästit Karjala26 (Goodbye Karelia), Terveh Petroskoi27 (Hello Petrozavodsk28), and Allus oli muna29 (In the Beginning There Was an Egg). These albums showed a change from optimism and the fight for Karelian rights to one reflecting bitter sarcasm, individual suffering, and alienation. For example, from Terveh Petroskoi: Gu tulendas mies tutah Astundas arvatah Ga mindäh čomat tytöt varatah?

Man is known for his coming Sensed from his pace But why pretty girls fear him? (“Mies Tutah Tulendas,” 2006)

Karhu deliberately draws associations from folk narratives, and this text has a link to the folk song “Jos Mun Tuttuni Tulisi” in the first two lines. But the third line is a rebellious contrast to the romantic idyll of the past: the present-​day reality is tough, with alcohol problems, violence, and subordination of the Karelians. The track “Iso Seppy Ilmollinen” (The Great Smith Ilmollinen), from the album Hyvästit Karjala (Goodbye Karelia), sets to music the thousand-​year history of the Karelians. According to the lyrics, the Karelians have lived between the Swedish and Russian empires. The Eastern Orthodox Church reached them first. Karelians burned down the Swedish capital of Sigtuna. Wars, divisions of land, and hunger forced the Karelians to leave their country and forget their traditions, until only the name of their land remained. “Armoittoman Lapsen Uni” (Dream of the Orphan) describes how the unlucky child “has hatred in mind and a stone in hand.” In the lyrics of “Keldaine Kuu” (Yellow Moon), the Karelian nation has become rotten and its bones lie in the earth. Later, the political associations in the music are even more direct. Karhu (2011) says that although he has to be careful and conduct a certain amount of self-​censorship, his marginal position in Russia helps and his lyrics in the Karelian language are not read by Russian-​speaking security authorities. “Moskovan Kämmen” (Hand of Moscow) tells how much the Russians despise the Karelian people, who themselves hastened their culture’s downfall by drinking and seeking fortune and riches elsewhere, leaving the area to its fate. Musically, the band has moved away from its folk-​rock roots and toward hard progressive rock. The sounds of the jouhikko, shepherds’ flutes, and accordion change to the complicated rhythms of a rock band and distorted electric guitar, though the albums shows noticeable influences from world music, including African rhythms to reggae. The music of Santtu Karhu is a resonant call from a people whose disappearance

246   History touched neighboring Finland, but whose cultural difficulties are worsened by the failings of Russian power. In his songs, the past life of the Karelians was strong and unbroken, but their current life is disordered and bleak. The message is that Karelians have submitted to their Russian conquerors. Such attitudes and proclamations have hindered the everyday music making of Talvisovat; the band has lost its rehearsal space and is rarely employed by Russian authorities at local festivals. Of Santtu Karhu, Republic of Karelia Minister of Culture Jelena Bogdanova says, “His music is important but his drunkenness is unbearable.”30 The local intelligentsia in Karelia continue with the old-​fashioned forms of national representation, such as the Karelian state ensemble Kantele, but the younger music audience has lost a voice that expresses its Karelian heritage. Cross-​border contacts continue to be the main support for the activities and interests of Santtu Karhu and Talvisovat. Performances by Talvisovat and Santtu Karhu continue to meet a demand for transnational Karelian sentiments. Gigs at Karelian evacuee associations have changed to language activism and Finno-​Ugric sentiments expressed in small clubs, for which the band’s wild and energetic aesthetic is fuel and inspiration. Most important, the ability of Santtu Karhu to write original material in the Karelian language about current life circumstances remains—​in a context in which few people are able to speak it anymore (Suutari 2010, 9). References to traditional oral poetry and Karelian societies in his lyrics strengthen even more his role as spokesman for Karelians. All these features coincide with a surge of Karelianism in Finland. If originally it was Estonian rock that inspired Karhu to make music in his mother tongue, it is now the Karelian-​speaking societies in Finland and Russian Karelia that have the biggest impact. Whether in publications or possibilities to perform. Gigs and contacts have frequently taken the band also to Sweden, where concerts have been arranged by Finnish associations and local multilingual societies. The gigs are never just concerts, though; they include personal contacts where two different worlds meet. Just as in the later years of Perestroika, the musicians of Talvisovat still travel without comforts, often accommodated by local musicians and activists; and the public are just as much astonished by these people from Russia as they are by their music.

Myllärit Another group, Myllärit (The Millers), raised the status and scope of foreign cultural contacts even further. Although beginning as part of a state ensemble, its members chose to follow their artistic freedom instead of working as official musicians. In the late 1980s, the Karelian state ensemble Kantele had a “Finnish band”—​a group of five instrumentalists (clarinet, violin, viola, bass, accordion) whose task it was in the Kantele variety show to perform Finnish pelimanni music—​instrumental folk music in the western Finnish fashion.31 To become a member of the group, one had to have a conservatory education (Olson 2004). During Kantele’s tour of Germany in 1991, the Finnish band enjoyed the freedom of busking in Tübingen and Stuttgart. This activity, regarded

Trajectories of Karelian Music    247 by some as begging, was not acceptable Soviet Russian behavior, and they suffered condemnation by the Kantele leaders during the long bus trip back to Karelia.32 But the group had already received an invitation to return to Germany in May 1992, and so the band decided to quit Kantele. Its musical director, Aleksandr Bykadorov, had already left the Kantele ensemble a little earlier to join Santtu Karhu and Talvisovat, and he now joined the other band members and they took the new name Myllärit (The Millers). Myllärit played in Germany and Central Europe for the next four summers. Busking and the small fees earned from private parties were not discouraged, since this yielded much more than their fees as professional musicians in Russia. Their friends and transnational contacts organized possibilities for them to stay and perform abroad, and this opened up new aspects of their musicianship and broadened their ability to represent Karelian ethnicities. Their mainly instrumental repertoire grew considerably when they recruited Arto Rinne as their soloist in 1994. The fresh, energetic arrangements of traditional folk music delighted audiences not only in Central Europe but also in Finland (where gigs were organized by their emigrant friends in Helsinki) and on smaller occasions in Russia (via the Intourist Office). The five men and two women were a mobile group, full of action, enthusiasm, and humor in their street performances (which I had observed in the mid-​1990s in Finland and in Russia). Typical of their playing were the intense, extremely fast melodies played by clarinet, violin, and accordion.33

Figure  12.2  Myllärit busking in Germany in 1994. From left: Aleksandr Bykadorov, Arto Rinne, Dmitry Demin, Zhanna Kudryavtseva, Sergei Zobnev and Andrei Varkentin. Photo is taken by the other violin player Tatyana Umnyakova.

248   History Clarinetist Dmitry Demin describes how euphoric it was for them to visit other countries: for him, it was so beautiful in the cities, with nice people, earning money, all the things for sale, and a happy atmosphere among the musicians: “All were happy, young, glorious, wonderful. It was a joyful time, euphoric, for us.”34 He emphasizes that what he gained during these years was both spiritual and emotional. They couldn’t afford hotels like Finland’s most popular folk band Värttinä, but they stayed at the homes of local people. They felt that these people had something to offer personally, and they wanted to give something back to the band. The spirit in the band was that they were in a “fairytale.” The choice to leave the state ensemble and its popular pompous representation of local Karelian music tradition and to gain the freedom to perform and busk also opened up the possibility for them to create new dynamic mixtures of Finnish, Karelian, and Russian folk music. But being independent meant that they had to fight for gigs in Petrozavodsk and elsewhere. Rock clubs did not yet exist, and it was practically impossible to record the music with modern equipment—​the only possibility was to make live recordings in a studio. Sari Kaasinen, the leader of the Finnish folk-​music band Värttinä, became interested in the group, perhaps seeing them as a male version of her group which featured three female vocalists (Käyhkö 1995).35 She offered them a recording contract with her company, and as a result they started to perform regularly at folk festivals. Their first album Eto Pravda36 (This Is True) was released in 1997. Eto Pravda gained wide attention in the Finnish press and on television; the titular song won the famous Levyraati (Juke Box Jury) TV show, and the band was nominated as best performer of 1997 in the annual Baltic Folklandia Cruise Festival. The album features the band’s joyful playing with acoustic instruments, in which their virtuosity and respect for folk music is evident, but it also includes extremely apt Ingrian texts that comment ironically on life in the villages during the communist era. For example, “Akka Delekatka” is a story of a poor desperate husband who has to organize everything at home, from milking to child care, while his wife goes to Communist Party meetings. “Eto Pravda” tells how the village of Tuutari slaughtered a cat and makes a fantastically extravagant story of it. “Petroskoi” (Petrozavodsk) is an Ivan Levkin 1960s song that was popular among the socialist-​era choirs, to which the Myllärit version adds a touch of irony and energy. The final track, “Svyatoj Vetsher” (Holy Evening), has a long duet for church bells played in the Russian Karelian Kizhi manner. Most of the Ingrian material was sent to Myllärit by Arnold Survo, a Russian émigré folklorist in Helsinki, while the other songs draw from the band’s older Russian and Karelian repertoire. The folk lyrics are strikingly apolitical compared to Karhu’s frustrated, bitter texts. Clearly, ethnicity in the ideology of Myllärit was something to celebrate and use to amuse the audience, rather than a tool in struggling for the rights of minorities. Originally, Myllärit (even as a Finnish band) consisted of members who themselves were not Karelians, and they did not identify themselves with the Karelians in the same fashion as Santtu Karhu. To be able to perform at big festivals and large concert arenas, Myllärit decided to recruit a drummer and thus move closer to the rock idiom. The first gig by the augmented line-​up was a big concert in Petrozavodsk, in April 1997, for the band’s fifth anniversary.

Trajectories of Karelian Music    249 Soon thereafter, a local contact from the Vermont, U.S.-​based Harmony Project (which was founded in 1985 for the purpose of cultural and educational exchanges between the then-​USSR and the United States) started to organize annual two-​month concert tours in the United States, which led to further contacts with Norway (the Telemark Folk Music Festival in Bø) and from there on to Scotland (Rinne 2013). In Sweden, there were a lot of concerts, but from a different angle: the group’s popularity in Finland was noticed by Finnish communities in Sweden (there are about half a million Finns living in Sweden, many of which are associated with Karelians), and so the band was invited to perform there in folk academies, at meetings of Finnish associations, and at festivals. The band’s second album37 was cut in the United States and was in the acoustic instrumental style of their early period. The next album, A Voi Voi! Karelian Fever,38 was again produced in 2000, in Finland, this time by Pilfink Records. By this time the new material had already been played for several years at hundreds of concerts, and this refining experience can be heard in the unison instrumental melodies (by violin, accordion, and shepherd’s flutes) that are played at ultra-​fast tempo and with significant virtuosity and power.39 In this third album, Aleksandr Bykadorov wrote all the song melodies and Arto Rinne derived the texts from folk archives in Petrozavodsk. While interviewing Arto Rinne, I gained access to his home archive and collection of press clippings, and so I could compare the band’s reception in newspapers of Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and the United States. In Russia, the biggest issue, and even concern, was the way in which Myllärit renewed folk music and arranged material for themselves; the local folk-​music authorities in Petrozavodsk even opined that it was not possible to use guitars in folk music because that would damage its authenticity. But Myllärit became known for its unique sound and reforms in folk music, and their energy appealed to a whole new generation in Petrozavodsk in the late 1990s. Thus, the band attracted a substantial following for its folk music, and the folk festivals and local folk scene benefited from their success. Also, the business and sponsors that supported Myllärit were often a subject of interest in the Russian press. Similarly, the collapse of the Soviet Union was often addressed in the press, and Myllärit were (rightly) considered to be a consequence of that political upheaval. In Finland, their knowledge of Karelian music was emphasized, as well as the uniqueness of their combining tradition and modernity. In Sweden, their musical proficiency and hippie-​like appearance were commented on. In the United States, the issue of poverty was often mentioned in connection with the band and its Russian background. On the other hand, the band’s Karelia connection was viewed in a Nordic context, because Myllärit were from northern Europe and performed at Scandinavian festivals and venues. Long tours, bad road conditions, and substance use weighed heavily on the relationships between band members and between the band and their families. For a long time, the band had been like a big family, and members’ spouses and children traveled with them to festivals in Finland and elsewhere.40 But the growing professionalism (evidenced in an increased number of tours) created tensions and caused irrational behavior, which worsened those relationships. They set up a studio and established the

250   History Myllärit Center, under the direction of accordionist Sergei Zobnev, to organize their activities. The center was responsible for establishing the first world music festival in Russia, Folk Marafon, which ran from 2000 to 2006, as well as other music projects of various kinds. Unfortunately, other members of the band grew frustrated with Zobnev’s use of the band’s name in the business functions, as many of the gigs had sponsors and others involved that had to be acknowledged. The key figures in the band, including Arto Rinne, left in 2002 and the number of the group’s performances decreased considerably thereafter.

Karelian-​Finnish Tradition A certain romantic glory has enveloped Russian Karelia, in the eyes of the Finns ever since the nineteenth century, but a touch of colonial superiority returned in the wake of Perestroika. In the Finnish press, Karelia today is often described as backward, underdeveloped, squalid, and miserable,41 but at the same time it is portrayed as authentic in its capability of maintaining the ancient language, its age-​old traditions, and authentic “touch of life.” Karelia is a source of inspiration, a possibility of seeing manifestations of Finnish-​Karelian tradition in a new or different way. In Sweden and Norway, Karelia did not carry such symbolic meanings (apart from in their Finnish communities), but those peoples’ curiosity to find interesting musical material led to incorporating some Karelian aspects in their musical inventions.42 The search for origins, or roots, on the Finnish side of the border was met with a rising national consciousness and language revitalization among the new generation in Russian Karelia. Opening up the world gave Karelian Russian musicians the opportunity to see new ways of making traditional music in a contemporary context. Santtu Karhu’s songs came to be part of that active ethnic movement (Kovaleva 2010, 45), and simultaneously his role was recognized in Finland (and among the Finns and Meänkieli speakers in Tornedal, Sweden) as well. Karhu’s musical career seems to both reflect and shape the struggle and sentiments of Karelians from the late 1980s to the present. The early enthusiasm and colorful joy of expression by the Karelian people has, however, met the reality of continuous language change, slow economic development, and vanishing cultural traditions. The prevailing political pressure in Russia does not encourage Karelians to raise their heads; a striking example is how Nuori Karjala43 (Young Karelia), the active cultural association that organized concerts and publications, was forced to shut down in 2015, condemned as a “foreign agent.” Santtu Karhu’s dark lyrics reflect how difficult it is for Karelians to survive under Russian cultural pressures and political dominance. Myllärit adopted a rather different stance, still making local traditions visible and attractive but reaching a more significant audience in Russia and abroad through their music, festivals, and media presentations. In short, Myllärit has been more effective, more lasting in drawing the young into a feeling and respect for Karelian folk-​music traditions.

Trajectories of Karelian Music    251 In Finland and other Nordic countries, the energy and professional quality of Myllärit was well regarded, especially in folk festivals and related performances. With their Karelian and Ingrian material, the group came to represent Russian Karelian contemporary folk music. On the other hand, Santtu Karhu’s growing irony, skepticism, and black humor was off-​putting and challenging for many. His pessimistic lyrics requires knowledge of the life of Karelians in Russia and motivation to improve the cultural circumstances. His work has found publishers in Finland, where destitution and misery are familiar motifs in depicting the “exoticism” and “authenticity” of traditional ethnic Russian Karelia. Therefore, Talvisovat’s audience is more limited, consisting of active defenders of Karelian culture and many Karelian immigrants in Finland; Karhu’s importance remains, in the way his music stimulates activism in the Finno-​Ugric world, as well as in Finland and the Nordic countries.

The Formation of Regional Identity The examples of Myllärit and Talvisovat demonstrate the presence of a strong sense of regional belonging that crosses the border of Russia and the Nordic region. These bands have not participated in state-​sponsored representations of Karelian nationalism. Instead, their music emanates from a respect for the regional Karelian tradition. Their identity is not tied to a specific territory but, rather, embraces a more abstract cultural landscape. Karelia is rich on oral traditions and musical skills. In Finland, and among those of Karelian descent elsewhere, Karelian music is about the multiple identities of people whose existence is threatened and who struggling to hold onto Karelian glory from an earlier time. Are there present-​day parallels to the nationalism of Karelianism that was launched in the late nineteenth century, before the border was closed between Finland and Russia? The transnational, global sphere of popular music, in which Karelian folk-​rock is a part, differs from the politically strained world in which Karelianism emerged; today’s transnational interest in Karelian music is multicultural, not distinctly anti-​Russian. These activities may be slightly lower now compared to the euphoria that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some barriers—​political, historical, and cultural—​remain, as the fate of Nuori Karjala shows. Nevertheless, Karelian folk-​rock has created a foundation for transnational connections and has stimulated a sense of regional identity—​an identity that is neither simply Karelian nor Finnish-​Russian but, rather, a more complex cultural bond.

Notes 1. Karelian has several dialects and is spoken in the Republic of Karelia, Finland, and the Tver region of Russia.

252   History 2. The greatest source of inspiration for the Karelianists was Kalevala, an epic poem based on the Elias Lönnrot’s expeditions to Karelia in the 1830s and 1840s, especially to northern Russian Karelia, an area called Viena. Although Finland and Karelia both belonged to the Russian empire before 1917, Viena Karelia never was part of Finland, and the Karelian cultural traditions are not the same as Finnish. 3. The movement was also a reaction to the oppression in the 1890s by the Russian empire toward its autonomous area, the grand duchy of Finland. Finnish nationalist artists (such as Jean Sibelius) tried to resist Russian power by means of strengthening the Finnish identity, and their findings from Russian Karelia suited these endeavors. 4. Such internationally successful Nordic groups that have based their repertoire on the Ingrian and Karelian traditional material and song traditions include Värttinä in Finland and Hedningarna in Sweden. In Russia, Balto-​Finnic languages and corresponding ethnic cultures have been and still are cultivated by state national policies in the Republic of Karelia. These languages are Karelian, Veps, and Finnish. Ingrian is considered a dialect of the Finnish language traditionally used in the Leningrad oblast around the city of St. Petersburg. 5. Emerging interest in Karelian folk music in the Nordic region parallels interest in Sámi, Seto, and Roma cultures (Åberg 2002; Chapter 19). 6. During the Soviet era it was relatively difficult in the Soviet Union to get access to Western cultural items such as records or musical instruments. 7. One of his cases is the Basque country on the Spanish-​French border. 8. During the process of writing this article I  was asked, what kind of participation my research included. Since 1992 I have travelled several times a year to Petrozavodsk. Often I have stayed in the appartments of the musicians in question, sometimes I have performed with them and couple of times I have organized concerts for them in Finland. Mutual help and friendship has been important for me. 9. On the meaning of folk-​rock for the Karelian identity, there are numerous articles and films published in Finland (Munne 2003; Käyhkö 1995; Sirén 1998; Mäki 2003; Tuominen 2002). 10. Edward Said (1993, 2011) wrote about orientalism from the postcolonial perspective. He pointed out that oriental culture is seen in the West as the exotic Other. In my case, Karelianism is a similar concept in the sense that Karelian culture is seen from outside, from the needs of Finnish society, but here a shared cultural heritage is clearly at hand, not just its Other. 11. Almost 1 million people in Finland have roots in Karelia, and thousands in Sweden as well. 12. Author interview of Santtu Karhu, October 2011. 13. Author interview of Tatjana Kokkonen-​Roivas, October 2, 2011. 14. Santtu Karhu interview. 15. Author interview of Genrih Turovski, November 2011. 16. Santtu Karhu interview. 17. Ibid. 18. Song lyrics are available in Karhu 2012; English translations by Pekka Suutari. 19. Karhu interview; author interview of Arto Rinne, October/​November 2011. 20. Karhu interview. 21. This conversation during the gig in Nurmes was documented also by the local newspaper, Karjalainen. In the backcover of CD album “Pahoin brihoin pajatukset” picture of Santtu Karhu is surrounded by a riffle sight.

Trajectories of Karelian Music    253 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

As was told by his band mate Dmitry Demin; author interview of Demin, September 2011. Karhu interview. Karhu 1997. Santtu Karhu and Talvisovat 2001. Santtu Karhu and Talvisovat 2003. Santtu Karhu and Talvisovat 2006. The name of the album can be seen as a modification of Villu Tamme’s influential Estonian song line Tere perestroika (Rinne 2007, 349). 29. Santtu Karhu and Talvisovat 2009. 30. Author interview of Elena Bogdanova, October 2011. 31. None of the members of the “Finnish Band” were Finns themselves, but conservatoire trained musicians from Petrozavodsk, originally from various parts of the Soviet Union. 32. Demin interview. 33. Myllärit 1993. 34. Ibid. 35. The violin players in Myllärit were female. 36. Myllärit 1997. 37. Myllärit 1999. 38. Myllärit 2000. 39. The fast and lively melodies played in powerful unisonos (violin-​ accordeon-​ flutes, jouhikko-​electric guitar, etc.) is an identifiable musical feature of Karelian folk-​rock, which can be heard from Talvisovat’s first live recordings and hits of Myllärit to present-​ day music of Sattuma, for example. 40. Demin interview; author interview of Zobnev, 2011. 41. For example, Karelians in Petrozavodsk are horrified by the way Finnish photography is used to depict the sad, broken houses and miserable people in Russian Karelian villages (e.g., Röyhkä and Metso 2011). Where the Finns may see romantic glory in a wrecked landscape, the Karelians find such perspectives insulting (author interview with Natalia Antonova, December 2011). 42. For example, the popular Swedish and Finnish folk-​rock band Hedningarna have made Nordic musical mixtures (Lilliestam 1998, 288–​290; author interview of Totte Matsson and Anders Norrudde, March 2013). 43. Nuori Karjala association was established in 1993 and it has arranged biannual musical evenings since 2006. These importance lie in the fact that this is the first time that Karelians (or more openly Baltic-​Finn young) has had it own concerts where the audience is addressed as Karelians in their own language.

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254   History Bogdanov, J. 2009. “Karjalaisen etnofuturismin ääriviivoja. Muistiinpanoja rocklyyrikko Santtu Karhun arvo-​ja aatemaailmasta.” In Kantele, runolaulu ja itkuvirsi, ed. P. Huttu-​ Hiltunen et al., 75–​117. Kuhmo: Juminkeko. Boym, S. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Frith, S. 1996. “Music and Identity.” In Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. S. Hall and P. du Gay, 108–​127. London: Sage. Häggman, Ann-​Mari. 1998. “Folkmusikens miljöer och funtioner. Vokalmusiken.” In Musik i Norden, ed. G. Andersson, 133–​155. Stockholm: Kungl. Musikaliska akademien. Hakamies, P. 2005. “New Culture on New Territories: The Karelian Isthmus and Ladoga Karelia in Post War Years.” In Moving in the USSR: Western Anomalies and Northern Wilderness, ed. P. Hakamies, 91–​109. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Hall, S. 1996. “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?” In Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay, 1–​17. London: Sage. Hannerz, U. 1998. “Transnational Research.” In Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, ed. H. Russel Bernard, 235–​256. Oxford: Altamira. Hirn, Y. 1939. Matkamiehiä ja tietäjiä. Tutkielmia suomalaisesta sivistyksestä ja Kalevala-​ romantiikasta. Helsinki: Otava. Hirsch, F. 1997. “The Soviet Union as Work-​in-​Progress:  Ethnographers and the Category Nationality in the 1926, 1937, and 1939 Censuses.” Slavic Review 56(2): 251–​278. Hyytiä, O. 1999. Karjalais-​Suomalainen neuvostotasavalta 1940–​1956—​kansallinen tasavalta? Helsinki: Suomen historiallinen seura. Inha, I. K. 1999 [1911]. Kalevalan laulumailla. Helsinki: SKS. Kangaspuro, M. 2000. Neuvosto-​Karjalan taistelu itsehallinnosta: nationalismi ja suomalaiset punaiset Neuvostoliiton vallankäytössä 1920–​1939. Helsinki: SKS. Karhu, S. 2012. Hyvästit Karjala, Terveh Petroskoi! Turku/​Tampere: Savukeidas. Käyhkö, S. 1995. “Myllärit on Venäjän Karjalan kansanmusiikkimaailman kummajainen.” Karjalainen, August 29. Kovaleva, S. 2010. “Nekatorye aspekty sovremennoi yazykovoi situatsii v Karelii.” In Karelia Written and Sung. Representations of Locality in Soviet and Russian Contexts, Ed. Pekka Suutari and Yury Shikalov, 29–​49. Helsinki: Kikimora. Kurki, T. 2006:  “Kirjoitettu ja luettu kylä Neuvosto-​Karjalan kirjallisuudessa.” In Paikka. Eletty, kuviteltu, kerrottu, ed. Seppo Knuuttila, Pekka Laaksonen, and Ulla Piela, 252–​271. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Laine, A. 2002. “Rise and Fall of Soviet Karelia: Continuity and Change in the 20th Century Russia.” In Rise and Fall of Soviet Karelia, ed. Antti Laine and Mikko Ylikangas, 7–​23. Helsinki: Kikimora. Lappalainen, T. 2011. Ruijansuomalaisten elämää. Historiaa ja tarinoita Jäämeren rannalta. Turku: Institute of Migration. Liikanen, I. 2004. “Voluntary Association and the Redefinition of Post-​soviet Political Space.” In Beyond Post-​Soviet Transition, ed. Risto Alapuro, Ilkka Liikanen, and Markku Lonkila, 42–​63. Helsinki: Kikimora Publications. Lilliestam, L. 1998. Svensk rock. Musik, lyrik, historik. Göteborg: Bo Ejeby Förlag. Ling, J. 1989. Europas musikhistoria; Folkmusiken 1730–​1980. Göteborg: Akademiförlaget. Litvin, A. L. 2001. Writing History in Twentieth-​Century Russia. A View from Within. Translated and edited by John L. H. Keep. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave. Mäki, P. 2003. “Santtu Karhu:  Ensimmäinen karjalankielinen rocklevy.” Kaltio 3. At www.kaltio.fi/​vanhat/​vanhatsivut/​arkisto/​kaltio2003/​03_​3_​maki_​peipa.htm.

Trajectories of Karelian Music    255 Markusse, J. D. 2011. “National Minorities in European Border Regions.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies, ed. D. Wastl-​Walter, 351–​372. Surrey and Burlington: Ashgate. Munne, T. 2003. “Venäjän Karjalan unohdettu rock.” Idäntutkimus 2: 55–​57. At www.helsinki.fi/​ idantutkimus/​arkisto/​2003_​2/​arvostelut.pdf. Õispuu, J. 2013. “Painettu sana pitää kansaa koossa: Vertaileva katsaus Aunuksenkarjalan ja Viron kirjallisuuden historiaan.” In Karjala-​kuvaa rakentamassa, ed. P. Suutari, 108–​121. Helsinki: SKS. Olson, L. J. 2004. Performing Russia: Folk Revival and Russian Identity. London: Routledge Curzon. Pronina, G., ed. 1990. “Kuibo elät karjalaine?” Punalippu 2. Ramnarine, T. K. 2003. Ilmatar’s Inspirations:  Nationalism, Globalization and the Changing Soundscapes of Finnish Folkmusic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rinne, H. 2007. Laulava vallankumous: Viron rocksukupolven ihme. Helsinki: Johnny Kniga. Röyhkä, K., and J. Metso. 2011. Rajantakainen Karjala. Helsinki: Johnny Kniga. Ruutsoo, R. 2002. Civil Society and Nation Building in Estonia and The Baltic States: Impact of Traditions on Mobilization and Transition 1986–​2000. Rovaniemi: Lapin yliopisto. Said, E. W. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus. Said, E. W. 2011 [1978]. Orientalismi. Helsinki: Gaudeamus. Sihvo, H. 2003 [1973]. Karjalan kuva: Karelianismin taustaa ja vaiheita autonomian aikana. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Sirén, A. 1998. Laulun matkassa—​Myllärit. [Movie]. Petroskoi:  Karjalan tv; Tampere: Filmaattiset oy. Slezkine, Y. 1994. Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. London: Cornell University Press. Slobin, M. 1992. “Micromusics of the West: A Comparative Approach.” Ethnomusicology 1: 1–​87. Stark-​Arola, L. 2000. “Reflexivity and the Camera’s Eye:  Comments from the Field on the Public and Private Uses of Photography.” Suomen antropologi 4: 4–​13. Stark-​Arola, L. 2002. “Ethnic Dynamics and the Finnish Factor: The View from a Post-​Soviet Karelian Village.” Ethnologia Fennica: Finnish Studies in Ethnology 30: 63–​76. Suutari, P. 2010. “Representations of Locality in Karelian Folk Music Activities from Composers to Singing Women: What Was Represented when Karelian Folk Music Was Performed?” In Karelia Written and Sung. Representations of Locality in Soviet and Russian Contexts, ed. Pekka Suutari and Yury Shikalov, 209–​228. Helsinki: Kikimora. Suutari, P. 2012. Kul’turnye traditsii i molodoe pokolenie prigranitsh’ya: natshalo tvortheskogo puti ansamblya “Toive” Petrozavodskogo gosuniversiteta (1982–​1992). Trudy. Karel’skogo nautshnogo tsentra Rossiiskoi akademii nauk 6: 134–​144. Suutari, P., and T. Munne. 2013. “Santtu Karhu ja karjalaisen perinteen puristus.” In Viisas matkassa, vara laukussa. Näkökulmia kansanperinteen tutkimukseen, ed. T. Hovi, K. Hänninen, M. Leppälahti, and M. Vasenkari, 163–​187. Turku: Turun yliopisto. Tarkka, J. 2012. Karhun kainalossa. Suomen kylmä sota 1947–​1990. Helsinki: Otava. Troitsky, A. 1988. Terveisiä Tšaikovskille. Helsinki: Vastavoima. Tuominen, A. 2002. “Talvisovat-​yhtye karjalaisuuden jäljillä.” YLE, December 3. At http://​ yle.fi/​aihe/​artikkeli/​2013/​01/​18/​talvisovat-​rokkaa-​karjalan-​puolesta#media=93937.

Interviews by Author Natalia Antonova, Petrozavodsk, December 15, 2011. Elena Bogdanova, Petrozavodsk, October 19, 2011.

256   History Kari Dahlblom, Jyväskylä, July 29, 2009. Dmitry Demin, Petrozavodsk, September 9, 2011. Santtu Karhu, Petrozavodsk, October 7, 2011. Tatjana Kokkonen-​Roivas, Joensuu, October 2, 2011. Totte Matsson and Anders Norudde, March 27, 2013 (via email). Arto Rinne, Petrozavodsk, October 19, 2011, November 6, 2011; Joensuu and Petrozavodsk, March 18, 2013 (via Skype). Genrih Turovski, Petrozavodsk, November 1, 2011. Sergei Zobnev, Petroszavodsk, December 14, 2011.

Discography Singles Karhu, Santtu. 1989. “Mustas kois/​Lykyn peräh.” Helsinki: EiNo Records. Karhu, Santtu, and Talvisovat. 1990. “Airotoi veneh/​Syvysharmavus.” Helsinki: EiNo Records. Karhu Santtu, and Talvisovat 1991. “Omien aigoin legendat/​Aunuksen Anja.” Helsinki: EiNo Records. Albums Karhu, Santtu. 1997. Kurret (c-​cassette). Petrozavodsk: Author’s edition. Karhu, Santtu, and Talvisovat. 2001. Pahoin brihoin pajatukset. Petrozavodsk: Author’s edition. Karhu, Santtu, and Talvisovat. 2003. Hyvästit Karjala. Ruukki: Hot Igloo. Karhu, Santtu, and Talvisovat. 2006. Terveh Petroskoi. Ruukki: Hot Igloo. Karhu, Santtu, and Talvisovat. 2009a. Allus oli muna. Ruukki: Hot Igloo. Myllärit. 1993. From St. Petersburg with Double Bass. (c-​cassette). Petrozavodsk:  Author’s edition. Myllärit. 1997. Eta pravda. Rääkkylä: Mipu Music. Myllärit. 1999. In the Light of the White Night. Waitsfield, VT: Project Harmony. Myllärit. 2000. A Voi Voi! Karelian Fever. Joensuu: Pilfink Records.

Chapter 13

Musi c in the Aft e rmat h of the 2011 U tøya Massac re Jan Sverre Knudsen

On July 22, 2011, one man killed seventy-​seven people at the government buildings in Oslo and at the Labour Party youth camp on the island of Utøya. The massacre was followed by numerous public events in reaction to the atrocities, most of which featured popular music. On July 25, more than 200,000 people gathered for the “Rose March,” which culminated in front of the City Hall with music performances, spontaneous singing, and speeches by Crown Prince Håkon and Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg. The official state memorial ceremony was held on August 21 in the Oslo Spektrum arena and featured some of the most renowned and popular Norwegian artists. This event, watched by more than a million Norwegians and broadcast live to all Nordic countries, is the main focus of this chapter. The chapter investigates the relationship between music, emotion, and national identity in the musical programming and performances, as well as reactions to the ceremony in public media. The argument is made that popular music took on a significant role in expressing and transforming the emotional culture of nationhood in this moment of national mourning and trauma. The Utøya massacre was unprecedented in modern Nordic history, representing the largest bloodshed experienced since WWII. Examining the functions of music in the wake of this extraordinary tragedy presents a new challenge to Nordic popular music studies, with global relevance, as similar massacres—​from school shootings to terrorism—​are occurring around the globe. While several scholars have investigated the role of popular music after the 9/​11 attacks from various perspectives (Fast and Pegley 2006, 2007; Fisher and Flota 2011; Garofalo 2007; Ritter and Daughtry 2007), obvious parallels in the Nordic countries have received little attention. The specific relevance for Nordic popular music studies concerns studying the particularities of popular music culture at one crucial historical moment, thereby opening up for other narratives than the national history of styles.

258   History While the primary idea shaping the production of the memorial ceremony concerned reaching out to a grieving people and helping us come to terms with a traumatic event, the design of the event and its mediations obviously also reflected other agendas, including national consolidation, multiculturalism, and transnationalism in the Nordic region. Key to the arguments presented in this chapter is a focus on the social and personal functions of music. Across the internal boundaries of musicology, scholars have offered categories and taxonomies of musical functions, including how music may serve purposes of enjoyment, expression, communication, entertainment, mood regulation, representation, validation of institutions, and so on (e.g., Merriam 1964; Nettl 1983; Turino 2008; DeNora 2000). Martin Clayton (2009) proposes four distinct, but interrelated functions of music, which will be employed in the analysis in this chapter:

1. 2. 3. 4.

Regulation of an individual’s cognitive or physiological state Mediation between self and other Symbolic representation Coordination of action

There is obviously great individual and cultural variation regarding which musical functions are put into play and made meaningful. Moreover, it is essential to acknowledge that a single music performance can simultaneously articulate multiple different, and even diverging functions (Clayton 2009, 36). For example, the public performance of a national anthem may relate to all four proposed functions. It may serve as a regulation of cognitive states by activating personal memories and sentiments; it articulates mediations between self and other by relating to individual understandings of national inclusion or exclusion; it is obviously a symbolic representation of the nation, and it can initiate and coordinate physical action by inspiring the audience to rise or sing along. This chapter analysis is based on the premise that the performance of popular music in this event shaped and reflected particular Norwegian ideas but also Nordic conceptions of popular music, nationhood, and public culture. Drawing upon Bohlman’s (2011) notion of a “New Europeanness” emerging from the political and geographical recharting of Europe since 1989, the final discussion connects the functions of music in this crucial historical moment to changes in the national imagery and the emerging conception of a “New Norway.” I argue that responses to the attacks challenged historically embedded national narratives and offered an alternative, postnational vision of nationhood. Since the scale and character of the attacks were unprecedented in the Nordic countries, there was little in the way of predefined scripts or proven ceremonial procedures to guide the preparation and execution of the event. One might argue that the ceremony was hastily put together, without much time to think carefully about the programming and the politics of representation. Still, it may be precisely such urgent scenarios that have the potential to most relevantly address the emotional, cultural, and political needs of the historical moment (Fast and Pegley 2006). The event was produced as an immediate response rather than a predefined traditional ritual.

Music in the Aftermath of Utøya Massacre    259 The invitees included survivors, friends and families of the victims, police, rescue workers, and others directly affected by the tragedy. The official Norway was represented by the prime minister, the royal family, and members of the government and parliament. International representatives included the heads of state from all the Nordic countries, as well as members of the Swedish and Danish royal families and the diplomatic corps. Performers were recruited from the A-​team of Norwegian artists including the most prominent and defining bands and solo artists from a wide range of popular music genres. It seemed that they were all there: the veterans with broad appeal, such as A-​ha, reunited for the occasion; “trønderrocker”1 Åge Aleksandersen with his band Sambandet; preacher-​turned-​performer Bjørn Eidsvåg; the national icon Sissel Kyrkjebø;2 and DumDum Boys, one of the most popular Norwegian-​language rock bands for two decades. The younger generation of performers included the socially committed hip hop duo Karpe Diem, plus a selection of popular singer-​songwriters: Jarle Bernhoft, Susanne Sundfør, Ane Brun, Sivert Høyem, and Ingrid Olava. In addition, the musical part of the program involved Swedish singer-​songwriter Melissa Horn and the Norwegian Radio Orchestra (NRK), which accompanied most of the popular music acts and also played two pieces by Beethoven and Mozart, the latter featuring renowned concert pianist Leif Ove Andsnes. Still, the event was, of course, not a concert but a national memorial ceremony, albeit with a significant musical content. In what many describe as the most emotional sequence of the evening, smiling portraits of the seventy-​seven victims were projected while their names were read by five actors. Prime Minister Stoltenberg gave a short speech emphasizing Norwegian traditions of openness, tolerance, and community in a “small country” inhabited by a “great people.” King Harald emphasized values of democracy and multiculturalism, as well as the need to care for those affected by the tragedy. Four readings of Scandinavian poetry completed the event. The large representation of popular music—​ eleven out of thirteen music performances—​was not only related to the young victims of the Labour Party youth organization AUF but also reflected changes in the role of popular music in society involving demographics, institutions, and genre transformations. Today, popular music cannot be understood primarily as an expression of youthful rebellion or what it is to be young in general (Hesmondhalgh 2002). Major ceremonial events provide a key site for investigating how such broad changes are articulated and experienced. Garofalo points out that high-​profile official events themselves are agents of change as they employ popular music “in the service of mourning, healing, patriotism and nation building” (Garofalo 2007, 4; see also Fast and Pegley 2006, 2007). In official ceremonies, music is not primarily justified as entertainment, but as a vehicle for rousing, reinforcing, and elaborating emotions and sentiments in a particular historical situation of major significance to the nation. The August 21 ceremony was commissioned by the Norwegian government and produced by the national broadcasting company NRK. In the hasty planning3 of the event, the ministry of culture requested that the ceremony primarily address the audience in the hall at Oslo Spektrum, consisting of the bereaved families and others affected by the

260   History tragedy. According to NRK project leader Stig Karlsen, otherwise known as producer of the Top-​20 show and popular music game shows, this entailed a focus he was unaccustomed to as a producer. Instead of constructing a musical product with the potential to “reach out through the television screens,” his team was now faced with the task of creating an adequate space for sorrow, grief, and compassion at the venue itself. “Every little thing, every word and every image was considered in relation to what those who sat there and had lost someone would feel”4 (Toldnes 2013). The use of lighting and camera cranes was discreet, and in place of the customary elevated concert stage a wide, sloping stairway was built to reduce the perceived distance between performers and audience. Most artists were not introduced on stage, signaling that this was not so much about them as celebrities as it was about reaching out to those who had lost someone. This was not about entertainment or catering to an audience of dedicated fans. As project leader Karlsen explained, discussions concerning genre and style were practically absent in the planning process. He had simply contacted the artists he presumed could make the most relevant contribution to a ceremony of national mourning. He was met with an overwhelmingly positive response. Many performers cancelled major concerts and tours.5

Emotions: Comfort and Consolation In his short speech, King Harald, choking back tears, started by saying, “By now, nearly all words have been used up.”6 This could well be understood as a statement indicating a feeling of exhaustion or apathy following the tragedy, but may also suggest that grief work requires other channels and forms of expression than verbal language. It activates the common conception of music as an expression that “goes beyond words” or a “language of feelings.” The function of music in the regulation of cognitive or physiological states (Clayton 2009, 41)  can be linked to the notion of musical affordances (Clarke 2005; DeNora 2000). Music affords a space for the elaboration of emotions—​in our case, personal as well as collective grief (DeNora 1999; DeNora 2000, 109). As DeNora argues, music has the potential to guide, shape, and facilitate our thoughts and emotions, while it is not determining of them. Individual associations and contextual circumstances will always add to the unpredictability of the music experience. The largely sociological account of music and emotions outlined by DeNora has been criticized for being excessively positive and for overestimating peoples’ freedom to use music as they wish in order to address their needs for emotional self-​management (Hesmondhalgh 2013, 6, 117). Music is a resource that might be used consciously as an enabler of compassion and empathy, but musical sounds and forms may under given circumstances also ignite or encourage emotional responses that are more unpredictable or take the listener by surprise. Two observations of audience reactions at the memorial ceremony may illustrate this.

Music in the Aftermath of Utøya Massacre    261 During the final music performance, Sissel Kyrkjebø’s rendition of Nordahl Grieg’s poem “Til Ungdommen”7 (For the Youth) set to the simple, psalm-​like melody by Danish composer Otto Mortensen, the audience acted spontaneously in a most striking way. In the transition between the second and third stanzas, just as the music makes a modulation from F minor to G minor in a dramatic crescendo with a timpani drum roll and harp glissando,8 a rustling of folding chairs is heard from the back of the hall. A few people start rising to their feet, the response spreads like a wave, and soon almost the entire audience is standing, many of them singing along. Noticing this, the artist, in her robelike white dress, smiles and lifts her arms in an encouraging gesture reminiscent of a preacher motioning the congregation to rise as part of the ritual of worship. Thus, this largely presentational event suddenly became participatory, highlighting the function of music as a coordination of action (Clayton 2009, 41) and producing experiences of shared emotions: compassion and community. This collective reaction may be understood as a result of the audience appropriating the space for emotional response afforded by the music performance, but at the same time, it must be seen in relation to musical sound—​the upward modulation by a whole tone, which is culturally embedded in Western music as a gesture signaling vigor and energy, and in this case, apparently igniting the audience’s affective and bodily response. A different, completely heart-​rending response occurred during the performance of the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, after the names of the victims had been read. As the last bars of music were fading out, a father, apparently of Middle Eastern origin, started lamenting loudly, desperately crying out the name of his murdered child before being escorted out of the venue by family members and security guards. As in the case of the collectively rising audience, we may see this reaction of a grieving father as making use of the affordances provided by the music, but at the same time, also as an act ignited by a particular musical circumstance. His reaction occurred at the particular moment when the gradually diminishing sound of the orchestra created a particular sonic space, possibly experienced as a metaphor for emptiness, for life ebbing out, thus encouraging feelings of loss or desolation. This occurrence also underlines the cultural specificity of emotions. Following Martha Nussbaum, there is great cultural variation, not only in the behavior associated with emotion, but also in the experience of emotion itself: “emotions are … differently shaped by different societies” (2001, 141). In Western rituals of sorrow and bereavement, audiences generally adopt a calm, silent attitude. At the August 21 event, the mainly Norwegian audience responded in such a conventional way, mostly maintaining a contained silence. Sobs and crying could be heard during some of the more subdued musical performances, and particularly during the reading of the victims’ names when each presentation spurred audible reactions from friends and family. By contrast, the assumed Middle Eastern father’s reaction was a powerful outburst of grief that is common at funeral rituals in the Middle East. Evidently, his emotional reaction was not considered appropriate within the frames of this carefully controlled ceremony of the Norwegian state.

262   History As pointed out in the introduction to this handbook, songs are a form of “aesthetic-​ ­ experiential social commentary,” commonly dealing with life-​ story narratives of emotional crisis, challenge, and change (this volume, p. 12). One of the most basic ways in which popular music performance encourages emotional response is by identification. The audience may react to the performer by mirroring emotional expression or by associating emotionally with the lyrics or the melody. This again may bring up feelings of one’s own possibilities, one’s own life and oneself (Hesmondhalgh 2013). Popular music lyrics are commonly written in the first person, but the “I” of the song is frequently unnamed and not identical with the performer. With exceptions such as hip hop and blues, notions of quality and authenticity are less linked to whether the artist manages to sing about his/​her own life in a credible way than to whether we as listeners are touched by what we hear; whether we are moved to project our own life experiences into the setting and emotional landscape of the song (Schippers 2010). In addition, when the lyrics remain unspecified in terms of time or place, this gives the song an open character, affording a broad range of interpretations and associations. From the Oslo Spektrum stage, the first-​person voice of the songs, on the one hand, proclaimed loss and sorrow: “I was lost, it was dark, I kept stumbling” (Jarle Bernhoft, “Stay with Me”); “I looked in the mirror with eyes red from crying” (Melissa Horn, “Kungsholmens Havn”). On the other hand, there were messages of hope and encouragement: “We shall meet, I know, I know” (A-​ha, “Stay on These Roads”); “I will comfort you, … I will ease your mind” (Ingrid Olava, “Bridge Over Troubled Water”). In this way, the music provided a specter of emotional connections open for all those affected to hook on to, relate to, and make use of in their own personal grief work after the tragedy.

Promoting Multiculturalism The memorial event was constructed as a national response to an act of terrorism that explicitly and unequivocally targeted the prevailing policies of multiculturalism. The 1,500-​page “manifesto” published by the perpetrator Anders Behring Breivik on the internet a few hours before the attack accuses “multicultural ideology” of subverting European society. His main target was not Islam or immigrants, but multiculturalism and multiculturalists whom he held responsible for opening up for “harmful immigration.” In a Nordic context, multiculturalism is inseparable from a history of equality and democracy as defining values of Nordic nation-​states (Andersson and Hilson 2009). The official Norway takes pride in presenting itself as a humane, multicultural nation and an international peacekeeper that emphasizes equality, openness, and tolerance. As Prime Minister Stoltenberg proclaimed on the very evening of the attacks, this terrorism should be met with “more openness, more democracy.”

Music in the Aftermath of Utøya Massacre    263 For more than two decades, ideas of multiculturalism have shaped Norwegian cultural policy, not least in the field of music. An emphasis on the communicative function of music as “a mediator between self and other” (Clayton 2009, 41) is essential in cultural policies and programs promoting music as a tool for preventing segregation and bridging boundaries between social groups. Music has been imagined as a tool for countering segregation in numerous public efforts focusing on the music of immigrant communities and education (Skyllstad 1993, 1997). Music styles and performers who are perceived to meet the aims of official multicultural policies have been given priority as instruments for encouraging cultural complexity at home and for creating the image of a multicultural Norway abroad. Multicultural music festivals rely extensively on public funding. For instance, the annual Mela Festival, with free admission, top international artists from around the world, and a reported total of 300,000 visitors, is entirely funded by the Ministry of Culture and Oslo Municipality. Today, music performance and music education are regarded as among the most powerful instruments for building a multicultural society. In this perspective, the August 21 ceremony must be understood as an intentional articulation of dominant politics. According to Randi Gressgård (2010), the Nordic discourse on multiculturalism is marked by an inherent tension between equality/​equal dignity and cultural difference/​distinctiveness. Individuals are considered to be equal, protected by individual rights, while at the same time they are to be recognized as culturally distinct by virtue of belonging to particular ethnic or religious communities. This distinction becomes particularly noticeable when certain customs or practices—​ritual slaughtering of animals, circumcision, or prayer calls from mosques—​come into conflict with “shared values.” As Gressgård contends, multicultural policies have their limits. “Cultural diversity is seen as a positive factor only to the extent that it promotes prevailing values and does not challenge the established institutions and shared values embodied in those institutions” (Gressgård 2010, xi). Gressgård’s distinction between equality and distinctiveness is relevant to understanding the memorial ceremony. The programming, with a strong representation of modern popular music artists, shows a quite different profile from the state-​supported music programs and festivals just mentioned, which to a great extent have emphasized ethnic particularity through the promotion of emblematic traditional music. This different orientation can be seen as an indicator of changes in the understanding of how music can address the social needs of a culturally complex society. This development is related to complex reactions to the growing cultural presence of young “second-​generation” immigrants engaged in transcultural popular music drawing from Anglo-​American genres such as soul and hip hop (see Chapter 15). For many younger members of ethnic minority populations, this music functions as an arena where young people can meet on equal terms and where cultural distinctiveness does not play a decisive role as a socially differentiating category (Knudsen 2011; Ringsager 2015). The multicultural aspects of the memorial ceremony were unmistakable. Prime Minister Stoltenberg spoke of welcoming pluralism and embracing tolerance.

264   History A prerecorded video showed leaders of five different religious congregations in their ceremonial garments, plus the head of the Norwegian Humanist Association, reading selected passages from key scriptures and texts. To suggest unity, the footage contained carefully produced overlaps; the faces of a rabbi and a Hindu priest were cross-​cut into an imam’s reading of a passage from the Koran. The concluding image showed all six leaders standing close together, shoulder to shoulder. Moreover, multiculturalism was manifest in the participation of actor and dancer Adil Khan (of Pakistani/​Afghani heritage) as one of the readers of the victims’ names, and not least, by Gambian-​Norwegian Haddy N’jie, a popular news reporter and television host, leading the entire ceremony. The music performance with the most explicit multicultural focus was without doubt “Tusen Tegninger” (A Thousand Drawings) by Karpe Diem, a hip hop duo with a strong following among youth of various national backgrounds. Over a delicate piano accompaniment, Magdi introduced the performance with the following words: Dear Norway, I am a Muslim, Chirag here is a Hindu and our friends look like a box of Non Stop.9 But we have never felt as Norwegian, and as little different as after 22nd July. Something has changed, and it may be naïve, but I wish that this change would last forever.

The song starts with a Muslim chant, serving as the chorus or “hook,” sung on stage by the all-​girl vocal group Traces, accompanied by the band’s pulsating hip hop beat and, after a few bars, also the entire Norwegian Radio Orchestra. The lyrics tell the story of a young Muslim who resents being confronted with stereotypes from Norwegian peers, particularly girls, while he also expresses a fear of letting them know that he is a practicing Muslim—​he hides his prayer mat. Toward the end of the song, the scope is widened through messages of cross-​religious understanding. A key line states that “the brotherhood is no longer between those who believe the same thing.”10 In Oslo Spektrum, the message was underlined by background projections from the official “Tusen Tegninger” video, including images of symbols and religious practices in houses of worship belonging to various religious congregations in the Oslo area: Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Catholic, and Protestant. This symbolically laden performance affords multiple understandings and interpretations. The performative utterances relate to issues of ethnicity, gender, religion, cultural taboos, and youth culture. It embodies state ideology by virtue of the ceremonial setting and the accompaniment of the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, which arguably stands as a sonic representation of the wider, extended community and an official sanctioning of the utterances expressed from the stage by Magdi and Chirag (see Fast and Pegley 2007). Seen as a whole, the performance can be understood both as a relevant response to the terrorist act and an effort to negotiate a “multicultural” position some place between equality and cultural distinctiveness in a complex landscape of cultural and religious identifications.

Music in the Aftermath of Utøya Massacre    265

National Representation and Consolidation The function of music as symbolic representation (Clayton 2009, 41) was particularly conspicuous at the memorial event. This was a national, representational event, intentionally mobilizing and producing concepts of the nation and representing it to its own inhabitants and spectators in the other Nordic countries. It was commissioned by the Norwegian government and produced by the state-​owned broadcaster NRK. Like other ceremonies with a strong national content—​sports events, opening or closing ceremonies of the Olympic Games, royal weddings or state funerals—​events of this kind constitute a platform on which nationhood is narrated and negotiated. Music is performed in the service of the nation-​state and in accordance with the aims and ideals of the state. Above all, this concerns the politics of representation. The power to choose who is to be included in the category of national music can be understood as a way to socially define the nation (Perelson 1998). In his influential work on the nation as a socially constructed “imagined community,” Benedict Anderson (2006) argues that the evolution of print media constituted one of the most profound influences on the development of the nation-​state, as print capitalism standardized languages and allowed people to imagine that they could have an identity in common with someone beyond their immediate, experienced community. While the nation is still the principal unit against which an imagined collective “we” is shaped and articulated, the processes shaping it have changed since the nineteenth century nation building Anderson refers to. Today, the technologies of television and the Internet have taken over the role of the print media as the primary arena for nation building, allowing national communities to be imagined and represented through high-​profile productions watched by the vast majority of a population. The common, simultaneous media experience—​structured by the organizers, the producers, and ultimately by the television cameras—​provides a powerful experience of the national “we,” especially through music performance. Anderson understands the collective singing of a national anthem as a unifying experience producing unisonance: “the echoed physical realization of the imagined community” (2006, 149). For Anderson’s anthem singers, the image of other anonymous voices simultaneously singing the same melody and lyrics serves as a strategy for uniting people and producing feelings of national community. In view of the memorial event, I would argue that a similar experience of unisonance was produced in a more modern form through the international media broadcast. For the millions of spectators in front of their television screens, the awareness of other, unknown people simultaneously watching, listening, and if not singing along, at least “silently chiming in with” (Anderson 2006, 149) familiar songs, produced unisonance, and in effect, a realization of Norwegian as well as Nordic community.

266   History There was hardly any strictly “national” music at the memorial ceremony, although the event itself evidently inscribed the music performed with new layers of national sentiment. As Philip Bohlman maintains, we can “exclude no music from the possibility of serving as a source for national identity” and “musics of all forms and genres can articulate the processes that shape the state” (2011, xxiv, 5). The focus, the character, and the media distribution contributed to recontextualizations that effectively labeled several of the songs performed as “national” by inscribing them with powerful new connotations. Tia DeNora has argued that music has a social identity that “like all social identities … emerges from its interaction and juxtaposition to others, people and things” (2000, 31). This idea, that a piece of music can have a social identity, implies that like human identities, it can also be subject to change. As human social identities are influenced by any interaction or encounter with others, the social identity of music is influenced by its historical use and, potentially, by any public or private performance or mediation. For the individual listener, the social identity of a song results from the sum of all experience and knowledge one may have of it, including factual information and any personal memory of previous encounters with the music. The two songs opening and closing the event—​ “Mitt Lille Land” and “Til Ungdommen”—​underwent significant changes in their social identity in the aftermath of the tragedy through processes of resignification adding new layers of meaning. Far into the future, both songs will be understood as nationally significant “22nd July songs,” if not actual “national songs.” “Mitt Lille Land” (My Little Country) written by Ole Paus—​known for innumerable socially critical and sarcastic songs—​was originally commissioned by the pro-​EU. organization Fra nei til ja (From No to Yes) for the political campaigns leading up to the 1994 referendum on Norwegian membership in the European Union. In this historical context, the simple, almost banal lyrics were largely understood as ironic, drawing upon the stereotypical image of Norwegians as a self-​indulgent people, reluctant to look beyond their own comfortable backyard. The possibility for an ironic interpretation was strengthened by the inclusion of a few bars of nationally iconic Hardanger fiddle music, as well as by the three other, more openly sarcastic songs on the single, and not least, by the cover art depicting a Norwegian billy goat defending his “little country” against the EU—​represented by yellow stars on a blue background emerging from below (see ­figure 13.1). After July 22, “Mitt Lille Land” was sung at the spontaneous “Rose March” three days after the attacks, when an estimated 200,000 Oslo inhabitants took to the streets with roses in their hands. Later, it was performed at practically every major event marking the tragedy. In this new context, the song is completely stripped of any ironical connotations, allowing it to even be referred to as a new national anthem (Bjerkestrand 2011; Tageson 2011). At the August 21 memorial event, it was sensitively performed by Susanne Sundfør accompanying herself on the piano, as a simple love song to a small and vulnerable country. The resignification of “Mitt Lille Land” can be plainly illustrated by comparing the album art of the 1994 original with the 2011 CD compilation with the same title, released “in memory of 22nd July” (see fi ­ gure 13.2). The latter includes two different recordings of the song, a stripped-​down solo version by Ole Paus from 1994

Music in the Aftermath of Utøya Massacre    267

Figure 13.1  Cover art for the single “Mitt Lille Land,” 1994. © Inge Grødum, printed with permission.

(without the Hardanger fiddle) and a 2010 cover version by Maria Mena, who was one of the first artists to perform the song publicly after July 22. Here are the lyrics for “Mitt Lille Land” (My Little Country):11 Mitt Lille Land

My Little Country

Mitt lille land Et lite sted, en håndfull fred slengt ut blant vidder og fjord Mitt lille land Der høye fjell står plantet mellom hus og mennesker og ord Og der stillhet og drømmer gror Som et ekko i karrig jord

My little country A tiny place, a handful of peace strewn out among plains and fjords My little country Where high mountains are planted among houses, people and words Where silence and dreams grow Like an echo in the barren earth

268   History

Figure 13.2  Cover art for the CD compilation “Mitt Lille Land,” 2011. © Collings entertainment 2011 / Chris Collings and Thomas Borgvang. Printed with permission.

Mitt lille land Der havet stryker mildt og mykt som kjærtegn fra kyst til kyst Mitt lille land Der stjerner glir forbi og blir et landskap når det blir lyst mens natten står blek og tyst

My little country Where the sea strokes mildly and softly like a caress, from coast to coast My little country Where stars glide by and turn into a landscape when it gets light while the night stands pale and silent

Similarly, “Til Ungdommen” (For the Youth’) by Nordahl Grieg/​Otto Mortensen) underwent a different, but no less striking resignification. Nordahl Grieg was a humanist, socialist, and strong supporter of Stalin’s policies in the USSR, even defending the infamous Moscow process. Written in 1936, in the shadow of rising Nazism in Europe,

Music in the Aftermath of Utøya Massacre    269 “Til Ungdommen” became an essential part of the Labour and Socialist Parties’ song canon and was, over the years, also adopted by humanists and peace organizations. Its place in the memorial events was self-​evident, since it was often sung at the Utøya Labour Party youth camp that was attacked; and according to some young survivors’ accounts, it was also sung on July 22, as a way to keep their spirits up and avoid their hearing the gunshots while swimming to escape the island. At the memorial event, performed by Sissel Kyrkjebø, who herself has been referred to as a “national symbol” or “figurehead of Norwegian-​ness” (Augestad 1997, 129), the song was virtually made national. Adding to this effect were the background projections of fjords and snow-​clad mountains, and the accompaniment by the NRK orchestra. Consequently, the August 21 performance by this recognized mainstream artist and “common denominator of nationhood” (Augestad 1997, 147) contributed to loosening the song’s historical bonds to the political left and linking it to the wider project of imagining and building “The New Norway.” In early 2012, the new social identity of “Til Ungdommen” was highlighted when several Protestant bishops suggested it should be included in the forthcoming edition of the official hymnal of the Church of Norway. The proposition was met with strong protests from Nordahl Grieg’s descendants, as well as the Norwegian Humanist Association, and was ultimately rejected by a small majority at the National Church Council. The resignification of “Til Ungdommen” carries a certain resemblance to Derek Scott’s descriptions of how songs written for and used by the “bourgeois” of Victorian Britain underwent a class journey by being appropriated and given new, political meanings by the working class and Irish rebels (Scott 1989). The reception of “Til Ungdommen,” however, was different, since its trajectory has gone in practically the opposite direction: from iconic song of the political left to common national property. What allows for a song like “Til Ungdommen” to make this kind of journey is obviously the open and unspecified character of its lyrics; most of the text can easily serve various social or political ends under different circumstances. Still, it is hardly a coincidence that the two stanzas (out of seven in the original poem) that pretty much have been “forgotten” as the social identity of the song has evolved can be seen to reflect the Soviet ideology of the 1930s, for which Grieg had such an admiration: “unbuilt power stations” are to be created by “bold minds,”12 and “Man is noble, the earth is rich /​if there is hunger and need it is caused by betrayal.”13 At the memorial ceremony and most other post-​July 22nd events, only four stanzas were sung (see lyrics that follow). As mentioned in the introduction to this handbook, there have been efforts to unite the entire Nordic region in song through the creation of a common Nordic anthem. So far such efforts have been futile; there is no particular song that can be seen to represent or mobilize notions of belonging to the entire region, perhaps because regional Nordic identity is generally understood as secondary to national identity. Still, “Til Ungdommen” can at least be considered the shared cultural property of two nations; it has a Norwegian author and a Danish composer; and is well known and loved in both Denmark and Norway, although its history of use and reception differs somewhat. In Denmark—​where it is known by its first line as “Kringsat av fjender” (Surrounded by

270   History Enemies)—​it has been a staple of the folkehøjskole (folk high school) song repertoire, often regarded as a pacifist hymn; while in Norway it has clearer historical associations with the political left. It was an obvious choice for the official Danish memorial service for the July 22 victims. As the host of the Oslo memorial ceremony, Haddy N’jie announced: “Our closest friends in sorrow have been our Nordic family.” Transnational sympathy and solidarity were underlined by two Nordic artists who drew parallels to past events in their home countries. Danish actor Sofie Gråbøl read Klaus Rifbjerg’s newly written poem connecting the current need for solidarity to the “Norway-​help” (Norgeshjelpen) during the Second World War, when Danes sent food packages to starving Norwegians as a “kiss of brotherhood.” Similarly, Melissa Horn drew a parallel to Sweden with her simple and fragile song “Kungsholmens Hamn,” about a presumably racist gang murder on the streets of Stockholm in 2007. The international live broadcast of the ceremony inspired a wave of reactions. Clips published on YouTube were given comments of sympathy from the other Nordic countries, encouraging transnational support and solidarity in this difficult time. Comments for “Til Ungdommen” included the following: •  “A message from Denmark, you are and will always be our brothers. We have been separated since the fall of the Kalmar Union [in 1523], but Norway is and will forever remain my brotherland… . This has been my favourite song since I was learning Norwegian in 9th grade.”14 •  “I was watching this ceremony here in Sweden and my tears would never stop flowing. My thoughts are with all of you who were hurt, all the time. All of Sweden is behind you!”15 Here are the lyrics for “Til Ungdommen” (For the Youth):16 Kringsatt av fiender, gå inn i din tid! Under en blodig storm -​ vi deg til strid! Kanskje du spør i angst, udekket, åpen: hva skal jeg kjempe med hva er mitt våpen?

Faced by your enemies On every hand Battle is menacing, Now make your stand Fearful your question, Defenseless, open What shall I fight with? What is my weapon?

Her er ditt vern mot vold, her er ditt sverd: troen på livet vårt, menneskets verd. For all vår fremtids skyld, søk det og dyrk det, dø om du må -​ men: øk det og styrk det!

Here is your battle plan, Here is your shield Faith in this life of ours, The commonweal For all our children’s sake, Save it, defend it, Pay any price you must, They shall not end it

Music in the Aftermath of Utøya Massacre    271 Da synker våpnene maktesløst ned! Skaper vi menneskeverd skaper vi fred. Den som med høyre arm bærer en byrde, dyr og umistelig, kan ikke myrde.

Then the weapons sink powerless to the ground! By creating human worth, we create peace. Those who with their right arm carry a burden, precious and irreplaceable cannot murder.

Dette er løftet vårt fra bror til bror: vi vil bli gode mot menskenes jord. Vi vil ta vare på skjønnheten, varmen som om vi bar et barn varsomt på armen.

Here is our solemn vow, From land to land We will protect our world From tyrants’ hand Defend the beautiful, Gentle and innocent Like any mother would Care for her infant.

A Postnational “New Norway”? The August 21 event was shaped in accordance with its multiple functions: affording a space for emotional elaboration, promoting community and solidarity, and the manifestation and representation of an open and inclusive nationhood. But what kind of nationhood does this point to? What changes in the national imagery can be traced in the performance of music in the aftermath of the tragedy? As Haddy N’jie summed up in the final announcement of the ceremony: “We have been reminded of what people we want to be.” Still, whatever influences the ceremony may have had on Norwegians’ self-​image and understanding of the nation, it is only one piece of a much larger picture. Other nationally symbolic events will have a different character and will bring forth the functions of music in different ways. However, as mentioned earlier, the lack of predefined scripts in relation to the August 21 event meant that its composition and the procedures it involved can be interpreted as a direct response to the most immediate needs of the nation-​state experiencing a threat, and therefore as a particularly interesting event in view of national identity. While there was widespread recognition of the memorial event as meaningful, worthy, and deeply moving, it was also met with criticism. Media scholar Jostein Gripsrud (Gripsrud 2011) argued that the musical programming gave the image of a monocultural, ahistorical nation. He pointed to the disproportionate share of “Anglo-​American–​ dominated popular music” and the total absence of nationally symbolic music, as well as music historically connected to “the ethnic minorities we now love to welcome.” Perhaps this critique misses the point by focusing exclusively on the politics of representation at the expense of the other governing purposes shaping the event. It is not

272   History difficult to see the point about the “monocultural” aspects, in the sense that the programming mostly consisted of artists with a Norwegian ethnic background, almost exclusively performing Norwegian popular music of the past three decades, mostly with Anglo-​American roots. However, it should be noted that this particular brand of “monoculture” is—​as Gripsrud rightfully maintains—​largely ahistorical. And that may precisely be the point. It is not embedded in traditional or historically founded “Norwegianness” but, rather, linked to popular artists and their most beloved music, some of which has served as key cultural references for both ethnic Norwegians and citizens with immigrant backgrounds. Marianne Gullestad (2002) argues that a policy of nationhood based primarily on culture and ancestry may build “invisible fences” against the acceptance of immigrants and create a “common ground between nationalism and racism.” The NRK team were careful about not making the program “too nationalistic.”17 Apart from an excerpt from Edvard Grieg’s “Air,” played while the audience was finding their seats before the start of the program, no images of a historical Norwegian past were mobilized. Although the contributions by King Harald and Prime Minister Stoltenberg, as well as Sissel Kyrkjebø’s performance, obviously suggest national identity, this was not by reference to the history of the nation or to a common heritage. Arguably, there was nothing in the popular music at the event that could be interpreted as a clear symbolic representation of any particular group or ethnicity, including ethnic Norwegians. The ceremony did not contain any of the major “rallying symbols”—​no flags, no national songs, no anthem.18 This was neither the occasion for celebrating the cultural particularity of ethnic minorities nor a time for promoting the musical heritage of a dominant group or cultural elite. Established, popular artists with a broad appeal were used to represent and consolidate particular images of the nation-​state and the Norwegian people in response to a potentially destabilizing threat. On the day of the attacks, the image of Norway as an idyllic, benevolent community with a well-​functioning “Nordic model” welfare state was instantly turned upside down (Andersson and Hilson 2009). The act of terrorism led to a national self-​examination in the media, challenging self-​indulgent and exceptionalistic tendencies in the public debate. Many people also experienced attitudinal changes. Muslims in Norway reported that they “received more positive attention and felt more included in the Norwegian “we” in the days after the attacks” (Andersson 2012, 424). As Philip Bohlman (2011, 231) argues, social and political change will by necessity also result in changes in the national imagery, “raising new questions about what the nation is.” The dissolution of the Eastern Bloc from 1989 onward resulted in the emergence of a New Europe, and accordingly, also a “New Europeanness”.19 In Bohlman’s essentially optimistic conceptualization, this New Europeanness has a connective, and even a healing, potential by responding to current challenges and assuming “specific forms that aim to repair the historical schisms and fissures” of Europe. The role of music in this scenario is crucial, both as a voice of the “New Europeans”—​the “individuals, communities, and groups whose cultures and musics have historically lain outside the strictures of nationalism” (Bohlman 2011, 232)—​and as an instrument of power for national governments to maintain and consolidate the nation.

Music in the Aftermath of Utøya Massacre    273 A parallel to Bohlman’s “New Europeanness” can be found in the idea of “The New Norway” that emerged in public debates following the July 22 tragedy. Similarly linked to demographic and political change, this suggests a new, modern Norwegian identity while also calling for changes in policies and public mentality. It involves a correction to Norwegians’ common self-​perception, a renewed focus on common values and rights, and the acknowledgment of difference and cultural complexity; it calls for a more inclusive attitude toward immigrants and the rejection of extremism of any form; a focus on the success stories of integration and a relentless fight against the hidden, everyday discrimination (Åmås 2011). Also, like Marstal’s “New nationals” (Chapter 17), the idea of a New Norway can be linked to the Nordic socioeconomic model that to a certain extent distinguishes the “welfare states” of the Nordic countries from the rest of Europe (Andersson and Hilson 2009). To what extent the idea of the New Norway has actually led to any substantial or lasting changes in mentality and self-​perception is, of course, difficult to determine. In a comprehensive analysis or the dominant public discourse following the attacks, Eileen M.  Myrdahl (2014) argues that the emerging new constructions of Norwegianness apparently resulted in a conceptual expansion of what it means to be Norwegian, while paradoxically reiterating the deeply embedded connection between “whiteness” and Norwegianness. According to Myrdahl, the expressed goal of strengthening a national community that is not based on “whiteness” was “undermined by the refusal to face and challenge the ways in which national belonging is constructed in racial terms” (Myrdahl 2014, 487). In other words, an expanded Norwegian “we” did not result in the work of undoing any parts of established Norwegian cultural heritage. The national imagery produced through the media coverage generally relied on whiteness “as the heart of what it means to be Norwegian” (489). Nevertheless, in the public discourse, July 22 was frequently described as a watershed and a starting point for the New Norway. The connective and cross-​cultural potential of popular music was highlighted. The musical practice of youth culture, particularly hip hop, was seen as mirroring the New Norway with reference to its positive role in multiethnic environments (Opsahl 2011). The Karpe Diem hip hoppers were labeled as symbols of the New Norway, embodying its key values and principles (Jacobsen 2012; Åmås 2012). This can particularly be ascribed to their many performances of “Tusen Tegninger,” which for all intents and purposes has become one of the most noteworthy “July 22 songs.” In line with Bohlman’s hopeful vision of nationhood in Europe, we might see the memorial ceremony and other post-​July 22 events as indicators of what this imagined New Norway could imply: a nation that promotes cultural recognition and respect while managing to negotiate constructively in the field of tension between the common and the particular, between equality and distinctiveness (Gressgård 2010). It might be regarded as a culturally complex and cosmopolitan “postnational” nation (Corona and Madrid 2008) characterized by a shift in cultural efforts from the maintenance of a coherent cultural center to the representation and building of a nation-​ state as an amalgam of different cultures. It could be imagined as a nation where

274   History background and ethnicity are no longer decisive for national belonging, and where the musical landscapes drawn upon and put into play in the building and maintenance of nationhood no longer primarily emphasize rootedness through a shared cultural history, background, or creed; where, as Karpe Diem told us at the memorial ceremony, “the brotherhood is no longer between those who believe the same thing.”20

Notes 1. Trønderrock is a label for certain rock music from the county of Trøndelag since the 1970s. It involves a number of artists and bands singing in the local dialect, some of them using elements from folk music. 2. Kyrkjebø has had a key role in a number of events of nationally emblematic significance, such as the Eurovision Song Contest in 1986 and the opening and closing ceremonies of the Lillehammer Winter Olympics in 1994 (Augestad 1997). 3. Information on the planning and programming of the event is based on author’s interview with NRK producer Stig Karlsen, December 12, 2012. 4. “Hver eneste lille ting, hvert eneste ord og hvert eneste bilde ble målt mot hva de som satt der og hadde mistet noen ville føle. Fokuset var på de som hadde det verst” (author interview with Stig Karlsen, February 10, 2012). 5. Karlsen interview. 6. Nå er nesten alle ord brukt opp. 7. See also this chapter, page 270. 8. The orchestral arrangement was written especially for the occasion by Øyvind Westbye. In an interview with the author, February 21 2014, Westbye reflected on his arrangement of “Til Ungdommen”: “There was a lot of emotion involved… . I am generally very careful with exaggerations, but in this particular context I felt that it matched the situation. I exaggerated the contrasts in order to create the greatest possible effect.” 9. A Scandinavian brand of multicolored chocolate candies. 10. “Brorskapet er ikke lenger mellom de som tror det samme.” 11. Lyrics for “Mitt Lille Land” (My Little Country). © Warner Chapell Music A/​S. Printed with permission from Norsk Noteservice A/​S. English translation by author. 12. Ubygde kraftverker … dristige hjerner. 13. Edelt er mennesket, jorden er rik/​finnes der nød og sult/​skyldes det svik. 14. En besked fra Danmark; I er og vil altid blive vore brødre. Vi har været adskildt siden Kalmar-​ unionens fald, men Norge er og vil for altid forblive mit brødreland… . Dette har været min favoritsang siden jeg i 9. klasse skulle lære norsk (“Molly 502001”). 15. Jag såg också på denna ceremoni här i Sverige och mina tårar ville aldrig sluta rinna. Mina tankar finns hos alla er drabbade hela tiden. Hela Sverige står bakom er! (“ImpulsiveMusic”). 16. The complete poem consists of seven verses. The four verses printed here are the ones sung by Sissel Kyrkjebø at the memorial ceremony. Lyrics for “Til Ungdommen” (For the Youth). Translation by Rob Sinclair, except the third verse, which was not included in his translation. That verse is translated by the author. 17. Karlsen, interview, December 21, 2012.

Music in the Aftermath of Utøya Massacre    275 18. A striking contrast to the most significant post-​9/​11 concert “A Tribute to Heroes”, which contained an extensive use of American flags and two established national songs finishing the event: “God Bless America” and “America the Beautiful”. 19. See also Marstal’s discussion of “New nationals” (Chapter 17). 20. “Brorskapet er ikke lenger mellom de som tror det samme” Karpe Diem, “Tusen Tegninger.”

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276   History Garofalo, R. 2007. “Pop Goes to war, 2001–​2004: U.S. Popular Music after 9/​11.” In Music in the Post-​9/​11 World, ed. J. Ritter and M. Daughtry, 3–​26. New York: Routledge. Gressgard, R. 2010. Multicultural Dialogue:  Dilemmas, Paradoxes, Conflicts. New  York: Berghahn Books. Gripsrud, J. 2011. “Monokulturell minneseremoni.” Dagens Næringsliv, August 27. Gullestad, M. 2002. “Invisible Fences: Egalitarianism, Natuionalism and Racism.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 8: 45–​63. Hesmondhalgh, D. 2002. “Popular Music Audiences and Everyday Life.” In Popular Music Studies, ed. D. Hesmondhalgh and K. Negus, 117–​130. London: Arnold. Hesmondhalgh, D. 2013. Why Music Matters. Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell. Jacobsen, R. 2012. “Fest og forståelse.” Haugesunds avis, October 25. http://​www.h-​avis.no/​ Knudsen, J. S. 2011. “Music of the Multiethnic Minority: A Postnational Perspective.” MAIA—​ Music and Arts in Action 3(3): 77–​91. Merriam, A. 1964. The Anthropology of Music. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Myrdahl, E. M. 2014. “Recuperating Whiteness in the Injured Nation: Norwegian Identity in the Response to 22 July.” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 20(6): 486–500. doi: 10.1080/​13504630.2015.1004997. Nettl, B. 1983. The Study of Ethnomusicology:  Twenty-​Nine Issues and Concepts. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Nussbaum, M. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press. Opsahl, C. 2011. “Speiler det nye Norge.” Aftenposten, August 25. http://​www.aftenposten.no/​. Perelson, I. 1998. “Power Relations in the Israeli Popular Music System.” Popular Music 17(1): 113–​128. Ringsager, Kristine. 2015. “‘It Ain’t Shit About the Music!’:  Discussions on Freedom of Expression in Relation to Rap Music in Social Work.” Danish Musicology Online, Special edition, 2015—​Researching Music Censorship, 109–​128. Ritter, J., and J. M. Daughtry. 2007. Music in the Post-​9/​11 World. New York: Routledge. Schippers, H. 2010. Facing the Music:  Shaping Music Education from a Global Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scott, D. 1989. The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlour: Popular Music in Britain. Philadelphia: Open University Press. Skyllstad, Kjell. 1993. Summary Report:  The Resonant Community—​Fostering Interracial Understanding through Music. Oslo: Norwegian Concert Institute. Skyllstad, Kjell. 1997. Music in Conflict Management—​A Multicultural Approach. International Journal of Music Education 29: 73–​80. Tageson, S. 2011. “Nu hedras terroroffren.” Aftonbladet, August 21. Toldnes, R. 2013. “Vårt lille land—​Musikk etter 22.” Juli. Master thesis, Oslo Universityo. Turino, T. 2008. Music as Social Life:  The Politics of Participation. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.

Chapter 14

Aspirations , G l oba l F u tu res, and L e s s ons from Sámi P op u l a r Mu si c f or the T wen t y- ​F i rst Centu ry Tina K. Ramnarine

Music researchers have responded to globalizing musical practices in Nordic contexts by shifting their analytical and ethnographic attention from music within nation-​states to music across borders, both within the region and beyond, to the global arena. The shift has been a disciplinary trend since the 1990s (Jones-​Bamman 2006; Ramnarine 2003, 2016; Westinen 2007). The analytical frame of music across state borders is established as a principal means by which to understand musical practices in the twenty-​first century, because new digital and recording technologies permit music to circulate across transnational networks with greater speed, thereby changing Nordic demographics and music teaching programs in universities and conservatories that emphasize shared transregional and transnational knowledge. Sámi popular music lends itself to thinking about music across nation-​state borders. It has been linked with indigenous political assertions for greater sovereignty, minority language sustainability, new historical narratives, and environmental challenges in the transnational socio-​cultural contexts of the Nordic world. In addressing these issues, music research articulates and benefits from the insights of historical, anthropological, and environmental writing on revisionist views of the past, aspiration, and the global challenges to our collective well-​being. As a child, I collected postcards of Sámi, Europe’s northernmost people, with their reindeer and traditional costumes. An opportunity to research their music came in the early 1990s, when I heard Sámi musicians performing joik in capital cities like Helsinki, as part of political meetings to assert indigenous rights within the Nordic nation-​states (Ramnarine 2003, 181–​184). At the time, my research focused on the contemporary

278   History Finnish folk-​music movement, but I  heard and documented the early joik performances of a singer, Ulla Pirttijärvi, who went on to become a prominent voice in the Sámi music world (Ramnarine 2003, 2013a), and I interviewed Finnish musicians such as Seppo Paakkunainen, who collaborated with Sámi musicians (Ramnarine 2003, 58–​ 60; 2009). In 2006, I embarked on a research project focusing on Sámi music across the Nordic nation-​states. I was prompted by curiosity about what music researchers could contribute to questions about climate change, choosing polar warming and Arctic resources (gas and oil) as my ethnographic foci, and traveling across Finland, Sweden, and Norway, and up to the borders of the Russian Kola Peninsula. The time was right for such inquiries. Climate change, including melting ice caps, had emerged as a global challenge and Sámi critiques on environmental crises were gaining strength. My research pointed out the principal features of joik and the ways in which this vocal genre has been implicated in environmental thinking, including indigenous concerns, eco-​feminist politics, and representations of nature-​based rituals in Sámi cinema (Ramnarine 2009, 2013a, 2013b). Following the joik revival period of the 1960s onward, Sámi musicians were increasingly engaging with popular music genres and new digital technologies, combining the traditional vocal genre of joik with ambient sounds, metal, rock, and rap, and reaching global, virtual audiences. They experimented with language revitalization through popular music performance, and by not confining these experiments to fusions between traditional and popular genres they created genres such as Skolt Sámi rock and Inari Sámi rap (see Ramnarine 2013a, 2013c). In contrast to the perceptions of early twentieth-​century researchers, who believed vocal genres like joik were disappearing traditions, music has become one of the most important elements in stories about Sámi cultural survival in the twenty-​first century. Analysis of musical continuity and change is enabled by music recordings, the earliest of which include those of Inari Sámi (from northern Finland), which were made at an ethnographic show in Berlin in 1911 (Ziegler 2007), and the Sámi music recordings made by the Swedish collector Karl Tirén as he traveled through Sweden working for the railway in 1913 (Jones-​Bamman 2003; Tirén 1942). Important factors in the continuing transmission of joik are recordings, festivals, competitions, virtual technologies such as MySpace and YouTube, pedagogic texts, and formal education projects (including joik in the music curriculum of Nordic music academies). Sámi musicians have entered global music markets, participated in the global indigenous performance network, and collaborated with musicians from other parts of the world. The turn to popular genres has been analyzed as “an important shift within the culture, one that seemingly embraces modernity over tradition” (Jones-​Bamman 2006, 351), but in all the mixes between joik and popular styles, “joik remains the most significant mode of musical expression” and the “variety of approaches to this genre … suggest that both this music and the people who produce it are far from finished exploring new performance contexts and new musical identities” (364). My initial questions about music, environment, and Arctic resources were increasingly framed by reading about Sámi histories and by continuing to attend music rehearsals and performances. These led to thinking broadly about musical performance and

Aspirations, Global Futures, and Lessons from Sámi Music    279 indigenous politics, including issues about Sámi popular music in discussions of cultural survival, the ways in which popular music and new communications technologies transform dichotomies between centers and peripheries, and the performance of “identity” across modern nation-​state borders. These issues extend beyond the specificities of Sámi examples. They are paralleled in the music expressions (including popular genres) of minority populations elsewhere. Through a brief presentation of three case studies—​ Nils-​Aslak Valkeapää, Sofia Jannok, and Amoc—​this chapter explores Sámi popular music in the imaginaries of Nordicness and highlights contemporary aspirations, many of which center on recognition of collective rights, assertion of cultural distinctiveness, and possibilities for self-​determination. The case studies address four principal questions, which underpin thinking about identities and aspirations: (1) How are minority languages sustained and how do musical practices promote language revitalization? (2) What are the underlying territorial politics, discourses on social justice, and new histories that reshape concepts of the past, and how are these reflected in music? (3) How are ecological and cultural sustainability issues linked (in the Nordic world as elsewhere)? and (4) Whose futures are being sustained (at grass-​roots/​regional/​state/​transnational levels)? Investigating these questions ultimately emphasizes how local discourses on political identities and aspirations are relevant in a global context. The 2011, number 1, issue of Gáldu Čála:  Journal of Indigenous Peoples Rights focuses on land, resources, traditional livelihoods, self-​determination, and the media. Henriksen notes in the introduction that the right to self-​determination has been an important argument for establishing nation-​states in decolonization projects, but that indigenous peoples have not claimed secession from existing states. They have hoped for better cooperation based on human rights, justice, and nondiscrimination (Henriksen 2011, 5). Sámi have emphasized the duty to respect territorial integrity as proscribed in international law in order to secure standards of human rights in national legislation. The clearest examples of how the Sámi might secure human rights relate to autonomous entitlements to decide on language and cultural matters without interference from government authorities (Henriksen 2011, 47–​48). These rights have been considered through Sámi membership in the World Council for Indigenous Peoples. In addition, the Sámi have participated in Finno-​Ugric congress meetings focused on the cultural survival of linguistically related peoples. Notably, young Finno-​Ugric authors explored the concept of “ethno-​futurism” in 1994, at which time a “joint decision to survive was made.”1 Geographic, cultural, linguistic, and political affiliations frame complex identities as indigenous, Finno-​Ugric, and Nordic.

Aspiration as a Conceptual Frame Aspiration provides a conceptual frame for considering some issues in Sámi popular music and politics. Aspiration has been seen as the disciplinary concern of economics

280   History in dealing with wants, choices, and calculations. The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai notes that aspiration is a cultural capacity and that it should be repatriated into the cultural domain (Appadurai 2004, 67). Such proposed repatriation recognizes that global economies are shaped by cultural choices as much as by trade and finances, to the extent that the beginning of the twenty-​first century has seen culture “become central to building the new geopolitics of a global world” (Arizpe 2004, 182). The Nordic region has seen new transnational alliances, political cooperations, economic routes, and demographic changes in the twenty-​first century, all of which point to its increasing importance as an economically and strategically important part of Europe. This is also a region that has seen many cultural revivals, developed strong infrastructures to foster cultural transmission, and invested in the promotion of cultural practice. In new contexts of Nordic integration, Sámi popular music becomes one aspect of minority cultural politics, which is paralleled in other regions and examples (e.g., Karelia; see Chapter 5, and Chapter 12). I draw on an anthropological notion of aspiration as a point from which to think about the future, reflecting on the lessons offered by Sámi popular music to contemporary questions about sustainability, marginality, and equality. I take my cue from Appadurai, who writes about “the recovery of the future as a cultural capacity” (2004, 62) and observes that the “arrangements of action that we may call cultural … may be especially strategic sites for the production of consensus” (2004, 64). These statements provoke two questions: First, what kinds of consensus might be produced in an era of globalization by musical practices, which are characterized by cultural exchanges, heterogeneity, plurality, and the rapid transmission of cultural diversity through the new communication technologies? Second, if we think about global futures today from the starting point of current global challenges such as education, poverty, or climate change, why should we think about what kind of future is to be recovered? Recovery of the cultural often rests on nostalgia for the past, and in musical terms this might be manifested in, for example, the music revival. But what nostalgia can there be in looking at today’s landscapes of impoverishment, environmental degradation, social inequity, and conflict? Aspirations for the future may counteract thinking about the problems of history. Thus, ultimately, I would like to approach the “recovery of the future” from a different perspective, one in which the present is marked by political actions that lead to the kind of future toward which we might aspire. For now, I will simply note that Appadurai’s observations draw our attention to cultural practices as socio-​political actions in complex temporalities, which also attend to the future—​however that can be understood—​whether unknown, predicted, or worked toward in strategic imaginations. In my reading, aspiration (with its forward-​looking dimensions) and sustainability (with its emphasis on maintaining present-​day manifestations of historical practices for the future) are interlinked within the connected temporal frames of past, present, and future. The temporality and sustainability of cultural capacity also highlight relationships to places. For instance, sonic memory, which may be located in different places, collapses the past and the present. Thus, to hear a Skolt Sámi song in Inari, in northern Finland, that would have once been heard in what is now the Russian Petsamo region

Aspirations, Global Futures, and Lessons from Sámi Music    281 reminds us of the histories of shifting political borders. Or, as the members of Transjoik suggest, musical citations and cross-​references from a global arena such as techno and qawwali are features of joik, which are consciously made in their recordings, as they say, to “summon the past as well as the future” (Meavraa album, 2001). As one of its members, Frode Fjellheim, explains, “We don’t just take the yoik and then put some electronic or rock or pop background underneath it. We try to pick elements from the yoik” (quoted in Diamond 2007, 42; also see Ramnarine 2016 for further details about Fjellheim). Such creative approaches to the joik tradition take us not only into thinking about the shamanic and ecological joik symbolism of a long geological temporality that precedes and survives us but also into analyzing contemporary global musical circulations. Locating musical traditions within historical frameworks and particular places also brings into focus different kinds of transnational politics, which are promoted by musical mobility. My key suggestions in this chapter rest on the imperatives for looking critically at the relations between Sámi popular music, identity politics, and cultural capacity in acting for our global futures. I suggest we should ask what we can learn from the Sámi cases. Should we be preoccupied with questions about identities in a world of cultural circulations and global challenges that speak to the survival of the human species? If not, how do contemporary musical mobility and indigenous, postcolonial politics take us away from the narrow, yet habitual conceptualizations of cultures, places, and identities toward the broadest frames of reference in any call for attending to the future? Referring to the potential lessons from Sámi popular music for the twenty-​first century is a way of contributing insights from the Nordic musical world relating to both the preoccupations of identity and border politics and the challenges concerning well-​being and the global future. While aspiration has been theorized in anthropological writing, it is of course much more than a conceptual frame. With regard to the musicians mentioned in the following sections, aspiration is expressed in many forms. I discuss aspiration in relation to ecological concerns and language revitalization to understand the politics at stake in the Nordic world as it orientates and reorients itself in the global arena. The discussion includes some reflections on the new histories, which are currently shaping ideas about Nordic identities for the future.

“The Earth Is Small”: A Message from Nils-​Aslak Valkeapää Nils-​Aslak Valkeapää (1943–​2001) was a Finnish-​Sámi teacher who became the most well-​known Sámi multimedia artist and political activist of his generation. He played an extraordinary role in fostering the joik revival from the late 1960s onward, engaging in musical experiments and collaborations that resulted in shifting joik transmission and performance patterns. His first recording was Joikuja (Joiks), which was released in 1968, a long-​playing record album with twenty-​two tracks. This recording includes

282   History examples of his earliest joik experiments with guitar accompaniment, and it reveals the disjuncture between a diatonically tuned instrument and the wider pitch possibilities of unaccompanied joik. In 1978, Nils-​Aslak Valkeapää, together with the Finnish musicians Seppo Paakkunainen and Esa Kotilainen, established a recording company, and Valkeapää was instrumental in choosing the name, Indigenous Records (Niiranen 2003, 102). He was awarded the Nordic Prize for Literature in 1991 (for Beaivi, Áhčážan [The Sun, My Father]), won the jury’s special prize in the European Radio Competition Prix Italia in 1993 (for Goase Dušše [The Bird Symphony]), and was invited to perform joik at the opening ceremony of the 1994 Olympic Winter Games in Norway. In works and recordings like The Sun, My Father (1988, co-​composed and co-​performed with Esa Kotilainen, who had played keyboards with the progressive rock groups Wigwam and Tasavallan Presidentti), Valkeapää used the joik as an integral part of electronic, popular, or symphonic textures. Such musical expressions contradicted earlier representations of Sámi as musically strange. For examples, the Italian traveler Guiseppe Acerbi (who was among the first to transcribe joik melodies) wrote about Sámi music: “Their music, without meaning and without measure, time or rhythms was terminated only by the total waste of breath; and the length of the song depended entirely on the largeness of the stomach, and the strength of the lungs” (Acerbi 1802, 66). More recently, the Hungarian musicologist Szomjas-​Schiffert described joik as two kinds of singing, one being “loud, shouting singing” with high notes resembling “shrieks” and the other, “mumbling” (1966, 64). Valkeapää acted in the film Ofelaš (Pathfinder, 1987), cast in the role of a leader who is committed to keeping the community together as it is split between fighting an advancing invader or avoiding confrontation by fleeing to the safety of a coastal site; he also composed some of the film’s music (see Ramnarine 2013b for an extensive discussion of this film). His real-​life status as a leading artistic and political figure included gaining recognition for Sámi indigenous identity, which had been a political aspiration throughout the twentieth century. An important expression of Sámi political alignment with other indigenous populations was a 1963 article titled “The Sámi Are the Indians of Sweden” (see Minde 2003, 79). But the Sámi were accepted as an indigenous people only in 1975, when Nils-​Aslak Valkeapää performed a joik at the first meeting of the World Council of Indigenous People. During this period a new history of Sámi as a colonized people developed (Nyyssönen 2008) in Sámi scholarship focused on positioning Sámi as part of the indigenous world, as well as by political activists. Since the mid-​twentieth-​century, Sámi assertions of indigenous identity have been pursued via complex internal and external negotiations, and their discourses on indigeneity have resulted in political recognition of an area within the Nordic countries that is now called Sápmi. The indigenous movement has emphasized transnational Sámi cooperation, traditional subsistence modes (such as reindeer herding), maintenance of Sámi languages, and revival of joik. Valkeapää’s legacy is apparent in the presentation of joik in popular music (in rock, heavy metal, and rap), in the symphony, in the music video, in Sámi music festivals, in choral projects, and in school music education. It is apparent in the development of contemporary Sámi literature and film, and in the

Aspirations, Global Futures, and Lessons from Sámi Music    283 establishment of a contemporary Sámi theatre group and the publishing house DAT. He wrote a play The Frost-​haired and the Dream Seer inspired by his visit to Japan and using Noh theatre techniques. The play was first staged by Beaivváš (the Sámi National Theatre) in 2007 and again in 2013 on a tour of Norway, Finland, and Japan as part of Valkeapää’s seventieth-​year anniversary celebrations. The play promotes the message that humans are a small part of nature, life, and the universe.2 His legacy is also to urge us to pay serious attention to indigenous accounts of changing sonic phenomena and to traditional knowledge about expected environmental sounds. He reminds us of different ways of understanding human experiences, of different worldviews. In works like the Bird Symphony, Valkeapää highlighted why we should ask questions about acoustic phenomena as the North Pole melts. In my listening, he points to polar warming and industrial damage to ecosystems as being both geopolitical and musical concerns, since a work like the Bird Symphony is possible only in a particular kind of sonic environment (Ramnarine 2009). In 1971, in his book Greetings from Lapland, he wrote, “Still, the earth is small, and feels smaller and smaller as time goes by … we live and dwell on the same earth” (Valkeapää 1983, 7).

“Borrowing the Earth”: A Message from Sofia Jannok Inhabitants of the circumpolar North have spoken about the everyday impacts of climate change. Dwelling in fragile Arctic ecosystems, they are among the first witnesses (Hassol et al. 2004, 86). Nordic ecological concerns have reached the global political conscience. In particular, polar warming, pollution, disappearance of habitats with oil and gas industries, hydroelectric dams, mining, forestry, and overfishing are ecological issues that need to be addressed urgently. In one form of address, Sámi political activists have contributed to indigenous representations on the potential insights to be gained from traditional knowledge offered to scientific organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In another form of address, Sámi popular musicians have followed Valkeapää’s model by reframing traditional musical knowledge in ways that speak to both ecological issues and global audiences. The Swedish Sámi singer Sofia Jannok is one of the musicians promoting ecological messages in her performances. She has been interested in combining jazz and popular music with joik. She tours the world as a musician, and has given performances across the Nordic countries, in China, and in India. She won the Sámi Grand Prix annual competition held in Kautokeino, Norway, in 2001 as part of a duo, and again in 2003 as a solo performer. She disseminates the same ecological message that Valkeapää did, thereby continuing his legacy of environmental thinking. In 2011, she gave a TED lecture in Mumbai, India, beginning with a joik performance and describing how she was profoundly moved by the film Avatar (2009). She outlined the plot: “It is about the human race in a future where they have destroyed mother earth, emptied her of all resources, and now started to find other planets to invade. A big mining company finds valuable resources on a paradise planet full of life… . But the company shows no mercy. The

284   History natives have to be moved or destroyed.” She told the Mumbai audience that this film was like a “documentary of [her] own life,” but that “the difference between the movie and reality is that the movie has a happy ending.” Jannok began her lecture with this film to introduce topics regarding the colonization of the Sámi, joiking in an endangered language, and current mining projects in the north of Europe. Through her family biography she told the audience about the lessons learned from her parents and grandparents, notably those about care, ecological relations, and guardianship, repeating the ancestral advice that “we borrow our home from earth … for the short time we will be staying here we have to leave it the way it was when we first arrived.” She ended her lecture by mentioning the Árvas Foundation, which she set up to act toward a different future, one with a happy ending, just as in the film; and she joiked.3 The same message is given on the webpages of the Árvas Foundation. On these pages she wrote: I have raised a foundation which carries the name of my home tundra Árvas in the middle of Sápmi, Samiland. In the belief of my people’s existence as long as mother Earth will be breathing I wanted to strengthen the identity of the Sami youth, our future. We are still here and we are proud of our lives and heritage. Due to the lack of knowledge about us many misunderstandings appear. Even today in the 21st century Swedish schools hardly teach anything about the indigenous people of their nation. With knowledge understanding will follow. Árvas Foundation is to care about our land and our water. My father and mother taught me that the land we live on is only for us to borrow. As we leave this life, we have to leave it with no traces behind so that the children to come can experience the same beauty as we have been living in. Unfortunately the colonization of the land, water, traditional livelihoods and life style goes on as I write as if none were living on earth. We still live here.4

Jannok’s most recent album is Songs to Arvas (2013). The music video of the third track “Áhpi” (Wide as Oceans) has been uploaded onto YouTube, and the song texts with English translations have been posted on Jannok’s webpages (sofiajannok.com).5 Images of a Sámi brooch, a skier moving across the winter Arctic tundra, and the Arctic oceans precede those of mining, dam projects, forest destruction, starving and dead reindeer, Sámi protests, police brutality, and a photograph of the Sámi foremothers (which has ancestral and cosmological significance; see Ramnarine 2013a). The last lines of the song are: “People are like oceans. They have no end.” The final image on the music video is a graffiti message, with a superimposed text reiterating that “we are still here.” Both Valkeapää and Jannok highlight ecological concerns. They both talk about cultural survival. As Jannok says on her webpages, “We still live here.” Ecological and cultural sustainability are interlinked. Certainly, discussions of ecological sustainability have provided the new vocabularies for thinking about the continuity of cultural transmission. The next case study shifts the focus from environmental messages to cultural

Aspirations, Global Futures, and Lessons from Sámi Music    285 creativity and experiments with nontraditional music genres in the promotion of cultural sustainability. It prompts us to consider issues of indigenous cosmopolitanism and cultural sustainability in the development of cultural capacity.

“The Language Is Good for Anything”: A Message from Amoc Amoc refers to the Anár Master of Ceremonies. (Anár is the Inari Sámi name for Inari.) Amoc is the stage name of the rapper Mikkâl Antti Morottaja (born in 1984), who raps in Inari Sámi, an endangered language spoken by around 350 people who live in northern Finland. He released a CD recording Amok-​kaččâm (2007), generating renewed interest in a language that seems to be on the brink of extinction. This recording also includes joik performed by one of the most well-​known of all contemporary joik recording musicians, Wimme. Amoc’s practices are located in the broader contexts of Sámi rap and of Finnish rap, and he is a member of the northern Finnish rap collective Guerra Norte (Northern War). His practices have attracted analytical attention within cultural geography (Ridanpää and Pasanen 2009), sociolinguistics (Pietikäinen 2010) and musicology (Ramnarine 2013c).6 Ridanpää and Pasanen note how the situation of the Inari Sámi language “looked quite desperate in the mid-​1990s, when there were four speakers under the age of thirty (three of whom were the sons of a local language activist, Matti Morottaja) and there were very few active speakers under the age of fifty. The language was taught in some schools for a couple of hours a week, it was heard on the local radio for one hour a week, an Inari Sámi journal was published three times a year, and a book or two was published occasionally. There was practically no public discussion concerning Inari Sámi—​not even in Inari, let alone southern Finland. Even in the 1990s, many people still thought it would be better for Inari Sámi people to exchange their moribund language for the more widespread and more viable northern Sámi” (Ridanpää and Pasanen 2009, 220). Since mastery of language is important in rap, this genre is a suitable medium for thinking about language revitalization. While a fuller discussion appears elsewhere (see Ramnarine 2013c), it is worth outlining some details here to underscore the role of popular music in cultural sustainability, especially with regard to maintaining the socio-​cultural relevance of minority and endangered languages. Rap is the reciting of rhymed verses by a rapper who is called the MC (Master of Ceremonies), and it emerged in the Bronx, New York City, in the meeting place of Caribbean, Latin, and African American musical practices, in the 1970s. That decade is exactly the same time that joik was being revived by Sámi musicians. Rap began to be performed in Finland in the late 1980s, but it emerged as a significant musical practice in the Finnish popular music world in the late 1990s. An influential duo was Fintelligens, who also provided a model for Amoc’s combination of Inari Sámi, Finnish, and English in his raps.7 His interest began as a teenager when the Finnish rap scene was becoming increasingly vibrant. He explains, “At first I just came up with some rather amusing rhymes in Finnish. When I was in the 6th form I decided to try

286   History and see if it was possible to come up with rhymes in Sámi. When my friends told me they thought this worked well, I started writing almost all my raps in Sámi” (quoted in Korpela 2007). He notes that difficulties in lyrics writing stem from turning to a vocabulary that is rich for describing nature, including around one hundred words for different types of snow, but that has not developed words for “street-​savvy youth” (quoted in Laitinen 2005).8 This raises a crucial point about the kinds of knowledge contained in language, in this case ecological. Thematically, Amoc’s raps avoid overtly Sámi topics, instead referring to horror films and dealing with violent subjects. Although he mentions to Arctic landscapes, he is not specifically concerned with local climate politics and does not deal with environmental crises such as polar warming. But, researchers might tease out questions about how ecological and cultural sustainability are linked. What does cultural survival mean when a Sámi musician raps instead of joiking? The status of Sámi languages changed from “dying languages” to “mother tongues” in the 1970s. As Minde notes, the Sámi began to describe themselves as “indigenous people” instead of “ethnic minority” in a political movement that challenged state discourses of modernization and highlighted colonial legacies, assimilation policies and self-​ determination (Minde 2003). Amoc’s practice highlights the diversity encompassed by such political shifts, drawing particular attention to minorities within a minority population, as well as to the role of music in language sustainability. The Sámi are heterogeneous populations, and in Finland, the three main population groups are the North Sámi, Inari Sámi, and Skolt Sámi, numbering around 7,000. The Inari Sámi population is not a traditionally nomadic Sámi group, who crossed the borders of nation-​states. The estimates are that Inari Sámi has never been spoken by more than around 1,000 speakers in the past. If this is the case, the language has been remarkably resilient. Amoc’s focus on Inari Sámi has been interpreted as a representation of rap credibility, since this locates his practice as that of a political voice from the margins. On the other hand, his focus on using an endangered language influences language use locally and attaches value to Inari Sámi in a global arena (Pietikäinen 2010). A Sámi musician rapping rather than joiking departs from essentialist constructions of indigenous identity. Sámi rap hints at more complicated identity politics that might lead to different kinds of political issues around cultural sustainability, social equity, and collective responsibility for the global future.9 Undoubtedly, Sámi rap reminds us about the practical realities of cultural creativity in a global arena. Amoc states “I want to show that the language is good for anything, for example for rapping” (quoted in Laitinen 2005). His practice is located within global media and popular music spaces, and it resonates with a transnational politics centered on indigenous rights advocacy, despite its removal from issues about the protection of cultural specificities. Niezen (2003) highlights the promotion of indigenous identities in international law, noting that “international indigenism” as the recognition of indigenous identities has been connected with the universal human rights movement, and concepts of rights have been used to resist state incursions. Yet, the paradox in international law is that indigenous identity is not framed by constitutional law but by private rights to intellectual property, thus giving rise to a “new imperialism” (Cutler 2011).

Aspirations, Global Futures, and Lessons from Sámi Music    287

Aspirations for Our Global Future The case studies included in this chapter emphasize that cultural survival does not depend on a static understanding of cultural practices. While the modern joiks of musicians like Nils-​Aslak Valkeapää, Sofia Jannok, Mari Boine, Frode Fjellheim, Ulla Pirttijärvi, Wimme, or Johan Sara are good examples of a turn toward integrating traditional and popular music genres as a way of promoting cultural sustainability, Amoc has turned away from joik to rap. With Amoc’s Inari Sámi raps we can see how the highly specific internal politics of a minority population within the Nordic world is played out on the world stage and in the juxtaposition of indigenous cosmopolitanism with cultural sustainability. Amoc’s Inari Sámi raps reveal complex relationships between creative legacies and cultural indications of the future. So, too, do other modern joik performances, which experiment with diverse popular music genres. These examples illustrate Appadurai’s description of culture as “a dialogue between aspirations and sedimented traditions” (2004, 84). Appadurai notes an emphasis on the latter but suggests that, “by bringing the future back in … we are surely in a better position to understand how people actually navigate their social spaces” (84). In an optimistic vein, in Finland, today, there is state sensitivity to identity claims. There are institutional, political, and educational frameworks to support the kinds of initiatives developed by performers such as Amoc. For example, Inari Sámi “language nests” for young children have been established, which are based on the Maori model of language transmission in New Zealand. By 2003, proposals for Sámi music education within the Finnish national system were made, and in 2011 a Sámi Cultural Environment Unit was established at the Sámi museum in Inari funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture and the European Regional Development Fund to promote cultural self-​government. Such initiatives indicate redistributive action and conceptualize identity politics anew. The lessons of Sámi popular music, however, might be to aspire to more entangled understandings of global connectedness for the twenty-​first century. Most immediately, the lessons are applicable in looking at the broader fields of Nordic popular music in an era of rapid demographic changes, new transnational alliances, and regional sustainability concerns. So far, I have concentrated on global futures in relation to ecological sustainability, cultural sustainability, minority politics, and regional perspectives within pan-​Nordic structures. These refer to the idea of Nordicness in transnational politics (also see Ramnarine 2014 for related political and musical discourses on the Baltic Sea Region). As a final point, I would like to briefly raise the topic of aspiration as a retrospective turn. We might return to Appadurai’s “recovery of the future as a cultural capacity” (2004, 62) to reread this statement as an expression of aspiration to a different kind of future. Indeed, Appadurai’s notion is itself inspired, first, by Charles Taylor’s “politics of recognition” that suggests intercultural understanding is an obligation rather than an option; second, by Albert Hirschman’s idea about cultural affiliations being framed not only by

288   History “loyalty” but also by “exit” and by “voice” (this latter being especially important to my case studies); and third, by Amartya Sen’s work on dignity and moral well-​being at the heart of welfare (see Appadurai 2004). I have been describing a future that is premised on alternative visions, including those offered by the smallest communities within the Nordic world. But my final thought will be about a future that looks again to the past, since there are some interesting, emergent Nordic historiographies that bear critical scrutiny. Of course, indigenous representation of being a “colonized people” is one such new history. In Sámi feminist scholarship, for example, the colonizing force is the “Sweden-​ Finland” kingdom, which is itself a newly conceptualized geography of power. Sámi feminist scholarship has contributed important dimensions to the political project of indigeneity since the 1970s, promoting the view that Sámi are colonized people so that struggles over gender emerge as implicated in calls for decolonization, self-​determination, and social transformation. Yet, this historical framing of the colonization of indigenous populations is entirely absent from another new historiography that is concerned with questions about colonial complicity and the role of the Nordic countries in European imperialism. In an edited volume of essays, Complying with Colonialism: Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region (Keskinen et al. 2009), the Sámi as a colonized people within the Nordic countries are absent. Colonial complicity is viewed externally to the Nordic region—​from ways in which Nordic anthropological scholarship was shaped by European imperialism to development projects in Africa. Thus, Ulla Vuorela writes in the volume: [E]‌ven if we were not at the heart of the colonial conquests, there are several links that connect us at least with the kind of knowledge that arose in the context of, or even in support of, the colonial projects. Even if we were not colonial subjects, the argument can be made that our minds were “colonised” into an acceptance of colonial projects, and we took on board the then ‘universally’ accepted regimes of truth. (2009, 21)

In referring to these historiographies, it is not my aim to affirm either of these versions of the past. Rather, I simply make the point that aspiration is as much about the recovery of the past as it is of the future. What are the advantages of claiming to be colonized subjects? How does this claim link Sámi populations to the world indigenous movement? On the other hand, what are the advantages of claiming to be complicit colonizing agents? How does this claim serve to link Nordic populations with former European imperial powers? These historiographies provide a context for looking at contrasting identity and transnational politics, which connect people in very different ways. Sámi popular music is implicated with the politics of utterance, as well as with histories of prohibition, thereby providing a route to interrogating the new histories of colonialism in Nordic scholarship. Popular music can act as a powerful political voice. It can contribute to new historio­ graphies. When the Sámi positioned themselves as part of the global indigenous

Aspirations, Global Futures, and Lessons from Sámi Music    289 world in the 1960s, an important political move was made for the future. As northern European citizens living in some of the wealthiest and most well-​established liberal democracies in the world, Sámi musicians have helped focus widespread attention on indigenous histories, minority issues, endangered languages, and environmental thinking. They celebrate cultural survival and offer their philosophical perspectives on ecological relationships to global debates. This chapter has outlined some lessons from Sámi popular music for the twenty-​ first century, which center on: (1) new ways of looking at ecology and human survival; (2) calls for cultural sustainability; (3) thinking about transnationalism and citizenship in the articulation of identities and rights; and (4) understanding the capacities of historiography to present stories for the future. Yet, in any call for a “recovery of the future,” a vital perspective is promoted by Valkeapää (1985), who draws our attention to uncertain and unpredictable futures: I thought I would peep into the future saw nothing.

Notes 1. See in the Finno-​Ugric congress webpages, “Ethno-​Futurism as a Mode of Thinking for an Alternative Future,” at www.suri.ee/​etnofutu/​ef!eng.html, by K.  Ülle, A.  Heinapuu, S. Kivisildnik, and M. Pärl-​Lõhmus; translated by S.-​E. Soosaar. 2. See www.beaivvas.no/​en/​the-​frost-​haired-​and-​the-​dream-​seer-​2013. 3. See Sofia Jannok’s TED lecture, “Our Rights to earth and Freedom,” at www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=5GZu8xECOdw. 4. See http://​arvasfoundation.com/​#!/​about-​2/​. 5. See www.youtube.com/​watch?v=hr13WV7UkgA. 6. Some relevant details are outlined in this chapter, but the case study of Amoc is discussed at greater length in Ramnarine 2013c. 7. English words modified by Finnish language rules are used extensively, including use of African American vernacular speech. Rap becomes räppi. The MC is so important in rap that Finnish rappers retain “MC,” hardly ever using the Finnish equivalent seremoniamestari (Westinen 2007, 72). Amoc uses the Inari Sámi terms for Master of Ceremonies in the chorus of the rap “Čalmekäitee” (track 4 of the 2007 CD recording):  “Säämirápmiäštár. Seremoniamiäštár” (Sámi rap master, Master of Ceremonies). 8. Finnish rap authenticity has been questioned also by commentators, noting there are no ghettos in Finland and that Finnish rap might just as well refer to everyday life in the suburbs of southern cities or the melting of the ice in the north (discussed by Westinen 2007, 34). 9. Sustainability issues have been emphasized in the 2003 UNESCO convention for the protection of intangible expressions of cultural heritage such as music, language, dance, and ritual. This reframes twentieth-​century intellectual preoccupations with cultural preservation and cultural change. One of the challenges in thinking about cultural sustainability in

290   History relation to Sámi rap is to develop critical perspectives on the contradictions in discourses on cultural ownership in a world of increased musical mobility characterized by transnational exchange, imitation and creative circulations.

References Works Cited Acerbi, G. 1802. Travels through Sweden, Finland and Lapland, to the North Cape in 1798 and 1799. London: Joseph Mawman. Appadurai, A. 2004. “The Capacity to Aspire:  Culture and the Terms of Recognition.” In Culture and Public Action, ed. V. Rao and M. Walton, 59–​84. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Social Sciences. Arizpe, L. 2004. “The Intellectual History of Culture and Development Institutions.” In Culture and Public Action, ed. V. Rao and M. Walton, 163–​184. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Social Sciences. Avatar. 2009. [Film]. Director, James Cameron. 20th-​Century Fox. Cutler, C. 2011. “The Globalization of International Law, Indigenous identity, and the New Constitutionalism.” In Property, Territory, Globalization:  Struggles over Autonomy, ed. William D. Coleman, 29–​55. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press. Diamond, Beverley. 2007. “ ‘Allowing the Listener to Fly As They Want To’: Sámi Perspectives on Indigenous CD Production in Northern Europe.” World of Music 49(1): 23–​48. Hassol, S., Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, Program for the Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna, Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, International Arctic Science Committee. 2004. Arctic Climate Impact Assessment. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Henriksen, J. 2011. Introduction. In Gáldu Čála: Journal of Indigenous Peoples Rights 1. At www. galdu.org/​govat/​doc/​galdu_​cala_​1_​2011_​eng.pdf. Jones-​ Bamman, R. 2003 “Following in the Footsteps of a Giant.” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 12(1): 35–​54. Jones-​Bamman, R. 2006. “From ‘I’m a Lapp to I  am Saami’:  Popular Music and Changing Images of Indigenous Ethnicity in Scandinavia.” In Ethnomusicology:  A  Contemporary Reader, ed. Jennifer C. Post, 351–​367. London and New York: Routledge. Keskinen, S., S. Tuori, S. Irni, and D. Mulinari, eds. Complying with Colonialism: Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region. Surrey: Ashgate. Korpela, S. 2007. “Amoc Is Rapping the Sámi language onto the Map.” At www.finland.fi/​public/​default.aspx?contentid=160116&nodeid=41798&contentlan=2&culture=en-​US. Laitinen, J. 2005. “Rapper Uses Sámi Language to Express Defiance.” Helsingin Sanomat International Edition. At www.hs.fi/​english/​article/​Rapper+uses+S%C3%A1mi+language+ to+express+defiance/​1101978492530. Minde, H. 2003. “The Challenge of Indigenism: The Struggle for Sami Land Rights and Self-​ Government in Norway 1960–​1990.” In Indigenous Peoples:  Resource Management and Global Rights, ed. S. Jentoft, H. Minde, and R. Nilsen, 75–​104. Delft: Eburon. Niezen, R. 2003. The Origins of Indigenism:  Human Rights and the Politics of Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Niiranen, O. 2003. Baron. Riihimäki: Siili and Karhu.

Aspirations, Global Futures, and Lessons from Sámi Music    291 Nyyssönen, J. 2008. “Between the Global Movement and National Politics:  Sami Identity Politics in Finland from the 1970s to the early 1990s.” In Indigenous Peoples:  Self Determination, Knowledge, Indigeneity, ed. H. Minde, 87–​105. Delft: Eburon. Ofelaš (Pathfinder). 1987. [Film]. Director, Nils Gaup. Music, Nils-​Aslak Valkeapää, Marius Müller, Kjetil Bjerkstrand. Pietikäinen, S. 2010. “Sámi Language Mobility:  Scales and Discourses of Multilinguism in a Polycentric Environment.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2010(202): 79–​101. Ramnarine, T. K. 2003. Ilmatar’s inspirations: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Changing Soundscapes of Finnish Folk Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ramnarine, T. K. 2009. “Acoustemology, Indigeneity and Joik in Valkeapää’s Symphonic Activism:  Views from Europe’s Arctic Fringes for Environmental Ethnomusicology.” Ethnomusicology 53(2): 187–​217. Ramnarine, T. K. 2013a. “‘In Our Foremothers’ Arms’: Goddesses, Feminism, and the Politics of Emotion in Sámi Songs.” In Performing Gender, Place and Emotion in Music:  Global Perspectives, ed. F. Magowan and L. Wrazen, 162–​ 184. Rochester, NY:  University of Rochester Press. Ramnarine, T. K. 2013b. “Musical Creativity and the Politics of Utterance: Cultural Ownership and Sustainability in Amoc’s Inari Sámi Raps.” In L’Image du Sápmi, vol. 2, ed. K. Andersson, 88–​112. Göteburg: Örebro University. Ramnarine, T. K. 2013c. “Sonic Images of the Sacred in Sámi Cinema:  From Finno-​Ugric Rituals to Fanon in an Interpretation of Ofelaš (Pathfinder).” Interventions:  Journal of Postcolonial Studies 15(2): 239–​254. Ramnarine, T. K. 2014. “Performance as Storytelling: Memory, European Integration, and the Baltic Youth Philharmonic.” Musicology 16: 83–​103. At www.doiserbia.nb.rs/​img/​doi/​1450-​ 9814/​2014/​1450-​98141416083R.pdf. Ramnarine, T. K. 2016 “Frozen through Nordic Frames.” Puls:  Swedish Journal for Ethnomusicology and Ethnochoreology 1:  13–​31. At http://​carkiv.musikverk.se/​www/​epublikationer/​Puls_​01_​2016-​03-​17.pdf. Ridanpää, J., and A. Pasanen. 2009. “From the Bronx to the Wilderness:  Inari-​Sami Rap, Language Revitalisation and Contested Ethnic Stereotypes.” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 9(2): 213–​230. Szomjas-​Schiffert, G. 1966. Singing Tradition of Lapp Shamans. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Tirén, K. 1942. Die Lappische Volksmusik (Acta Lapponica 3). Stockholm: Nordiska Museet. Valkeapää, N-​A. 1983 [1971]. Greetings from Lapland:  The Sami—​Europe’s Forgotten People, Translated by Beverley Wahl. London: Zed Press. Valkeapää, N-​A. 1985 [1974, 1976,  1981]. Trekways of the Wind, translated by H. Gaski, L. Nordström, and R. Salisbury. Kautokeino, Norway: DAT. Vuorela, U. 2009. “Colonial Complicity: The ‘Post-​colonial’ in a Nordic Context.” In Complying with Colonialism: Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region, ed. S. Keskinen, S. Tuori, S. Irni, and D. Mulinari, 19–​33. Surrey: Ashgate. Westinen, E. 2007. “Buuzzia, budia ja hyvää ghettobootya”:  The Construction of Hip Hop Identities in Finnish Rap Lyrics through English and Language Mixing.” MA thesis, University of Jyväskylä. Ziegler, S. 2007. “Wax Cylinder Recordings of Sami Music in the Berlin Phonogramm-​ Archive.” European Meetings in Ethnomusicology 12: 212–​226.

292   History Discography Amoc. 2007. Amok-​kaččâm (CD). Tuupa Records Oy, TREC-​007, Finland. Jannok. Sofia. 2013. Songs to Arvas (Album; includes track 3, “Áhpi”). iTunes release May 8, 2013 and other Internet download sites. Transjoik. 2001. Meavraa (CD). Warner Music Sweden CD-​8573-​85273-​2. Valkeapää, Nils-​Aslak. 1968. Joikuja (LP). Otavan Kirjallinen Äänilevy (OT-​LP50). Valkeapää, N. A., and E. Kotilainen. 1988. Beaivi Áhčážan (The Sun, My Father). CD. DATCD-​4. Kautokeino, Norway: DAT.

Pa rt  I I I

I DE N T I T Y

Chapter 15

Masculinit y, Rac e , an d Transcult u ra l i sm i n a N orwegian C ont e xt Stan Hawkins

Like its Scandinavian neighbors, Norway’s cultural landscape has changed considerably during the first decades of the twenty-​first century. Patterns of cultural mobility have reconfigured the country’s social, political, and cultural landscape, with the country’s cultural complexity well discernible in the global impact of new musical practices and patterns of mediation. A sparsely populated country, Norway has witnessed increased industrialization and globalization in ways that differ from its neighbor states and other Western alliances. All of this has a direct bearing on the ways in which music is produced, consumed, and disseminated. Above all, economic prosperity (chiefly through oil mining and production) has had an impact on all facets of society, contributing significantly to processes of transcultural assimilation. If music is about experiencing belonging, it is also about attaching cultural values to identity; it therefore operates as one of the most powerful markers of nationhood (see Whiteley, Bennett, and Hawkins 2004). In this chapter the emphasis falls on race and gender in a Nordic transcultural context, where various examples of popular music are considered. The Nordic countries share many cultural traditions, and as with folk and classical music, popular music has been inspired directly by each of the Nordic countries every bit as much as it has by the U.S.A. and U.K. Framing their commonalities is a Nordic model of welfare, economy, and politics that aspires to an equal distribution of wealth. This has had a major impact on culture. Crucially, transculturalism relates not only to patterns of migration from the outside to the inside of a host country, but also to cultural mobility across regional borders within a domestic space. Inspired by the writings of José Martí, Fernando Ortiz, and Octavia Paz, and their theories on transculturalism, this study accounts

296   Identity for performance practices within various Norwegian contexts. As such, transculturalism is defined by the quest for belonging and is predicated on being part of developing and changing communities that draw people and their cultures together within a national geopolitical space. The objective of this chapter is to examine music-​making processes in performances by the duo Madcon, Jarle Bernthoft, Lars Vaular, and Sondre Lerche, all of whom provide a fascinating snapshot of contemporary Norway. It is argued that popular music provokes questions relating to structures of masculinity, class, and race, while shaping narratives that sustain and resist traditions. The performances studied involve the suffusion of the “ordinary” into the realm of the fantasy, hence offering an opportunity to scrutinize the practices of self-​fashioning that form part and parcel of national and local identity.1 Moreover, the case studies assembled are all male artists of the same generation, where the popularity of each artist is assessed in tandem with nationhood, style, and attitude. Offering up various interpretations of performances underlies the task of identifying the local, national, indigenous, and regional from a Nordic perspective. Although discourses on the gendered body have filtered into all areas of music research, gender and its alignment to race still remains a relatively unchartered area of study in Nordic popular music studies, with just a few exceptions.2 How can music help us comprehend the ties between masculinity and race, and how do sentiments concerning local and national identity arbitrate hidden anxieties about the force of cultural transformation? Certainly, the structuring of masculinity articulates specific ideological and political meanings in different ways from one region to the next. However, there are contingencies at stake that require contemplation in terms of production and consumption. While gender equality is highly prized in Nordic countries, there are ongoing concerns linked to male hegemony. Therefore, issues of masculinity and race require addressing, not least when it comes to marginalized groups of people and the increasing concerns of migration within the Nordic region. It is worth stating that while race studies, as a major research field, has been prevalent in the U.S.A. since the latter half of the twentieth century,3 it is less evident in the Nordic countries. Yet, historically, the intersections of race and heteronormativity constitute a political entity as much in Norway as in any other country. Somewhat problematically, ethnicity is designated by the term “etnisk norsk” (“ethnic Norwegian,” sometimes even abbreviated to “e-​Nordmann”), referring to the legitimacy of citizenship and whiteness. Increasingly controversial in its usage, this term raises critical questions concerning Norwegians who are not classified as etnisk norsk. Bearing this in mind, I consider the black duo Madcon and their assimilation into a multicultural Norway. In their now-​legendary host performance at the 2010 Eurovision Contest held in Oslo, they have demonstrated that for etnisk norsk to exist as a cultural symbol of privilege, it needs to be mapped against Otherness in a transcultural setting. Inevitably, definitions of ethnicity raise the issue of belonging as much as of exclusion, and as this study attempts to point out, ideals tend to persist during the “showcasing” of musicians at highly televised national pop events.

Masculinity, Race, and Transculturalism    297

Masquerade and Cultural Transmission In their studies of the Swedish progressive rock movement during the 1960s and 1970s, Rolf Eyerman and Andrew Jamison have delved into music’s embodiment of traditions. Building on the work of Christopher Small, Richard Schechner, and Herbert Marcuse, they have argued that performance-​based rituals are integral to the construction of meaning. Popular music, in all its genres and idioms, has always defined ritualized practice to its own end: “In the age of global media this transmission can involve millions of people, and it can also take place extremely effectively through cultural expressions like music and song” (Eyerman and Jamison 1998, 37). Technological developments thus shape performance traditions that traverse national boundaries and form new cultural constellations. Eyerman and Jamison have also insisted that performance traditions are “constructed and reconstructed through a continuing dialogue between the upholders of the past and the spokespeople for the future, between traditionalists and innovators” (42). In this sense, the rites of performance harness, articulate, and shape the intricate progression of transculturalism. This is because, as Simon Frith puts it, “identity comes from the outside, not the inside; it is something we put or try on, not something we reveal or discover” (Frith 1996, 273). Thus, popular music construes identities as make-​ believe. Intriguingly, ideas of identity also form the very ingredients of playfulness that become a mainstay of pop entertainment. Derived from the French mascarade, the term “masquerade” refers to an assembly of people amusing and entertaining themselves when dancing, singing, and putting on a show. One of its chief components is fun, occurring in any range of guises. By releasing audiences from the constraints of everyday life, masquerade resolves tensions in quite extraordinary ways. Producing the “fun factor” in performance proffers a comprehension of the “local” as much as the “national.” After all, pop performances are cunning acts of cultural expression that transpire through an ongoing structuring of social movement and generation.4 Antics of masquerade define the performance style of Madcon, consisting of Yosef Wolde-​Mariam and Tshawe Baqwa. Formed in 1992, the duo would gradually rise to the top of the Nordic music industry.5 Blending funk, dance, hip hop, and soul with reggae, Latin and African, their style might be described as a meltdown of retro urban mix. In many ways, their performances allude to masquerade in the guise of a self send-​up that has a sharp political edge. Significantly, this duo is promoted and perceived as a major symbol of multiculturalism and cultural diversity in Norway, best illustrated in their performance during the Eurovision Song Contest, hosted by Oslo in 2010. Their single, “Glow,” from their fourth album Contraband, produced and written by Element (Hitesh Ceon and Kim Ofstad), would be showcased during the seven-​and-​a-​half-​minute break, with an estimated 130 million viewers.6 In retrospect, this proved to be a defining moment in Norwegian history and is well worth examining.

298   Identity In no uncertain terms, the performance of “Glow” was a complicated affair, choreographed through the lavish spectacle of a flash-​mob dance, and transmitted live from the Telenor Arena (see ­figure 15.1) in Fornebu, Oslo, with a simultaneous broadcast of performances from various European locations, including L’Alfàs del Pi (Spain), Reykjavík (Iceland), Ljubljana (Slovenia), Gothenburg (Sweden), Vilnius (Lithuania), London, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, and Dublin. Flash mob gatherings are intended as something spontaneous, occurring within a short time frame, and Madcon managed to convey this effortlessly. Most of all, their performance served as a reminder that resistance is often found in spaces where cultural change has its greatest potential. Epitomizing this, the flash mob, a masquerade in itself, picks up on the ideals of solidarity through rituals associated with the carnival. As a highly profiled mediated trans-​European event, Madcon’s “Glow” performance would celebrate, if not contest, European identity by mediating notions of national identity, ethnicity, and belonging. That this duo was selected by the organizing authorities in Oslo was indisputably strategic, given the politics of integration in Norway. In this sense, their flash-​mob performance was intended to mirror the utopian values of multicultural, social democratic Norway, paradoxically one year prior to Anders Behring Breivik’s attempt to shatter this image.7 By mobilizing large crowds in different urban spaces around Europe, Madcon’s act also fulfilled a larger political mission. Through music, as John Street puts it, “our sense of the past shapes our sense of the present and its politics” (2012, 97); music is a product of social organization and political intent. Moreover, it stimulates cultural change in new imaginary spaces: “Just as music can allow us to imagine other people, so it may conjure up other worlds—​both utopian future ones and real, alternate past ones” (168). Indeed, music generates the ideals and values that shape ideology.

Figure 15.1  Madcon, in Telenor Arena, Oslo

Masculinity, Race, and Transculturalism    299 In considering the role of masquerade in ritualized displays, I want to mull over the act of participation as a politically expressive device. Vividly captured on YouTube,8 Madcon’s performance of “Glow” in different European spaces (with a range of nationalities on show) depicted the carnivalesque of flash-​mob gatherings. Tracing the origins of the carnival back to the Feast of Fools, Mikhail Bakhtin critiqued the behavior and customs that historically burlesque the sacred with the profane. Making the claim that though kings might become beggars and fools turn into wise men during festivities, Bakhtin cautioned us that this should never be confused with liberation from authority and social hierarchy. In addition, there is, as he argued, the matter of the carnival and foolery of politicians, which provides the basis for further critical introspection. One might posit that the joviality of multicultural representations in the form of entertainment transports with it the asymmetric power relationships that define the national space where cultures fuse. For instance, while pop music might frame Europe’s biggest festival, there remains the dubitable issue of inclusion—​whose show, for whom, and on what premises? There is a flip side to utopian displays of society and culture—​for the carnival, the dream of a perfect existence, can never fully mirror social reality. Taking a broader perspective, it would seem that Madcon’s objective in their performance of “Glow” was more than a token gesture of Otherness within a European context. Rather, it was about upholding the idea that all humans share common features across borders, where people contribute in their own ways to the formation of new cultural territories. With more than a touch of self-​parody, Madcon would sing, “Hear me roar, hear my thunder sound, I’m the lord of the underground, part of the jungle.” A high dose of nonchalance and self-​deprecation (connoted by the words “jungle,” “thunder,” “underground”) delineates the complexity of nationhood and belonging. And, their strategy would be reinforced by the polyvalent features of musical style as they expressed their allegiances to a democratic system that accommodates migrant cultures. All in all, the live performance of “Glow” epitomized transculturalism at work in Norway. Effectively, the intention behind the production was to make evident that music is a potent source of energy, a vehicle for imminent change and unity. “Glow” therefore provided a compelling discourse on urbanity across Europe, a journey across one space to the next in a bid to chart the landscape of transcultural coexistence. Madcon’s flash performance would stand as a narrative of solidarity; a narrative that reconnected Europeans through politics, culture, and kinship. Mostly, it expressed the transitive process of shifting from one culture and ethnicity to another without explicitly acquiring all the traits of a host nation: “See we try to reach out, get the world to see, though we all feel different, you just like me!” By force of circumstance, artists of immigrant parentage seek out cross-​cultural interactions at the same time as they experience stereotyping and prejudice on a daily basis. Accordingly, Madcon tackle the underlying aspects of their own Otherness through popular music. Both in form and content, their act conveys ethnic diversity in relation to the dominant white group. Granted, mixed allegiances will always prevail as individuals and social groups adjust to new urban spaces, an idea Judith Butler (1993) advances

300   Identity when stating that conformity is not always distinguishable from acts of acceptance and affirmation. In this sense, accommodating one’s identity in order to conform can come at the cost of exclusion. In other words, the urge to belong (and please) highlights the complexity of social and political ideals in marketing and consumption. Inescapably, strategies of classifying are tangled up in misconceptions of identity. A cursory reminder of this is found in Derek Scott’s (2006) study of patterns of consumption and reception of music in the nineteenth century. Against the background of Liszt’s Gypsy, Wagner’s Jew, or African American, Indian, and Celtic music, Scott frames the concept of race and racism within music today. Tendencies toward racial thinking, he maintains, are ubiquitous in judgments of culture and national identity: The sense of national identity created by building a literate “high culture” out of a dialect was achieved in music by “reviving” (and often inventing) national folk dance and song traditions. In the first half of the twentieth century, radio was an important medium of dissemination of “national” music. Music thus continued to play an important hegemonic role in dominant classifications of race, nationality, and identity. (2006, 20)

Scott identifies two distinct traits in the U.K. that are equally prevalent in contemporary Nordic societies: first, a move in the “direction of multiplying ethnicities”; and second, a move toward “blurring of distinctions,” where classification of nationality overlaps with ethnicity (Scott 2006, 20). Significantly, new forms of racism have emerged along a cultural axis, where ideas of race are linked not only to nationality but also to religion. Importantly, Scott sheds light on the cause for the current climate of racism in Europe, where “religion is a key factor in one group’s hatred for another, and in which fear of Islamic fundamentalist supra-​nationalism overtakes earlier fears of fascist nationalisms (despite the absence of an overarching Muslim authority or single formulation of Islamic orthodoxy)” (Scott 2006, 21). Returning to Madcon’s performance of “Glow,” there can be little doubt that a continuous blurring of fixed categories and process of essentialization compounds perceptions of nationality. Given this, we might ask: What are the vital links between gender, nationhood, and race in a transcultural context? And, moreover, how do we proceed in problematizing gender in music performance?

Strategies of Solidarity and Distancing Probing into reductionist accounts of music and identity, Keith Negus and Patria Román Velázquez (2002, 140) have argued that music “is surely something else besides or other than identities, and identities are something more (or less) than music.” Utilized in

Masculinity, Race, and Transculturalism    301 countless ways, music involves distancing oneself from categories and notions of the self. This involves alienating oneself from the cultural conditions of one’s own social space: The feeling of distance may well be experienced as anomie: estrangement from the tastes, norms, and values of others, a feeling of not being part of a group, of not-​ identifying with those who are “into” the music or not sharing anything other than a love of the music with the producers of that music. Or, it might entail a more profound sense of alienated distance from the social conditions, work, and leisure activities that have produced such music. (2002, 142)

Emphasizing the problems of categorization that engender cultural associations, Negus and Román Velázquez “wonder whether such references to origins, ‘background’ or ethnic label tell us very much” (140). As their study suggests, a reflexive engagement with the politics of music, and more specifically an awareness of its broader structures, is required for comprehending cultural-​political consciousness through musical performance (also see Walser 2003 and Street 2012). Given that gender norms permeate all types of music, it seems all the more vital to address this when conceptualizing nationality. In a Nordic context mainstream pop artists reiterate norms in predominantly conventional ways.9 More often than not, the male artist’s superego obeys the rules of male hegemony, a point Ian Biddle and Freya Jarman-​ Ivens (2007) have highlighted in their study of the forces at work that position “heroic masculinity” in relation to ethnicity: “That is to say, normative (‘heroic’) masculinity per se is entirely and only committed to the project of sustaining its own normativity and ‘natural’ status as synonymous with the white, middle-​class, male body” (2007, 14). From this one might postulate that white masculinity only becomes something discernible, something to exclaim about, when it contravenes the cultural pressures of male hegemony. Even in countries that pride themselves on equality, gender norms and their rigid binarisms are rooted in most communities and therefore inextricably linked to a nation, its culture, its history, and its political narratives. With this in mind, I now turn to three etnisk norske pop celebrities—​namely, Sondre Lerche, Lars Vaular, and Jarle Bernhoft.10 Lerche and Vaular are cousins from Bergen, while Bernhoft is from Nittedal (in Akershus, near Oslo). All three artists have received full national recognition through the coveted Spellemann Prizes (the Norwegian equivalent to the Grammy), with successful careers in the making. To start with, Jarle Bernhoft, who goes under the artistic name Bernhoft, is a multi-​instrumentalist, composer, songwriter, and singer. He first came to public notice as a vocalist in the Norwegian band Span, which dissolved in 2005. His solo career was launched in September 2008, with the release of his album Ceramic City Chronicles.11 A close look at Bernhoft and his “heroic” masculinity reveals many strategies at stake. Winning fans over is essential for the aspiring pop star and this has to do with look, style, and mannerisms. As such, self-​assuredness is a necessary part of the process, where stylization, vanity, and affectation intersect. Important is Bernhoft’s musical virtuosity. His mixing of genres and, not least, his crooning voice stylize a performance

302   Identity style that is aptly bound up in the Norwegian term flinkis—​the pejorative term for working long and hard and excelling. Being flinkis also slips into the negative realm of showing off, a dubious characteristic in a Norwegian egalitarian context. Connotations of flinkis contravene the “collective consciousness” of the Jantelov,12 something quickly rendered suspect when singling out the individual from his peers. As part of its rationale, the Jantelov situates the individual within a tightly regulated and unified social and political system, where shared values and notions of equality—​for many the hallmark of being Scandinavian—​are regulated and framed with careful precision. In his various videos and live performances, Bernhoft knowingly obeys and yet plays with the Jantelov while pursuing the goals of the Baudelairean flaneur—​the epitome of the affected, European male subject in the guise of the “soft” man (myk mann).13 His “Streetlights” video from 2008 is a fitting example of this situated within a transcultural setting that targets an international as much as a domestic audience (see ­figure 15.2). Throughout the video the camera picks up on his languid movements, with regular close-​up shots of his torso and huge open Mick Jagger–​like mouth. His brand of sensuality is cool, sexy, and cocky. “Streetlights” also has an air of nostalgia, evident in the hints of soul-​funk, such as “Street-​Life” by Randy Crawford and the Crusaders. Bernhoft’s appropriation of African American style is undisguised and deftly executed, with him playing a range of instruments: drums, guitars, bass, Hammond organ, cello, piano, and violin. Highly polished, this performance quintessentializes the flinkis through an extrovert style that brims with self-confidence and instrumental virtuosity. Aesthetically, the use of mirror effects in the water-​reflection shots harks back to the Narcissus mythology, where the handsome Greek youth falls in love with himself as his reflection in the water, never able to part himself from it. Ultimately, the fixed gaze of the boy turns on itself through

Figure 15.2  Jarle Bernhoft, in the performance of “Street Lights”

Masculinity, Race, and Transculturalism    303 an unashamed display of narcissism. One might say that Bernhoft’s representation in “Streetlights” is constitutive of a form of eroticized metrosexuality that renders masculinity acceptable and attractive in a Norwegian setting. In his rewritings of Narcissus, Jacques Lacan (2002) identified the complexity of the ego, prior to its cultural determination. This, Lacan maintained, is irreducible for the individual, for the child’s preoccupation with his own image prefigures the adult male’s “alienating” destination. Lacan’s discourse on the mirror stage can be applied to the male pop-​music performer, and the links between the subject and his own “imaginary” sense of reality; it is the vulnerability of the ego that highlights the elusive relationship between the self and the outside world, between love and desire. This seems an appropriate moment to shift from a video recording to a live-​ performance context. As one of several musicians invited to perform at the National Memorial Ceremony for the victims of July 22, held on August 21, 2011 at the Spektrum indoor stadium in Oslo, Bernhoft chose to perform his song “Stay with Me.” Executed with great humility in front of grief-​stricken parents, siblings, royalty, politicians, and heads of states,14 his performance was fashioned eloquently. Building on the narratives of national grieving in pop performances (for example, Elton John’s touching performance at Diana’s funeral in 1997), Bernhoft almost wept on the lyrics: “Stay with me, oh stay with me, through my troubled times, oh and the good ones too.” Bernhoft was the only artist who substituted the existing lyrics of a popular song with new lines: “I’ve been searching so hard for something meaningful to say, but I can’t find the words and I can’t find the ways, But know this much: You’ll be with us always.”15 In this touching performance, intricacies of phrasing, through melody, motivic snippets, rhythmic articulation, and textural contrasts, shaped the song’s powerful feelings. Drawing on a wide range of expressive devices that mediate the weight of his phrasing,16 his performance extracted grief and sorrow in a sincere manner. During this live televised event, music in all its variants would relay constructions of nationhood, albeit in ways that dampened the usual brazen display of national pride through the red, white, and blue of the Norwegian flag. The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) carefully selected a wide range of genres, seamlessly arranged, to capture the poignancy of such a moment of national grief. Such displays of nationhood, as Thomas Hylland-​Eriksen (2010, 122) points out, are commonly based around a “traditionalistic ideology,” glorifying and recodifying “an ostensibly ancient tradition shared by ancestors of the members of the nation.” Yet, rather than just re-​creating that tradition, it “reifies it in the same way that Hurons reified their supposed tradition.” Musically, Bernhoft would rouse such sentiments with a high dose of emotional engagement and sincerity. Most significantly, his vocal style, modeled on African American gospel crooning, was turned into a signifier of Europe’s close ties to the U.S.A. Historically, the expressive power of gospel finds a place within contexts marked by grief and struggle, as Bernhoft’s performance affirmed. Gospel, he knew, establishes solidarity with previous movements of struggle in the face of adversity, its traits suggestive of a painful process that provides recourse for reflecting on the universals of human suffering in a vulnerable moment of national grieving.

304   Identity Most of all, Bernhoft’s live performance stood as a stark reminder of music’s expressive power, and in contrast to the elation found in “Streetlights” and Madcon’s “Glow,” it induced pathos. It also demonstrated the nuances of vocality that help capture the aesthetics of a reverent performance. During his act he would mainly avert the camera’s lens, fixing his eyes on the audience while briefly closing his eyes. As a display of humility, his performance would succeed in transporting the religious and ceremonial traditions of one context into another through time. Transculturally, then, Bernhoft’s live performance of “Stay With Me” transformed a set of performance practices within a highly sensitized space that had been exposed to extreme violence (see Johnson and Cloonan 2008). Moreover, he provided a trusting view of the white Norwegian male as part of a vulnerable yet dominant political group under attack by one of its own citizens. So, in stark contrast to his dandy-​like traits in “Streetlights,” this performance avoided playfulness in order to project sincerity and pain. And, through such emotional outpouring, he drew on empathic responses of heightened sensitivity while never relinquishing his status as an idol.

Two Court Jesters and a Fjord Horse Of quite a different cultural ilk are the Norwegian celebrity cousins Lars Vaular and Sondre Lerche, who come from the picturesque fjord region of western Norway. While Vaular is a rap artist, Lerche is an indie-​rock, pop, and folk-​rock musician. The track “Øynene Lukket” (Eyes Shut), which they recorded together, is a conglomeration of styles. Oozing with sentimentality, the song is about failed friendships and bittersweet nostalgia: “He said he’d stick around just for me, if I promised him I’d always keep the cash right on me.” As the song progresses, so the mood darkens: “So fucking sour, Cuts through the air like a knife, I know that it is a bad idea, There are thousands of reasons to go under, I know that it is a bad idea.”17 Such sentiments of remorse deal with the topic of male bonding and insecurity. Rather cunningly, the Norwegian lyrics eschew the topic of “ordinariness,” operating as a key marker of the indie-​rock performer.18 In particular, their singing style foregrounds a specific type of male bonding. Strategies of being jordnær (a common term used by Norwegians positively to describe a person as normal, uncomplicated, and down to earth) are a powerful structuring device in the construction of an identity, where complicity often flirts with unpretentiousness (quite the opposite of flinkis). At first glance, Vaular and Lerche’s performance is unbridled by social pretentions—​something that closely bonds their fans to them. This contrasts culturally with the embroidery of Bernhoft’s and Madcon’s styles, which originate from the urbanized east side of the country, near Oslo, a socio-​political diametric to Bergen. The political tract of homosociality in the song “Øynene Lukket” is culturally refined and underpins national and regional stereotypes as much as gender, race, and class. Conspicuous cultural distinctiveness accentuates the complex differences between the rural and urban.19 Corresponding to cultural contexts, gender norms vary and connote

Masculinity, Race, and Transculturalism    305 different ideas of ethnicity and nationality. Yet, as Hylland-​Eriksen puts it, stereotypes never “refer to a social reality, and they do not necessarily give accurate hints of what people actually do” (2010, 28). Rather, stereotypes provide a “tidy map” of one’s social world while justifying “systematic inequalities in access to resources” (31). That said, perceptions of “classification” from one side of Norway to the other are inextricably tangled up in labels people activate to identify who they are and who they are not, which is in turn measurable alongside ideas of the Other. In contrast to Bernhoft’s video, “Øynene Lukket” is unglamorous in virtually every respect. This is not without intention, nor is it without charm. For most of its duration, the video portrays the two cousins sitting next to one another in front of a large white screen held up by two young girls. This simple visual backdrop frames most of their performance. Notably, an absence of any overt musical virtuosity characterizes an “ordinary” performance, with the boys so chilled they occasionally sing out of tune. In my reading, the performance is ironic, with more than a hint of disavowal. This is made apparent by the casual presence of a group of females, serving as backstage stooges, whose function it is to instate the homosociality on display. It is only during the build-​ up to his guitar solo right at the end of the song that they become the focus of attention, when Lerche is lifted by them into the air (see ­figure 15.3). Humorous intent is apparent in a parody of the guitar hero being gingerly elevated by his female fans. This is accentuated not only by the exaggerated gestures of Lerche’s performance at this point but also in the makeshift context of an undecorated studio backstage and the group of ordinary-​ looking girls. The final scene collapses into a quasi-​Tivoli act, with a rural Fjord horse entering the set on which Valuar is precariously perched. The video ends with his being

Figure 15.3  Shot of Lars Vaular and Sondre Lerche from the video “Øynene lukket”

306   Identity led off stage by a sturdy blonde farmer girl. It can hardly go amiss that even the horse is portrayed as jordnær in a West Coast Norwegian setting, symbolizing one of the oldest working-​horse breeds in the world. Silliness envelops two men and a horse, the triviality of which is blunt to the point of hilarity. Perhaps most at stake in this performance is the downplaying of the glitz and glamour often associated with mainstream pop and its celebs, all of which reinforces the appeal in the “low” aesthetic status of an indie-​oriented musical style. Delving deeper into the matter of homosociality, Vaular and Lerche’s performance suggests something more than just camaraderie. Their togetherness is a stark reminder that masculinity achieves its authority through the tactics of disengagement, best illustrated when Lerche gets up and solos, as the young girls/​fans who support and rotate him on a round platform surround him. In this moment, the female is a bearer of male symbolic order and fantasies. The scene is made phallocentric by his clasping the guitar in his hands. In this instance I  would suggest that the symbolism of Vaular and Lerche’s performance lies in their fashioning themselves as objects of desire through a vocal delivery that is relaxed, softly spoken, and arguably feminized. While Vaular’s melodic lines feel quite monotonous in a laid-​back pleasurable sense, the intelligibility of the words remains paramount at all times. Undeniably, there is a strong appeal in downstaging one’s act, and these artists succeed in communicating this both in the audio recording of the song and the video. The air of ordinariness they exude is contrary to the quirkiness of Bernhoft and Madcon. Disarmingly, their indifference is conveyed in a way that normalizes their masculinity, where passivity and the suppression of emotions is all about being in control. That said, their performance is narcissistic as they turn to the tactics that make them attractive within both a local and an Anglo-​American context. Tantalizingly, both performers almost appear too chilled, which becomes the central performative premise for their act, and arguably their appeal. In the end, though, the song is about more than just gender norms; it is also about ideas of class, Nordic regionality, and cultural belonging. In my reading, they stereotype their regional belonging through language as much as mannerism, and in this way, they define the boundaries of their group (see Hylland-​Eriksen 2010). Moreover, they aptly demonstrate that being “normal,” everyday etnisk norsk is always rooted in the striking intonations of a vestlandsk dialect, instantly identifiable from Bergen and its rural surroundings. Music is a carrier for a host of cultural values linked to ethnicity, class, and gender. And, the artists in question characterize the turn-​of-​the-​century Norwegian male, where the interface between gender and class is suffused with egalitarian ideas of selfhood. Homi Bhabha’s views on identity spring to mind when he scrutinizes the interpellative structures of race, class, and gender: “Class identity is auto-​referential, surmounting other instances of social difference. Its sovereignty is also, in a theoretical sense, an act of surveillance” (Bhabha 1994, 318). For Bhabha, class categories are also narcissistic in that they “provide a clear view to the stream’s rocky bottom,” only then to be “caught in an autotelic disavowal of their own discursive and epistemic limits.” Metaphorically, Bhabha describes how class resembles “a wounded narcissus that gazes

Masculinity, Race, and Transculturalism    307 down to the bottom of the stream” (319). This fanciful impression is useful in directing our attention to the global space, where cultural hybridity is articulated through enclosures and exclusions. In opposition to the hegemony of a white world, Bhabha’s critique of neocolonial relations situates the new world order alongside multinational division of labor. Crafty references are made to Allan Sekula’s Fish Story, an epic photographic work of industrial ports created over a five-​year period. Bhabha draws attention to a navigational allegory in Sekula’s work that epitomizes exploitation and transcultural exchange. Coincidentally, this involves a remarkable moment where the Norwegian national anthem blares out from a loudspeaker on a bluff, greeting the arrival of a container ship built by Koreans and staffed by underpaid foreign nationals: “Norway’s nationalist nostalgia cannot drown out the babel on the bluff. Transnational capitalism and the impoverishment of the Third World certainly create the chains of circumstance that incarcerate the Salvadorean or the Filipino/​a” (Bhabha 1994, 12). Spaces of intervention negotiate cultural presence as Bhabha alerts us to the perils of celebrating the past in order to homogenize the present through bland and uncritical acts of nationalism. With this, we learn how historical specificity and cultural diversity inform the ambivalences of globalism through gender, ethnicity, and affluence (in the case of an affluent northern European nation-​state). Manifestly, then, music as a transcultural glue binds us to the creative possibilities for human endeavor and new collective constellations.

Thinking Nationhood, Nostalgia, and Music Cultural abrasion appears when people are mobilized within and outside national boundaries, and problems associated with intolerance and racial prejudice flourish in contexts where difference and change are inevitable. A sober reminder of this is evident in the recent backlash against multiculturalism in Europe, exemplified by Breivik’s attack on the Norwegian state’s model of social democracy in 2011 and the course of events that led to the closing of borders to Syrian refugees in 2015 by E.U. and E.E.A. European states. So, how do new and evolving cultures coexist and survive in the geographic spaces and places defined by nationhood? And to what extent do notions of transculturalism impinge on this? In my findings, it is not so much that music becomes a thematic marker for the reinvention of nationhood but, rather, that its ambiguities are latent in the structures that position a country such as Norway globally. Throughout this study I have considered how masculinity contributes to a definition of national identity in popular music. From this it is clear that music is bound up in preserving one’s cultural heritage as much as in altering it. The structuring of nationhood

308   Identity is a signifying system in itself, something that is always imaginary and through which music acquires its symbolic meaning. In this sense, popular music can be understood as part of a transcultural flow and the development of new patterns in democratic citizenship. Musical sounds and styles are transformative of the identities and integration of many groups, and today the performance and reception of popular music takes place globally; it offers striking narratives on national and regional identities. Hence, the flow of multiple identities and cultures through the dissolution and disjunctures of spatiotemporal boundaries creates new possibilities for change and continuity (see Bohlman 2003). Popular music’s unifying role is discernible in the cultural and social fabric of a specific geographic region, contributing to countless cultural narratives. Musical performances conjure up ideas of who musicians are, who they think they are, where they come from, and how they act out their gender. Identifying nationality, for instance, provides a trajectory that connects the past to the present, and as we have seen, Norwegian popular music opens up an imaginary space for envisaging national and gendered identity in compelling ways. This occurs within a vibrant context that is encoded through transculturalism. Indeed, the cultural, geographical, and political context of the performances presented in this chapter reflect the shifts and realignments that have taken place in Norwegian music during the first decades of the twenty-​first century. Cultural belonging, as I have suggested, needs to be grasped and problematized in relation to gender, ethnicity, and locality. More specifically, gender norms and ideas about ethnicity reinforce and redefine structures of nationhood, as well as where we feel we belong. The point I  am arriving at is that musicians constantly draw our attention to this in extraordinary ways by utilizing rhythms, melodies, harmonies, lyrics, and instrumentation as artistic articulations of community experiences in diverse contexts. In this sense, music operates as a mode of aesthetic-​experiential social commentary. Hence, the artists Madcon, Bernhoft, Lerche, and Vaular provide us with a real opportunity to reflect on contemporary society through performances that offer panoramic shots of an exclusive, ever-​evolving geopolitical space in the form of Norway. As such, these performers siphon the notion of a transcultural space as part of a broad-​based national narrative that inevitably conveys the idiosyncrasies of gender, race, and class. And, because music forges links between people, it circumscribes shared experiences across cultures. Music therefore fulfills a formative role in getting us to continually envision conceptions of identity that result from the endeavors of human creativity.

Notes 1. This chapter extends numerous concepts presented in earlier studies (Hawkins 2002, 2007, 2009), and I acknowledge invaluable discussions with Mats Johansson, Birgitte Sandve, Jon Mikkel Broch Ålvik, and Mari Paus, who were part of the project I led, Popular Music and Gender in a Transcultural Context (2010–​2014), funded by the Norwegian Research Council.

Masculinity, Race, and Transculturalism    309 2. See, for instance, studies by Nordic scholars, such as Anne Danielsen, Johan Fornäs, Helmi Jäeviluoma, Annemette Kirkegaard, Vesa Kurkela, Morten Michelsen, Pirkko Moisala, and Erik Steinskog. 3. Roediger’s seminal study The Wages of Whiteness (1991) inspired a spate of books on the subject. 4. In this section I want to express my gratitude to Jocelyn Guillbault, who provided me with critical feedback on the first draft of these ideas as presented in my keynote address at the Roskilde IASPM-​Norden Conference in 2012. 5. Yosef was born in Norway (of Eritrean and Ethiopian parentage) and Tshawe was born in Germany (of South African parentage). 6. Notably, the song sold ten times platinum in Norway and over 30,000 copies in Germany, reaching the Top 10 charts in over ten countries. 7. See Jan Sverre Knudsen’s chapter (Chapter 13) for an account of the role of music in the aftermath of Breivik’s attacks on the Norwegian state. 8. See www.youtube.com/​watch?v=bWUtEW-​iYhI. 9. Of course, though, this is not to dismiss the common variables that are inscribed in musical genres. See Biddle and Jarman-​Ivens 2007. 10. I  am grateful to my former Ph.D.  student Birgitte Sandve for invaluable insights into Norwegian West Coast identity and for drawing my attention to the phenomena of Sondre Lerche and Lars Vaular, as well as the relevance of the Fjording hest (Fjord horse) and numerous other eccentricities pertaining to the West Coast of Norway. 11. Quite by chance he was invited on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, following his discovery on YouTube. During the show he played his well-​known hit “C’mon Talk,” enthralling the audience. In 2012, he was awarded the Statoil stipend of 1  million kroner at the Larm music congress and festival—​an award given to Norwegian artists to market themselves internationally. 12. See Aksel Sandemose’s novel from 1933, En Flyktning krysser sitt spor (A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks), where the concept of the Law of Jante upon which Janatelev is based was introduced. 13. At the time of writing this chapter, Bernhoft claimed that he was tired of being classified as a “soft male”; he chose to “toughen up” his image by wearing a white Scarface suit to the Spelleman Awards. Such comments are not without a good dose of self-​parody. See Dagbladet, “Det er for å tøffe opp imaget mitt,” March 23, 2013. http://​www.dagbladet.no/​ 2013/​03/​23/​kjendis/​mote/​jarle_​bernhoft/​lisa_​bernhoft/​rod_​loper/​26356057/​. For a detailed analysis of masculinity and dandyism through the Baudelairean flaneur, see Hawkins 2009. 14. Other invited performers included the rap duo Karpe Diem, Leif Ove Andsnes, Melissa Horn, DumDum Boys, Susanne Sundfør, Sivert Høyem and Ane Brun, Åge Aleksandersen, A-​ha, Bjørn Eidsvåg, Ingrid Olava, and Sissel Kyrkjebø. 15. Thanks to Jan Sverre Knudsen for pointing out this important detail. 16. For ideas on the characteristics of phrase structure as they conjoin performance expression, in particular from a pyschological perspective, see Clarke, Dibben, and Pitts 2010. 17. Thanks to Mari Paus for the translation into English. 18. For an extensive study of white masculinity and homosociality in indie rock, see Bannister 2006. Also, see Emig and Rowland 2010, for interdisciplinary research into how masculinity is performed across a range of genres and contexts in popular culture. 19. For another Nordic study that concentrates on the rural and the urban in Icelandic popular music, see Dibben 2009.

310   Identity

References Bannister, M. 2006. White Boys, White Noice:  Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bhabha, H. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York and London: Routledge. Biddle, I., and F. Jarman-​Ivens. 2007. “Introduction: Oh Boy! Making Masculinity in Popular Music.” In Oh Boy! Masculinities and Popular Music, ed. I. Biddle and F. Jarman-​Ivens, 1–​17. London: Routledge. Bohlman, P. 2003. “Music and Culture: Historiographies of Disjuncture.” In The Cultural Study of Music, ed. M. Clayton, T. Herbert, and R. Middleton, 45–56. London and New York: Routledge. Butler, J. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” London: Routledge. Clarke, E., N. Dibben, and S. Pitts. 2010. Music and Mind in Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dibben, N. 2009. “Nature and Nation: National Identity and Environmentalism in Icelandic Popular Music Video and Music Documentary.” Ethnomusicology Forum 18(1): 131–​151. Emig, R., and A. Rowland, eds. 2010. Performing Masculinity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Eyerman, R., and A. Jamison. 1998. Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frith, S. 1996. Performing Rites. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hawkins, S. 2002. Settling the Pop Score: Pop Texts and Identity Politics. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hawkins, S. 2007. “Those Norwegians: Deconstructing the Nation-​state in Europe through Fixity and Indifference in Norwegian Club Music.” In Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location: Between the Global and the Local, ed. I. Biddle and V. Knights, 179–​189. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hawkins, S. 2009. The British Pop Dandy. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hylland-​Eriksen, Thomas. 2010. Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives, 3rd ed. London: Pluto Press. Johnson, B., and M. Cloonan. 2008, eds. Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence. Aldershot: Ashgate. Lacan, J. 2002. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function.” In Ecrits, trans. B. Fink, 75–81. New York: Norton. Negus, K., and P. Velázquez. 2002. “Belonging and Detachment: Musical Experience and the Limits of Identity.” Poetics 30: 133–​145. Roediger, D. 1991. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London and New York: Verso. Scott, D. 2006. “In Search of Genetically Modified Music:  Race and Musical Style in the Nineteenth Century.” Nineteenth-​Century Music Review 3(1): 3–​23. Street, John. 2012. Music and Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Walser, R. 2003. “Popular Music Analysis: Ten Apothegms and Four Instances.” In Analyzing Popular Music, ed. A. Moore, 16–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whiteley, S., A. Bennett, and S. Hawkins, eds. 2004. Music, Space and Place: Popular Music and Cultural Identity. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Chapter 16

H ip Hop as P u bl i c Pedago g y Alexandra D’Urso

This chapter examines how hip hop is used as a medium of informal education and social commentary by ethnic minorities in Nordic societies. As a contribution to the literatures on hip hop and identity politics of popular music in the Nordic countries, the chapter offers a new perspective on hip hop produced in diasporic communities, analyzing the use of hip hop as a form of public pedagogy in the case of Adam Tensta and Eboi, who are based in Sweden. The concept of public pedagogy will be detailed later, but essentially it refers to forms of education that occur and are negotiated outside formal educational institutions. The chapter analysis calls for renewed reflexivity about music’s significance to understanding how the social and ethnic-​racial politics of globalization in the Nordic region affects the lives of individuals in the region. Since its beginnings in the 1970s in the Bronx borough of New York City, hip hop culture has been known for its four elements: rap, graffiti, DJing, and breaking. Sernhede and Söderman (2010, 99) have described the emergence of a fifth element of hip hop culture as kunskap och lärande (knowledge and learning); in the context of this volume, the broader concept of education will be used as a means of describing how some Swedish rappers use rap music as a form of anti-​racist pedagogy. Drawing from primarily song lyrics of the named artists, I shall examine counter-​hegemonic constructions of identity as they emerge through subversive rap and public appearances made by two artists from Sweden: Eboi and Adam Tensta. As noted in this book’s introduction, a nuanced perspective of identity performance done vis-​à-​vis music creation or performance requires careful reflection about how global changes, local histories, and human agency converge in the processes of articulating or negotiating identity, especially national identity. The experiences of Eboi and Adam Tensta and their use of rap as a form of anti-​racist pedagogy described in this chapter are drawn from a Swedish context, but their approach has connections to other performative social processes occurring in the Nordic countries (see Chapter 17).

312   Identity Linking these artists’ pedagogical practices to larger global flows of resistance in hip hop culture—​namely its music—​this chapter shall use a social constructionist-​and critical pedagogy-​informed perspective to address the following questions: (1) How is identity explored in the music lyrics of these artists? (2) How do these artists negotiate competing claims to national or regional identities vis-​à-​vis their positions as hip hop pedagogues? and (3) How do representations of identity in the music of these artists serve as examples of counter-​discourse about mainstream understandings of identity in Sweden and possibly in other Nordic countries? Music originating from hip hop culture is widely recognized as a social medium for individuals from diasporic communities. Rap music is simultaneously place-​based both locally and transnationally within wider flows of music (Mitchell 2001), possessing “a fluid capacity to cross borders, and a reluctance to adhere to the geopolitical givens of the present” (Alim and Pennycook 2007, 90). The public identity negotiations that occur vis-​à-​vis the production of and engagement with such music can shed light on how the issue of insider/​outsider identity fits into larger global flows of anti-​racist rap public pedagogy, especially as this engagement challenges common understandings of a larger Nordic identity and “create[s]‌spaces that affirm identities of difference” (Porfilio and Viola 2012, 7). Given recent troubling events in the Nordic countries, including but not limited to online communities dedicated to supporting the ideology of Anders Breivik (Bjurwald 2012); the increasing support of far-​right parties like the Sweden Democrats, the Danish People’s Party, The Finns, and the Norwegian Progress Party; numerous arson attempts on refugee housing in Sweden; and physical assaults on migrants from Eastern Europe, the Nordic countries have much soul-​searching to do if there is to be a realistic hope of holding on to the values that the region so strongly articulates both locally and globally. When it comes to reconciling the challenges of a digitally connected world, large shifts in capital and flows of people have brought about changes to the welfare state that have had unintended consequences for the reputation of the Nordic region. Amid growing xenophobia and social exclusion, rap music has become a necessary pedagogical tool for individuals in these countries to raise important discussions, challenging far-​right appeals to people’s fear of the Other and providing hope for a future filled with acts of critical resistance.

The Politics of Rap Pedagogy Music scholars have long discussed hip hop culture as a medium of resistance across the globe (Dimitriadis 2009; Mitchell 2001; Porfilio and Viola 2012; Richardson 2006). The resistance explored within rap music is broadly associated with attempts to challenge hegemonic perceptions of minority groups. But in a wider sense, rap and other forms of popular music also allow for the creation of alternative cultural spaces, including spaces of informal learning and self-​empowerment that may in turn strengthen

Hip Hop as Public Pedagogy    313 collective values and subversive forms of knowledge. Such resistance can be compared with Gramsci’s (2000) understanding of the organic intellectual, which he describes as being a necessary figure in allowing social classes to rise up against domination. Fischman and McLaren (2005) further theorize the role of the organic intellectual as that of a guiding mentor who works to broaden their community members’ understandings of social power relations, ultimately attempting to inspire individuals to reflect upon and work together against ongoing unjust hegemonic practices. Since its beginnings as a part of the hip hop movement, rap music has been harnessed as an informal, noninstitutional means of counter-​education, allowing for the production and sharing of knowledge excluded from mainstream media channels and institutions. Public Enemy member Chuck D has, on numerous occasions, referred to rap music as “CNN for black people” (Chang 2004), highlighting the significance this genre holds in providing alternative understandings of reality and hopes for the future. Jeff Chang has extended Chuck D’s metaphor further, arguing that rap music has “become CNN for marginalized young people all around the world” (Riley 2012, para. 6). The resistance illustrated in rap music may occur in conjunction with artists’ larger visions and imagination of solidarity with other alienated individuals or communities across the globe, whether such communities are located in the urban areas of the Bronx or in the suburbs of Helsinki. Transnational social resistance vis-​à-​vis engagement with rap can be understood as fulfilling a greater purpose—​one through which individuals can imagine international solidarity via membership in an international hip hop community. This kind of engagement recalls Appadurai’s description of “the imagination as a social process” (1996, 31) allowing people to make sense of complex transnational issues by envisioning different possibilities Mills (2000). Transnational processes affecting the distribution and production of music have resulted in profound changes with regard to the use of and access to rap music. Chang (2005) has noted that in recent decades, global media conglomerates have, in some ways, stifled the artistic diversity distributed through traditional mainstream media channels such as radio and television; however, being a music artist of any genre in the Internet age means that wide exposure is not contingent upon official record company endorsements. Rather, the combination of having a computer, a YouTube account, and access to digital samples has allowed individuals to not only gain wide exposure to and receive feedback on their music but also to maintain greater control over their image and potential career choices. No longer requiring the official approval of big media, several artists have managed to create careers largely from their strong online presence and the free distribution of their music through YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud, and other means. While some might argue that a decreased vetting process might call into question the artistic quality of artists whose careers rely on DIY musicianship, it can also be said that fewer external controls on an artist’s musicianship allows artists to take on more experimental projects and resist having their identity prescribed for them by record companies. However, the aura enveloping music today and the agency of artists with largely online presences obscure the reality of how local social conditions often produce or

314   Identity sustain the exclusion that commonly precipitates the development of rap at the local level around the globe. The current global-​digital flows of music and capital make it quite difficult for rap music to not be inherently transnational, as local contexts are shaped greatly by outside forces. In the case of Swedish rap in a larger Nordic context of championing human rights, the shifts of place and space among those in marginalized Swedish communities on account of war or other social upheaval has made it impossible for local concerns in these communities to be divorced from larger global human rights issues. Adam Tensta and Eboi are connected with other artists in the local community, the music industry, and the ongoing process of meaning negotiation that occurs across the web of interrelated private-​public life experiences that surface upon a closer engagement with these individuals’ public pedagogies as artists (D’Urso 2013; Giroux 2003). Here, the concept of public pedagogies (D’Urso 2012; Giroux 2004a, 2004b, 2004c) refers to educational materials produced and negotiated in the public sphere, referring to Nancy Fraser’s (2009) broadened development of this concept that distances itself from the original understanding of the public sphere as more dependent on Westphalian notions of statehood as the bound locus of civic participation (Habermas 2006). The term “educational materials” refers not to traditional understandings of a curriculum or lesson but, rather, to tangible and intangible sources (e.g., music, interviews, film, activist events) produced by individuals (public pedagogues) with the intent of imparting, disrupting, or encouraging discussion and knowledge negotiation outside of formal sites of education (D’Urso 2013; Giroux 2001; Sandlin, O’Malley, and Burdick 2011). Public pedagogies, like formal sources of education, are inherently political in that they are produced to achieve certain outcomes or to provide alternative or counter-​ hegemonic narratives. Furthermore, public pedagogies are necessary complements of individuals’ participation in civic life, given that these pedagogies are often widely accessible to individuals across society and provide opportunities for discussing current events. It should be noted that various forms of public pedagogy possess different kinds of affordances depending upon the medium in which the pedagogy takes shape; when engaging with such pedagogies, individuals might choose to focus on one or more specific aspects (e.g., a song’s lyrics, its musical qualities, how it is performed or disseminated, etc.). Thus, some public pedagogies can be viewed as multimodal owing to the creator’s and the public’s ability to engage with the material in diverse ways. For the purposes of this chapter, I engage primarily with the lyrics of the artists’ public pedagogies. Although the examples of public pedagogies discussed in this chapter are drawn from a Swedish context, it is worth noting that the power of these educational tools is by no means limited to the borders of the Swedish state. In fact, as global access to information on the Internet increases and public pedagogies are shared electronically, the pedagogical possibilities and opportunities for social change vis-​à-​vis engagement with these materials grows exponentially, making these public pedagogies an important means of inspiring social change both locally and globally.

Hip Hop as Public Pedagogy    315

Rap Pedagogy in a Swedish and Nordic Context Love (2012), Söderman (2011), Sernhede and Söderman (2010), Dimitriadis (2009), and Alim and Pennycook (2007) have called attention to the educational relationship between hip hop culture and music, each noting the ways in which hip hop culture’s music is locally and globally situated within wider currents of knowledge—​knowledge transmitted via various modes of public pedagogy and fraught with complicated messages and meanings, and understood in contexts made locally meaningful to those who engage with rap. In particular, Swedish rap, much like rap music from other areas around the world, has addressed the important place-​based aspect of hip hop culture. Eboi and Adam Tensta have drawn from their experience growing up in the suburbs of Stockholm to provide a locally grounded narrative that challenges the common perception of the Nordic countries’ fulfillment of democratic values. Narratives of Nordic equality have found counter-​narratives in the music of Eboi and Adam Tensta, who have been denied full access to the privileges of being unquestionably Nordic or Swedish. As Mulinari et al. (2009, 3–​4) have noted, “the construction of [Nordic] exclusive national identities is built upon a notion of belonging grounded in ‘race’/​ethnicity, and where distinctions, such as the one between ‘the nation’ and ‘the immigrants,’ are systematically created and reinforced.” The resistance to Othering and exclusion expressed in Eboi and Adam Tensta’s music alludes to the existence of a system of privilege accessible to some based on their status as white majority members. The acknowledgment of an unnamed system of privilege echoes Charles W. Mills’s description of the racial contract, which addresses the existence of white privilege and the inability for many white majority individuals to understand their complicitness in this system of oppression: Personhood can be taken for granted by some, while it (and all that accompanies it) has to be fought for by others, so that the general human political project of struggling for a better society involves a different trajectory for nonwhites. It is no accident, then, that the moral and political theory and practical struggles of nonwhites have so often centered on race, the marker of personhood and subpersonhood, inclusion within or exclusion from the racial polity. (Mills 1997, 111)

Although it might be considered taboo in the Nordic countries to acknowledge race as a category of discrimination (Hübinette and Tigervall 2009), those who are often on the receiving end of racist policies, practices, or behaviors find it difficult to deny the fact that they are indeed treated differently on the basis of their skin color. Calling attention to the reality that racism and discrimination exist in the Nordic region speaks to the power of “public struggle over recognition” (Shannon 2000, 90), through which individuals’ life experiences are validated by virtue of their stories being heard in the public sphere.

316   Identity One of critical pedagogy’s central figures, Henry A. Giroux, has stated that “as moral and political practice, pedagogy is about the struggle for identity just as much as it is a struggle over what counts as knowledge” (2012, para. 10). Giroux describes critical pedagogy as a means of “locat[ing] discursive practices in a broader set of interrelations, but it analyzes and gives meaning to such relations by defining them within particular contexts constructed through the operations of power as articulated through the interaction among texts, teachers, and students” (Giroux 2003). Pairing this interpretation of critical pedagogy with understandings of social constructionism (Bauman and May 2001; Falkheimer and Heide 2006; Gergen 2009) allows for the understanding that individuals, working within existing realities in their societies, possess the ability to articulate identity vis-​à-​vis the social and educational structures and forces available at their disposal. Using public pedagogies as a means to educate individuals by including and thus validating minority individuals’ viewpoints, it is possible to enact what Carl Anders Säfström (2010) has referred to as a “pedagogy of dissensus,” which he likens to democracy. In a pedagogy of dissensus, or “the force through which the naturalness of orders is undone” (16), individuals whose voices have not been heard are able to legitimize themselves as speakers and introduce viewpoints that were previously unspoken or unheard. Articulating identity by engaging with subversive forms of public pedagogy such as rap music provides an excellent starting point to address how social structures and political policy in the neoliberal-​leaning welfare state have served to disenfranchise citizens of certain backgrounds. Describing the neoliberal assault against public schooling and youth in the United States, Giroux (2003) argues that instead of producing citizens who are capable of critical thought and are encouraged to participate in public life, the neoliberal influence on social and educational policies has essentially renegotiated democratic notions of citizenship and replaced these with an individualistic consumerism. While educational outcomes for individuals of foreign origin have worsened since the 1990s when neoliberal educational policies were adopted in Sweden (Johansson and Olofsson 2011; Söderman 2011), the issue of exclusion goes deeper than access to formal sites of education. Although far-​right political party participation has been growing in the Nordic region, the longstanding tropes of Nordic equality, welfare, and access to education appear to provide so strong a hold on the regional psyche that it is difficult for many individuals to accept the fact that racism and unequal access to Nordic identities exist (Palmberg 2009). In fact, Palmberg has argued that belief in a kind of Nordic exceptionalism in relation to the problematic development of colonialism in Western Europe, combined with the self-​image of the Nordic countries as protectors of equality and access to the welfare state safety net, has resulted in widespread difficulty understanding how to address racism from within this artificial democratic utopia: “We are less prepared than we need be for the prejudices encountered by immigrants of colour, and even less so for the incidents of racist crimes. Racism is simply seen as bad and extremely impolite behavior towards foreign guests, but not as part of an inherited ideology” (36–​37). Palmberg’s statement does not adequately address the diversity and complexity of experiences of those of foreign origin in the Nordic countries. She does not differentiate

Hip Hop as Public Pedagogy    317 between immigrants and those born in Nordic countries to one or more foreign parents. However, her point stands that acknowledgment of racism and discrimination is often quite a difficult task in the Nordic region. It has been argued that the Scandinavian tradition of folkbildning has played what appears to be a significant role in how Swedish rappers have taken up identity discussions in a deliberately local context, all the while not losing sight of larger hip hop ideals such as using the power of education to achieve radical social changes. In particular, Söderman (2011) has investigated how hip hop’s inherent pedagogical possibilities compare with the values of folkbildning, which he describes as a movement driven by democratic views of education as an emancipatory and transformative process and accessible by all regardless of socioeconomic status. Initial inspiration for hip hop movements in the Nordic countries may have been gained vis-​à-​vis engagement with American rap, and Swedish rap music has certainly contained references to social struggles and minority alienation across the world. However, faced with the threat of growing neoliberal social policy, increasing intolerance in the public sphere, and ongoing discrimination against Swedes of foreign origin, it is perhaps the underlying cultural value placed on folkbildning that has provided a fertile ground upon which Swedish artists have been able to successfully call attention to important social questions.

“Scandinavian Born and Raised, Far from Ashamed of My Immigrant Name” Eboi and Adam Tensta have challenged discrimination and racism from their positions as public pedagogues since becoming active rappers.1 These artists’ work as hip hop “educators” has developed via utilization of various modes of public pedagogy, including music; interview activism (D’Urso 2013), video and music projects done in partnership with anti-​racist youth organizations, Internet pedagogies including Twitter and Facebook, and more. Both artists are prolific producers of public pedagogies largely distributed online, and the amount of material they have developed and disseminated during their careers as artists thus far is extremely large. Therefore, the pieces described herein have been selected for their particular relevance in developing the recent ongoing public discussion on the issues of exclusion and racism in Sweden. More specifically, these artists have been chosen as examples owing to their increased output of anti-​racist public pedagogies in the wake of the 2010 Swedish national elections, when the far-​right Sweden Democrats gained parliamentary representation for the first time. Although Eboi and Adam Tensta are not the only rappers in Sweden or the Nordic countries who address racism and discrimination on the basis of ethnic origin or racial otherness, their direct challenging of racist statements put forth by the Sweden Democrats in a time when many anti-​racist activists altogether refuse to engage with this party makes them notable hip hop pedagogues worthy of study. The examination of Adam Tensta

318   Identity and Eboi’s public pedagogies in this chapter will not touch upon how audiences mediate and negotiate knowledge put forth by these artists. While the work of Eboi and Adam Tensta sometimes overlaps as both artists collaborate often with each other, there is a definite contrast between the more highly visible, internationally known career of Adam Tensta and the (until quite recently) more underground, less mainstream career of Eboi. Though the public pedagogies easily retrievable online, especially interviews, tend to number higher when speaking of Adam Tensta, Eboi’s contribution to the Stockholm hip hop scene has been consistent, even if until quite recently under the mainstream radar. Eboi’s first solo album (released under his real name, “Erik Lundin”), Suedi, came out in November 2015, at the time of this writing. Previously, he has appeared to favor distribution in online services such as YouTube, SoundCloud, and Spotify. Eboi is credited as an author of three of the tracks on Adam Tensta’s first album. One particular song, “Dopeboy,” was released earlier in Adam Tensta and Eboi’s careers. In “Dopeboy,” Adam Tensta narrates from the perspective of a stereotyped young black man, with the apparent goal of challenging common situations in which he and other men of color are systematically discriminated against. In the refrain, Eboi asks repeatedly, “Do I look like I sell drugs?” The narrator’s perspective in “Dopeboy,” from which interlocutors are called out for associating black men with drugs, recalls the trope that Katheryn Russell-​Brown (2009, 62) refers to as “living while black,” in which black people, especially men, are confronted with the racialized, stereotyped association of being drug dealers. Although Adam Tensta has stated that he chose his stage name in order to contribute to more positive public descriptions of his neighborhood, Tensta (Hedström, n.d.), neither he nor Eboi attempts to gloss over or glamorize the real challenges facing individuals in Tensta or other Stockholm suburbs. Instead, both Adam Tensta and Eboi contribute their insider perspectives to provide more nuanced explanations as to why their neighborhoods face certain challenges. In his song “Jungle,”2 Eboi states: More nations represented in my hood than the damn Olympics Homie got baby pictures Holding weapons the size of Jada Pinkett Whatchu know about war About drones About death squads at the door Ya family house in ruins, family reunions at the morgue In a country where the regime is Cutting the heads off non-​believers Some of them seen ‘em kill nephews and nieces, grandfolks blown to pieces Then they come here where some of them turn to Islam, some of them turn to Jesus Then again, some of them turn to pieces So in turn the murder rate increases

In this excerpt, Eboi draws connections between the trauma faced by individuals (i.e., refugees) who have been displaced because of war in their home countries, and the

Hip Hop as Public Pedagogy    319 ensuing challenges facing them in a Swedish context. While many question whether the Swedish government’s efforts to resettle refugees in Sweden have been substantive enough, and still others argue that the government spends too much money on refugee resettlement, Eboi directly addresses the psychic trauma and challenges that have followed individuals during their global border crossing. In naming this trauma, Eboi gives an emic historical context for why violence is manifested in his neighborhood, thus providing his listeners with a more sensitive and less judgmental means of understanding the challenges facing certain individuals there. Furthermore, such a perspective de-​pathologizes violence as a personal problem and situates it instead within a global context of wars, fights for natural resources, and genocide. By sharing his voice as that of a member from his particular neighborhood, Eboi provides personal descriptions of suffering that humanize and contextualize individuals as they were situated first outside of the Nordic region, with the result being that their presence and difficulties make more sense within Sweden and a greater Nordic context. Refugees and others of immigrant origin who have relocated to the Nordic region, especially those from Africa and the Middle East, have in most cases been excluded from being perceived as full citizens; however, as Marstal (Chapter 17) notes, popular music has afforded nonethnic Scandinavians an empowering means of situating their own experiences within the dominant discourse. When using Eboi’s and Adam Tensta’s public pedagogies as a means to understand how discrimination and racism are experienced, certain patterns emerge. For example, in Eboi’s song entitled “Precinct,”3 he states: And they wanna blame immigration We far from one race, but all in one place –​better blame segregation Nobody cared it was all well and quiet Till the kids in the hoods started riots

The far-​right Sweden Democrats have attempted to harness individuals’ frustrations over the economic crisis and the current influx of refugees in order to find a common enemy to blame for economic challenges. Just as many extreme political parties have done elsewhere in Europe, the Sweden Democrats have used discussion about national identity to promote a static notion of nationhood that Bella Frank (2012) argues has replaced former rhetoric on racism informed by race biology. Eboi’s response in “Precinct” acknowledges not only the Sweden Democrats’ extremist pandering to individuals’ fears of the Other, but also it addresses the fact that the physical separation of refugees and others of foreign origin in The Million Program4 housing projects, combined with a seemingly willful popular culture reluctance to acknowledge and problematize the fact that nonethnic Swedes are constantly racialized (Hübinette and Tigervall 2009), has allowed individuals outside these areas to live lives completely divorced from these communities (except for the often problematic information that outsiders can read in newspapers or hear on the radio and TV).

320   Identity

From Covert to Overt Public Pedagogues One of Eboi’s and Adam Tensta’s initial overt forays into using their status as public pedagogues to effect social change occurred in 2009, when they produced a remix of Swedish hip hop group Infinite Mass’s song “Area Turns Red” using new lyrics as part of a larger educational project. The Area Turns Red project was released by an anti-​racist youth organization, Alla lika alla olika, in partnership with mobile phone operators Tele2 and Comviq and Respect My Hustle Entertainment, the last of which is the hip hop collective where Eboi and Adam Tensta are professionally affiliated. A video using the song and provocative images of racist events in Sweden was used in Swedish public schools as a tool to renew public dialogue on issues of xenophobia and to get young people interested in fighting prejudice and discrimination. Furthermore, a website with a discussion forum was opened for people to discuss the project and their personal reactions to it. During the past few years, Eboi and Adam Tensta have collaborated with other artists on a song and accompanying video called “Tystas Ner” (Quieted Down) and “Tystas Ner Remix,” the latter of which was released on Sweden’s National Day in 2012. Produced by the artist Stress, “Tystas Ner” signifies a turning point in Adam Tensta’s and Eboi’s work, as both artists prior to this point had largely produced music public pedagogies in English. Both versions of the song have been quite controversial, and immediately following the first time the original version of “Tystas Ner” aired on the radio, over two hundred people reported the song as being an attack on a group—​the group being the Sweden Democrats. Hence, the song has been banned from the airwaves, although it has maintained a significant circulation on Spotify and YouTube. In “Tystas Ner Remix,”5 released intentionally on Sweden’s National Day in 2012, Adam Tensta raps: And you ask me why I don’t trust the law, shit You should ask the same question to the police officer Or to the elected politicians who fiddle away our money The same people who close schools and sit and wish for a homogenous country with blond blue-​eyed Swedes And at the same time sell out elderly people’s health care And have the guts to complain about satellite dishes And about one who just wants to live his life For where he moved from was death and he smelled it So fuck you and all those who think the same Integration’s just a word and it’s fucking just as good That we say it in black and white Certain people are worth less, not worth a fucking shit6

Adam Tensta highlights the contradiction between appeals to right-​wing populism and the consequences of neoliberal policies that have resulted in the increasing privatization

Hip Hop as Public Pedagogy    321 of health-​care services in Sweden—​a move that arguably values fiscal austerity over the well-​being of older, presumably ethnic Swedes. Furthermore, by linking the images of satellite dishes to hypocritical behavior from politicians and police officers, and back to the idea of Sweden as being ethnically monolithic, Adam Tensta provides a critical evaluation of how spaces in Sweden are sometimes clearly policed and judged on the basis of ethnic background and foreign origin. Members of the Sweden Democrats publicly criticized the artists involved in “Tystas Ner.” However, in my interview7 with Adam Tensta and Eboi, Adam Tensta noted that the song became an online social movement, spawning wider activity against racism and discrimination in a way that drowned out the Sweden Democrats’ opposition. This was not the first time that Adam Tensta used public pedagogies to limit the impact of the Sweden Democrats. In April 2011, a few months after Sweden Democrat leader Jimmie Åkesson’s fall 2010 appearance in the Swedish Parliament dressed in traditional southern Swedish folk costume, Adam Tensta appeared in an interview and photo shoot in Gaffa magazine. Dressed in the Swedish folk costume from the area where his mother grew up, Adam Tensta offered a verbal and visual rebuttal of Åkesson’s attempt to link Swedishness to white masculinity and political power. In this sense, Eboi and Adam Tensta have used their positions as public pedagogues not only to inform individuals about living conditions for those of foreign origin, but also to inspire social change, online mobilization, and trouble right-​wing populist notions of Swedishness through the dissemination of their public pedagogies.

Conclusion As a selection of Adam Tensta and Eboi’s music and active stances as public pedagogues show, rap music has become a “unique counterspace to explore possibilities for critical inquiry, sites of historical reclamation … [and] avenues that nurture an emancipatory imagination” (Porfilio and Viola 2012, 6). It is important for educators and others interested in understanding social exclusion to go beyond popular channels of information distribution and become engaged with the voices of pop culture educators within territorially stigmatized communities (Sernhede and Söderman 2010; Wacquant 2007) in order to get a better picture of how neoliberal assaults on the welfare state have affected people beyond what one might learn from uncritical mainstream depictions of “others” in Sweden and in the Nordic countries. This chapter has described examples of how Swedish rappers have acted as anti-​ racist public pedagoges by critically engaging with right-​wing populist notions of identity in Sweden. By focusing on the works of Eboi and Adam Tensta, both Swedes of foreign origin, I provided a space in which the artists’ voices and stories can bear witness to how the effects of global neoliberalism are brought to bear on life in the Nordic region, especially on individuals from stigmatized neighborhoods. Using rap music as a pedagogical medium of resistance to hegemonic narratives, Eboi and Adam Tensta are able to deconstruct Nordic notions of racial otherness and situate themselves as pedagogues within the changing welfare society. The examination of artists’ pedagogies

322   Identity in this manner builds upon social constructionist and critical pedagogy traditions of viewing identity as something locally constructed and critically challenged by public pedagogues. Although not addressing the performativity of Eboi and Adam Tensta’s public pedagogies nor how individuals mediate and negotiate the pedagogies put forth by these artists, it is my hope that this chapter will inspire further work that explores these aspects in different Nordic local contexts. The urgency to make room for and legitimize non-​ mainstream educators’ voices has increased in recent years, especially in proportion to the growing widespread xenophobia and racism across Europe.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

The section’s title is from Eboi’s song “Immigrants,” ©2011 by Eboi. ©2012 by Eboi. ©2011 by Eboi. Miljonprogrammet (The Million Program) was a Swedish government housing project that planned for the construction of 1 million new residences within a period of ten years during the 1960s and 1970s. 5. © 2012 by Stress, Sebbe Staxx, Malcolm B, Nimo, Promoe, Moms, Adam Tensta, and Aleks. 6. Translated from Swedish. 7. Author’s interview with the artists in Stockholm on October 31, 2012.

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Hip Hop as Public Pedagogy    323 Fischman, G., and P. McLaren. 2005. “Rethinking Critical Pedagogy and the Gramscian and Freirean Legacies:  From Organic to Committed Intellectuals or Critical Pedagogy, Commitment, and Praxis.” Cultural Studies↔ Critical Methodologies 5(4): 425–​446. Frank, B. 2012. “Det nya arbetarpartiet” [The New Workers’ Party]. Arena, October, 27–​29. Fraser, N. 2009. Scales of Justice:  Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World. New York: Columbia University Press. Gergen, K. J. 2009. An Invitation to Social Construction, 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Sage. Giroux, H. 2001. “Breaking Into the Movies:  Pedagogy and the Politics of Film.” JAC 21(3): 583–​598. Giroux, H. 2003. Public Spaces, Private Lives: Democracy Beyond 9/​11. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. Giroux, H. 2004a. “Cultural Studies and the Politics of Public Pedagogy: Making the Political More Pedagogical.” Parallax 10(2): 73–​89. Giroux, H. 2004b. “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals.” Communication and Critical/​Cultural Studies 1(1): 59–​79. Giroux, H. 2004c. “The Politics of Public Pedagogy.” In If Classrooms Matter: Progressive Visions of Educational Environments, ed. J. Di Leo and W. Jacobs, 15–​36. New York: Routledge. Giroux, H. 2012. “Henry A.  Giroux:  Can Democratic Education Survive in a Neoliberal Society?” Truthout. At http://​truth-​out.org/​opinion/​item/​12126-​can-​democratic-​education-​ survive-​in-​a-​neoliberal-​society. Gramsci, A. 2000. “X: Intellectuals and Education.” In The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916–​1935, ed. D. Forgacs, 300–​322. New York: New York University Press. Habermas, J. 2006 [1964]. “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article.” In Media and Cultural Studies: KeyWorks, ed. M. Durham and D. Kellner, 73–​78. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Hedström, F. (n.d.). “Adam Tensta tar rappen från förorten” [Adam Tensta Takes Rap from the Suburb]. At http://​archive.is/​mf2yN. Hübinette, T., and C. Tigervall. 2009. “To Be Non-​ White in a Colour-​ Blind Society: Conversations with Adoptees and Adoptive Parents in Sweden on Everyday Racism.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 30(4): 335–​353. Johansson, T., and R. Olofsson. 2011. “The Art of Becoming “Swedish”:  Immigrant Youth, School Careers and Life Plans.” Ethnicities 11(2): 184–​201. Love, B. 2012. Hip Hop’s L’il Sistas Speak: Negotiating Hip Hop Identities and Politics in the New South. New York: Peter Lang. Mills, C. W. (2000). The sociological imagination (2nd ed.). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Mills, C. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mitchell, T. 2001. Global Noise: Rap and Hip-​hop Outside the USA. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Mulinari, D., S. Keskinen, S. Irni, and S. Tuori. 2009. “Introduction: Postcolonialism and the Nordic Models of Welfare and Gender.” In Complying with Colonialism: Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region, ed. S. Keskinen, S. Tuori, S. Irni, and D. Mulinari, 1–​16. Surrey: Ashgate. Palmberg, M. 2009. “The Nordic Colonial Mind.” In Complying with Colonialism: Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region, ed. S. Keskinen, S. Tuori, S. Irni, and D. Mulinari, 35–​50. Surrey: Ashgate. Porfilio, B., and M. Viola 2012. Hip-​hop(e):  The Cultural Practice and Critical Pedagogy of International Hip-​hop. New York: Peter Lang. Richardson, E. 2006. Hiphop Literacies. London: Routledge.

324   Identity Riley, T. 2012. “Still Fighting the Power.” Moyers and Company, May 18. At http://​billmoyers. com/​2012/​05/​18/​still-​fighting-​the-​power/​. Russell-​Brown, K. 2009. The Color of Crime: Racial Hoaxes, White Fear, Black Protectionism, Police Harassment, and Other Macroaggressions, 2nd ed. New  York:  New  York University Press. Säfström, C. 2010. “The Immigrant Has No Proper Name:  The Disease of Consensual Democracy within the Myth of Schooling.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 42(5–​6): 606–​617. Sandlin, J., P. O’Malley, and J. Burdick. 2011. “Mapping the Complexity of Public Pedagogy Scholarship.” Review of Educational Research 81(3): 338–​375. Sernhede, O., and J. Söderman. 2010. Planet Hiphop: Om hiphop som folkbildning och social mobilisering [Planet Hip Hop: On Hip Hop as Education and Social Mobilization]. Malmö, Sweden: Liber. Shannon, P. 2000. “‘What’s My Name?’ A Politics of Literacy in the Latter Half of the 20th Century in America.” Reading Research Quarterly 35(1): 90–​107. Söderman, J. 2011. “‘Folkbildning’ through Hip-​Hop: How the Ideals of Three Rappers Parallel a Scandinavian Educational Tradition.” Music Education Research 13(2): 211–​225. Wacquant, L. 2007. “Territorial Stigmatization in the Age of Advanced Marginality.” Thesis Eleven 91: 66–​77.

Chapter 17

Urban Musi c a nd t he C omplex I de nt i t i e s of “New Nati ona l s ” in Scandi nav ia Henrik Marstal

This chapter investigates the emergence of urban music among diasporic populations in Scandinavia, particularly youths of African, Middle Eastern, and Asian descent whose family history in Scandinavia dates back to the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s. Urban music originated as a marketing label in the 1980s in the United States and the United Kingdom, but has survived as a popular term for various kinds of popular musics in the African and other diasporas, such as hip hop, R&B, dubstep, dancehall, and related genres. The major trends in this landscape shaped by the corporate music industry and music journalists have played out in Scandinavia, too. Hip hop has had a particularly large following since it was introduced in the three Scandinavian countries of Sweden, Norway and Denmark in the late 1980s.1 The urban styles performed by the young diasporic populations in the following decades have become an important part of the local and national cultures of urban music and have pioneered a new consciousness of ethnicity and Otherness in mainstream pop culture.2 This chapter examines urban music in Scandinavia, with a comparative perspective on how musicians negotiate the hegemonic agendas of nationalism musically and discursively. The analysis illustrates the dynamics through examples of a few popular artists of diasporic populations. Scandinavians have been searching for terms to identify these populations, and none of the terms has been stable and without problems. This chapter adopts the term “New Nationals” with reference to the arrival of these diasporic populations in the late twentieth century. By that same token, the chapter is critical of the implied construction of time and difference, and ultimately inequality, throughout colonial history (Fabian 1983), with the implicit idea of an unmarked

326   Identity “white” normativity. Popular culture is a powerful arena for the construction of these distinctions. Studies of especially Scandinavian hip hop have offered valuable insights into the role of urban musics in local and regional identifications with place and culture. For instance, Mads Krogh and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen (2008, 13)  ask the question whether the prominence of cultural and geographical periphery in Scandinavian hip hop turns the traditional priority of cultural centers upside down, when the “glocalization” of the genre identifies and celebrates local centers in the hip hop nation. Johan Söderman (2011), in turn, discusses in a Swedish context how hip hop constitutes a platform of nonformal education and a tool for social activism for young “new Swedes” of immigrant background. The chapter partly draws on this research while also seeking to compensate for the fact that other urban music genres than hip hop remain quite underresearched in Scandinavian scholarship. Rare exceptions to this include the profound investigation into the “changes in the Swedish music landscape” associated with processes of multiculturalism, but not bound to popular music only, by Dan Lundberg, Krister Malm, and Owe Ronström (2000), and Sidsel Karlsen’s (2012) study on the multiple musical repertoires of young immigrants in the Nordic countries as a resource in striving for democracy. Thus, this chapter is among the first studies to broaden the field of inquiry to include other urban music styles, such as R&B and dancehall. The aim of this chapter is to offer an empirical account of how a number of New National urban artists have touched on political aspects of national identity and by doing so aroused controversy concerning the power relations between the political public sphere and New National communities (Hervik 2011) in a post-​9/​11 Western World (Bleich 2009). I will do this by investigating various political (and to a limited extent) social narratives in relation to four New National urban artists with considerable artistic, critical, and commercial outreach—​among these Adam Tensta (Sweden), Natasja (Denmark), Karpe Diem (Norway), and Outlandish (Denmark). The four artists all present different ways of dealing with, challenging, and underlining the abovementioned power relations, suggesting that certain minority perspectives now have entered mainstream music production and consumption. The use of music, lyrics, and visual representations have enabled these artists to critically comment on and oppose issues of marginalization primarily as a reaction to neo-​nationalistic agendas, not only among politicians and opinion makers but also in certain parts of the media. Even though the Nordic model has promoted notions of tolerance toward and acceptance of immigrant diasporas in Scandinavia, it has not hindered serious backlashes against the diasporas by neo-​nationalistic and immigrant-​reluctant ethnic Scandinavians. Tense, often emotional debates concerning political, social, and cultural aspects of immigration and assimilation have been part of the public debate, leaving many New Nationals in a vacuum concerning issues of national identity or national significance owing to what Hans Weisethaunet (2007, 195) calls the “multifaceted discursive and historical processes” of national narration. As the four cases indicate, New Nationals have been viewed as an obstruction to or even an enemy

Urban Music and the “New Nationals”    327 of the society’s coherence, and thus a threat to hegemonies of national identity and belonging. A rather hostile attitude toward New Nationalness has been a conditio sine qua non for neo-​nationalistic forces ever since the 1970s, often in connection with increasingly popular right-​ wing political parties displaying populistic and influential immigration-​critical agendas: Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party) in Denmark, Fremskrittspartiet (Progress Party) in Norway, and Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden Democrats) in Sweden. As a result, the political and cultural climate in each country has had rather heated political debates and harsh criticism of leading political authorities concerning minorities, not least because the three parties all have proven to be powerful catalysts for these debates. The consequence has been more strict government policies (see Mulinari et al. 2009, 7) carried out by parliaments that themselves contain very few minority members. The discourse on national belonging is no longer restricted to populations who are not marked by Otherness, but is also a matter for the New Nationals. Claiming the right to be respected as worthy citizens by articulating national belonging through their own artistic performances, New National artists broaden, challenge, and transform national culture, while at the same time complicating the very notion of national significance.

Urban Music and National Identity According to Philip V. Bohlman, the genre complexes of hip hop were “adopted and adapted” by black and Asian communities in order to “narrate their contemporary historical struggles and to move the voice of resistance to the public sphere” (Bohlman 2011, 234). The same can be said of R&B, dancehall, and pop, including also the notion of brown people. The transnational dynamics of the ongoing immigration debate remain indeed an important perspective on not only the abovementioned changing conditions of national significance but also on popular music in general (Hesmondhalgh 2013, 164). Ove Sernhede (2002) shows how hip hop in Sweden became one of the main forms of cultural expression for young males during the 1990s in the social housing areas of the three largest cities of the country—​Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö. This formed a profiled Swedish contribution to the hip hop nation that relates especially to the cultural expression of young, marginalized males all over the world. Sernhede’s interviewees generally understood themselves as immigrants with a strong, emotional connection to their own specific neighborhood, rather than as Swedish citizens (Sernhede 2002, 55, 93). No wonder that studies of immigrant youth culture in Scandinavia have cited hip hop “as the primary expression of ethnic youth identity” (Fock 1999, 70) and “the language of the pro-​active, anti-​racist youth” (Peterson 1995, 59). This is in accordance with the historical accounts of the genre, where a clear relation to one’s own local community has defined the genre aesthetically (Söderman 2007, 27–​ 28). In immigrant “ghettos” not unlike the ones in Germany, Italy, Great Britain, and

328   Identity France, the social exclusion that follows from physical segregation has been viewed as “neighborhoods of exile,” a term coined by Loic J. D. Wacquant (Sernhede 2002, 59). This is not necessarily the only identity formation practiced in the hip hop of New Europeanness, though. Lars Lilliestam has pointed toward the fact that many hip hop artists who appeared on the Swedish scene during the 1990s had a Swedish mother and a father from Africa, the West Indies, the United States, or a Muslim country. Some were born in Sweden, and most of them were raised in social housing areas in the largest cities of the country (Lilliestam 2013). Later on, a similar development took place in Norway and Denmark. The changed conditions have helped establish a new cultural production of “music in the image of the nation” (Bohlman 2004, 81), shaping a socially constructed national narrative that explores the participation and representation of a new generation of Scandinavian musicians with immigrant backgrounds. Many New Nationals have pointed to the fact that they were actually born and raised in a Scandinavian country, that they are Scandinavian citizens, and that they thus claim a moral right to be accepted and acknowledged as such. Kristine Ringsager (2016) shows how brown rappers in Denmark in the early twenty-​ first century negotiate citizenship and affiliation in their music. She argues that many of them feel “authorized yet unrecognized” (Sassen 2003, 14) because they hold a formal citizenship as Danes, but do not feel that this citizenship allows them to be full-​blown members of society. In other words, the alterity of brown rappers considered by the ethnic majority as racialization, ethnification, or what Homi Bhabha (2004, 19) has called “unhomeliness,” in which the individual in question lives on “the rim of an ‘in-​between’ reality.” Even though Othering may be impossible to escape, it is also empowering in that it contributes to the construction of a brand by which the artist in question accrues agency (Ringsager 2016, 153). Sune Qvortrup Jensen makes a similar observation: Othering discourses, even if they are experienced as painful, also open a space for agency. In a paradoxical way, agency as capitalisation illustrates the continued relevance of the concept of othering: Thinking in terms of othering allows us to grasp how power structures condition agency and to reflect on how historical symbolic meanings frame the possibilities at hand for negotiating identity. Capitalisation has elements of both resistance and reproduction, because it can be interpreted as an attempt to challenge the devaluation of the other, although it does not disrupt the category. (2011, 73)

This is the case with the urban music genres in question, because they frequently have served as a marker of authenticity for New Nationals. Many artists often touch upon first-​hand experiences of suppressed constructions of identity and lack of privileges (Harrell-​Levy, Kerpelman, and Henry 2016, 3), as well as the use of music as a medium of resistance (Ringsager 2016; Krogh and Pedersen 2008). To perform within the boundaries of mainstream urban music genres is perceived as a form of compliance with discourses of marginalization.

Urban Music and the “New Nationals”    329

Three Case Studies Early in the twenty-​first century, New National urban artists from all three countries emerged; among these were the Danish dancehall artist Natasja, the Swedish hip hop artist Adam Tensta, and the Norwegian hip hop duo Karpe Diem. All these artists are representative by being both commercially successful and critically acclaimed. They also hold status as household names, being consumed by mainstream audiences of diverse ethnicities.

Natasja (Denmark) In 2007, a single by Copenhagen-​based Natasja (Natasja Saad) entitled “Gi’ mig Danmark tilbage” (Gimme Denmark Back) was launched. The performer, raised in Denmark with a Danish mother and an immigrant Sudanese father, had recorded the song for her debut album, I Danmark er jeg født (I Was Born in Denmark). The success of “Gi’ mig Danmark tilbage” was fueled by her untimely death in the same year, which undoubtedly contributed to making it one of the most played songs in Denmark throughout 2007 and 2008, and winning several prizes. “Gi’ mig Danmark tilbage” was shaped as a protest song, addressing a string of problems in Danish society related to the change of values it had undergone during the decade. In this respect, the song is a reprimand to bourgeois mentality (E. Jensen 2010). In an uplifting and joyous manner, the song deals with frustration over the loss of traditional values and lack of respect for individuals in Danish society. The song refers to the open-​minded spirit and respect for each other’s differences that seemed to be in place in parts of Copenhagen in the 1970s when Natasja herself grew up (though this picture of Denmark might be an idealized construction). The song also dealt with the political reality of Dansk Folkeparti (Danish Folk Party); in one verse about Satan’s putting his efforts into changing Danish everyday culture, the lyrics go: “This is something they fancy in the Danish Party.” In May 2008, Dansk Folkeparti aroused controversy in the Danish media and among Natasja’s supporters by using the song title in its plural form: “Gi’ os Danmark tilbage” (Give Us Denmark Back) (Glanowski 2008). Owing to the immigrant-​critical agenda of the party, the slogan was seen as a wish to return to the “good old Denmark”—​that is, the times before the mid-​1960s, when there were virtually no non-​Western people living in Denmark (except for a few small Eastern European diasporas). This was seen as overtly provocative, given Natasja’s own immigrant background. The incident resulted in a debate about whether the party should be taken to court for violating copyright law, but this was abandoned, and the party actually used the slogan in a lengthy advertising campaign.

330   Identity

Adam Tensta (Sweden) The Stockholm-​based rapper Adam Tensta (Adam Momodou Eriksson Taal) released his debut album, It’s a Tensta Thing, in 2007 to considerable success in Sweden and to a certain extent outside the country as well. Tensta, a Swede with a Finnish-​Swedish mother and an immigrant Gambian father, was born and raised in a social housing complex in the Stockholm suburb of Tensta. Even though his songs are written in English and are performed in a smooth hip hop style without explicit political messages, Tensta is among a number of Swedish New Nationals who have used their art to make explicit critic remarks about everyday politics in the country, first and foremost the increasing political significance of nationalist, immigrant-​critical agendas brought forward by the political party Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden Democrats). When the party was elected to Parliament for the first time in September 2010, the party’s leader Jimmie Åkesson showed up at an official event related to the opening of the Parliament in a traditional Swedish folk costume from the region of Blekinge, thus making a strong symbolic connection between the party’s agenda and the notion of national significance.3 The happening became the object of much debate and outrage, and in April 2011, in response to Åkesson’s appearance, Tensta released his second album, Scared of the Dark. The album’s publicity strategy included using a front cover of the leading Swedish music magazine Gaffa, where Tensta posed in a Swedish folk costume as well (­figure 17.1).4 The folk costume represents his mother’s home region, and the headline on the front page, “Trygghet, tradition & mångfald” (Security, Tradition, & Diversity) was a mockery of Sverigedemokraterna’s successful campaign “Trygghet och tradition” (Security and Tradition), appropriating the campaign logo. The symbolic value of this reaction resides in Tensta’s attempt to take the power back from the political elite by neutralizing the national connotations of the folk costume. In the accompanying interview, Tensta claimed that the costume symbolizes a sense of belonging to his Swedish roots, and that ethnic diversity and Swedishness are two sides of the same coin (Franzén 2011; see also Chapter 16). In November 2011, Tensta took a step toward a more confrontational stance by contributing to a protest song directed at Sverigedemokraterna as well as racism in Sweden as such (Anon. 2012). The song “Tystas Ner” (Whispering Down) is a collaborative rap song performed by a number of artists, Tensta included, and it was aired on Sveriges Radio AB (the Swedish national radio broadcasting company). The lyrics scorned the party leader with strongly biased words claiming that Nazis were now members of the Parliament. However, even though the song caused strong reactions by leading Sverigedemokraterna members (Magnusson 2011), the incident did not arouse further controversy.

Karpe Diem (Norway) The Oslo-​based duo Karpe Diem, consisting of Magdi Ytreeide Abdelmaguid and Chirag Patel, made their recording debut in 2004 and soon became one of the most

Urban Music and the “New Nationals”    331

Figure 17.1  Adam Tensta posing on the front cover of the Swedish music magazine Gaffa in 2011. His traditional Swedish folk costume is a response to the use of a similar costume by politican Jimmie Åkesson of Sverigedemokraterna

popular hip hop artists in Norway, having released four albums between 2006 and 2012. Both members were born and raised in Norway, Abdelmaguid of a Norwegian mother and an Egyptian immigrant father, and Patel of an immigrant Indian mother and an immigrant Indian father who originally had migrated from Uganda.

332   Identity In the aftermath of the 2011 terrorist attacks in Oslo and on the Utøya island, the duo was invited to perform at one of the memorial concerts with other mainstream Norwegian artists, taking place on August 21 with many representatives of the Nordic political elite (see also Chapter 13). In this very case, a religious aspect played a significant role, since the duo has a Muslim and a Hindu background, respectively, but they performed in a Christian church together with Christian and atheist musicians for mainly a Christian community of Norwegians. One of the Karpe Diem singers actually mentioned this while introducing the song “Tusen Tegninger”; the song is about being a Muslim in modern Norway, arguing for tolerance between people of different origins. The singer added that he had never loved Norway as much as during the days preceding the memorial concert. The explicit national context of the performance helped underline that difference and sameness were not necessarily in opposition to each other but, rather, were mutually dependent. Thus, Karpe Diem touched on issues brought forth by the mourning nation and its political elite, especially Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, who had taken moral responsibility for the attacks, and who was also mentioned in the rewritten lyrics for one of the songs performed, “Byduer i dur.” A year after the attacks in Norway, Karpe Diem was harshly criticized in an op-​ed in the daily newspaper Dagbladet by a leading member of the youth organization of Fremskrittspartiet (Progress Party), Christer Kjølstad. He claimed the duo “portrayed themselves as Ghandi,” while earlier in their career they had urged their fans to kill and burn members of the party (Kjølstad 2012). MP Peter N. Myhre from Fremskrittspartiet echoed this by urging people to boycott the upcoming Norwegian Øya Festival, headlined by Karpe Diem (Solvik 2012). In an answer to Kjølstad and Myhre, Patel and Abdelmaguid (2012) asked rhetorically: Since when were their lyrics to be taken that literally? The cases of Natasja, Adam Tensta, and Karpe Diem show how identity formations of nationhood do not necessarily have to do with notions of a distant homeland. A sense of belonging to the national community where one was born and raised may be just as important, thus one is entitled to criticize the nation’s foundations and aims. The evidently hostile attitude toward immigrant-​critical political parties has indeed to do with the marginalization that the parties promote. The resulting controversy concerning all three artists in their respective homelands suggests that clashes between musical expression and political agendas are likely to be explosive when identity matters are at stake. Even though right-​wing parties might be more likely to interfere directly with and comment on issues of cultural production than would other parties, the parties in question engage with new formations of nationhood by means of confrontation rather than dialogue. Elements of self-​righteousness in the artists, as well as commercial strategies of sensation in the media and the music industry, may also be at stake here, since the act of pointing out marginalizing discourses in one’s own lived reality can easily be interpreted as markers of authenticity rather than markers of necessity. The cases hint to Veit Erlmann’s (1993, 5, 13) observation that “[d]‌ifference itself becomes the signified” when differentiated subsystems are being “heroized as ‘otherness’ and fetishized as

Urban Music and the “New Nationals”    333 marginality.” He labels this potential criticism “the production of difference,” because difference in commercialized music production “is no longer an antithesis to the system” (Erlmann 1994, 165 and 167). This suggests that the power relations in question might be much more complex and ambiguous than this chapter is able to prove, since national awareness and identity formations are not restricted to people of ethnic Scandinavian origin.

Outlandish and the Challenge of National Power Relations Another relevant example in terms of new formations of nationhood is the 2004 song “Man binder os på mund og hånd” (Our Mouths Are Sealed, Our Hands Are Tied) by the Danish R&B group Outlandish. The group consists of three males with immigrant backgrounds: Isam Bachiri, born in Denmark of immigrant parents from Morocco; Waqas Qadri, also born in Denmark of immigrant parents from Pakistan; and Lenny Martinez, born in Cuba of immigrant parents from Honduras, having moved to Denmark from Cuba with his parents as a teenager. Like Karpe Diem, the members of Outlandish have different religious backgrounds: Bachiri and Qadri are Muslims, while Martinez is a Catholic. The group performs primarily in English, but also incorporates Spanish, Arabic, and Urdu on a regular basis, and on special occasions, Danish as well. The lyrics often deal with matters of social engagement, daily immigrant life patterns, and the sense of marginalization (hence the name of the group). Songs like “Walou” (2000), “Guantanamo” (2002), and not least the MTV hit “Aicha” (2003) gained international hit status, allowing Outlandish to perform live around the world, including in the Middle East. Thus, Philip Bohlman identifies Outlandish as a voice of “a new generation of Muslim popular musicians … who bring raï and arabesk to Europe” (Bohlman 2011, 249). The group was formed in 1997 and its debut album, Outland’s Official (2000), soon established the group as “Danish hip hop’s first substantial manifestation of the multicultural and multiethnic reality that Denmark has become” (Christensen 2000, quoted in Ringsager 2016, 138; author’s translation). The group was heavily promoted by Danish authorities in concerts and TV shows as an example of “positive integration,” among these the Eurovision Song Contest, which Denmark hosted in 2001. “Man binder os på mund og hånd” was released as a single in June 2004 and soon became one of the most played hit songs on Danish commercial and national broadcasting radio stations for the rest of that year. The song was a highly syncretic cover version of a schlager that originally had been written in 1940 by poet Poul Henningsen and composer Kai Normann Andersen as a patriotic song against the German Occupation Army. Even though the original song was musically rooted in a rather distant yet trendy idiom, namely tango, its popularity as a “homeland song” has remained undiminished.

334   Identity Hence, Outlandish demonstrated a forced self-​positioning as belonging to and representing a marginalized and socially excluded group of people, while at the same time making a “forced positioning of others” (Harré and Langenhove 1999, 27–​28) by pointing to ethnic Danish audiences’ reluctant attitude toward New Nationalness, even though the same audiences hailed Outlandish as a skillful musical act. Yet, it is unclear whether the group actually forced its audiences to consider their own positionings through a stance pro et contra New Nationalness in itself. During the song, these lines are repeated numerous times in order to emphasize the protest aspect of the original: Our mouths are sealed, our hands are tied But the spirit cannot be slaved And no one is tied when the thought is free We hold an inner fortress here Which is strengthened in its own worth As long as we fight for what is precious to us5

The strong identification of a repressed people making a silent protest against its tyrants obtained a completely different socio-​political meaning when performed by Outlandish. In the context of New Nationalness, the group made the piece into a protest song that rebelled against the social exclusion and marginalization legitimized by politicians, opinion makers, and the media. The community referred to in the song title was no longer a national Danish population but, instead, a group of New Nationals marked by ethnic-​racial difference.6 With a smooth, laid-​back–​produced R&B song suitable for massive air play, Outlandish put the majority of ethnic Danes in a position that resembled the Nazi occupation, suggesting that ethnic Danes around the millennium were “guilty” of a similar crime. At the same time, they revoiced the original protest aspects of the song and spread its timeless political potential. Outlandish’s remake of “Man binder os på mund og hånd” at the distance of more than six decades challenged the long-​established and legitimate status of patriotic songs as “markers of a specific cultural narrative related to aspects of nation-​building practices” (Smith 1995, 90) and bearers of “fixed authenticities” (Connell and Gibson 2003, 19–​21). By deconstructing the content of the original schlager, Outlandish’s version borders on “new folk music,” a term used by Bohlman (2011, 231) for contemporary European musics creating “conscious acts of creativity, even re-​reoutings of the tradition itself ” within a national discourse. Thus, discourses on musical nationalism understood as a conceptual and a syncretic reaction to the political climate contributed to redefining a new stance for the public view of immigrant Danes. In this way, the production and consumption of popular music helped redefine the debate over national significance at the beginning of new millennium. In May 2004, Outlandish performed at Rock ‘n’ Royal, a national event that took place in Copenhagen in the sports and event arena Parken. The occasion marked the announcement of the wedding of the Crown Prince Frederik and Australian Mary

Urban Music and the “New Nationals”    335 Donaldson, thus entitled to be the future Queen of Denmark. As a venue, Parken is a symbolic bearer of Danishness, as the national soccer team plays its official home matches there. The event attracted 40,000 people and was televised live by the national broadcasting company, being a national event celebrating the Royal House of Denmark, institutionally supported by the national media and the political elite. The event took place amid heated debate on immigrant politics fueled by the fact that Dansk Folkeparti, led by Pia Kjærsgaard, had come into power in 2001 as the parliamentary support for the liberal-​conservative government led by Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The very name Kjærsgaard had long been a symbol of exclusion for most New Nationals, and many ethnic Danes as well. Several of the performers on stage, including ethnic Danes, took advantage of the situation to tacitly comment on the fact that the princess was a newcomer in a society where the media, politicians, and opinion makers had promoted intolerance toward Danes with an immigrant background. The aim was to put her national status into perspective and point to the irony of the situation. Outlandish used the event to premiere “Man binder os på mund og hånd.” Before playing the song, Isam Bachiri welcomed Donaldson to the country in English, and added: “But there is one person you should be aware of: Pia Kjærsgaard.” The remark was a unique political moment in the story of not only domestic hip hop but also of new formations of nationhood, since Bachiri spoke up against this powerful politician, who was present in the audience together with the prime minister and other leading Danish politicians. By doing a remake of a patriotic song that was an undisputable part of Danish cultural heritage related to the Nazi occupation, Outlandish showed that New Nationals in Denmark actually know and care about this heritage, contrary to the common rhetoric against immigrants. By referring to a beloved song for ethnic Danes about national mobilization, Outlandish executed a stealth maneuver to outwit the enemy, in this case Dansk Folkeparti. Moreover, Bachiri exposed the hypocrisy in the alliance between the national media, the Royal House, and the political elite to celebrate the welcoming of an immigrant. Mary Donaldson’s ethnicity as a white Australian was of course of great significance here, owing to the alleged “neutrality” of whiteness (Dyer 1997).⁠ Even though the House of Glücksburg, the ducal house from which the Danish Royal House descends, holds a long-​established tradition of marrying partners from other countries, the act of welcoming royal foreigners more warmly than others looked quite odd. The members of the Royal Family were thus taken as “moral hostages” by Outlandish, who insisted on the necessity of relating the New National music to the ongoing immigrant debate. However, the Royal House never officially reacted to the incident. Viewed as a nation-​building event during a period of a heated national debate concerning ethnicity, Rock ‘n’ Royal turned out to be vulnerable, when New Nationals like Outlandish met the event with this harsh critique. Arjun Appadurai states: As states lose their monopoly over the idea of nation, it is understandable that all sorts of groups will tend to use the logic of the nation to capture some or all of the state, or some or all of their entitlements from the state. This logic finds its maximum

Figure 17.2  The official poster for Dansk Folkeparti’s national campaign in 2004-​2005 called ‘Frisk pust over landet’ (A breath of fresh air across the country)

Urban Music and the “New Nationals”    337 power to mobilise where the body meets the state, that is, in those projects that we call ethnic and often misrecognise as atavistic. (1996, 157)

The Rock ‘n’ Royal incident can be understood in this light, since Outlandish used the logic of the nation to present an alternative view of the state as a result of a diasporic reality that could not and should not be hidden away, even on a royal occasion like the announcement of Crown Prince’s wedding. At the same time, the group destabilized the “race privilege” that the predominantly white elite and white spectators attending the show enjoyed maybe without even being aware of it. In this context, it is possible to view “Man binder os på mund og hånd” as a postnational statement by new Danes who were generally absent in the alliance among the media, the Royal House, and the political elite. The incident can also be seen as a challenge to the Nordic model, or the self-​picture of the region as a tolerant, peaceful, and appreciative place with a considerable care for other people (Griffiths 2004, 279). At the Rock ‘n’ Royal event, this self-​image was challenged because the “goodness” of the whole arrangement did not stand the test of hypocrisy in celebrating a newcomer from the other side of the globe in a media event aimed at the whole nation.7 In November 2005, the leading Danish music magazine Gaffa featured Outlandish on the front cover following the release of the group’s third album Closer Than Veins (­figure 17.2).8 On the cover, Outlandish pose in a mockery of a political campaign poster, which Dansk Folkeparti since December 2004 had promoted massively throughout the country (­figure 17.3).9 The cover has much in common with Tensta’s, discussed earlier. On the poster, Pia Kjærsgaard is portrayed along with her two closest partners in the party, Kristian Thulesen Dahl and Peter Skaarup, all three of them walking toward and smiling at the viewer in a relaxed manner. The text above them read “Frisk pust over landet” (A breath of fresh air across the country), which many Danes saw as an overt provocation, since “fresh air” could easily be seen as xenophobic. The party ignored the pressure, though, and used the slogan also during its election campaign in February 2005. By using media as a power tool to strike back at the campaign, Outlandish offered a reversal of the slogan: New Nationals in Denmark were not terrorists nor Islamists, but instead allowed the fresh air of diversity and global orientations blow across the country.

Transregional Aspects On a structural level, these case studies show how aspects of New Nationalness in Scandinavian societies encompass all three nations and point toward a similar set of references in mainstream urban music genres. On an individual level, though, the cases are quite dislocated from each other; for instance, Danish audiences do not know much about either Karpe Diem or Tensta. However, the transnational perspectives of urban music made by New Nationals remain a special case.

338   Identity

Figure 17.3  Outlandish‘s mock-​up of Dansk Folkepartis’ national campaign poster from 2004-​ 2005 (see fig. 2) on the front cover of the Danish music magazine Gaffa in 2005

The introduction to this volume rightly assumes that popular music contributes to the creation of new cultural geographies and center-​periphery dynamics. However, the quest for transnational cultural connections mentioned as a conditio sine qua non for Nordic popular music discourses (Introduction chapter), could be enhanced by suggesting a transregional perspective on New National urban music as well. Here, I draw inspiration from other Nordic scholars, namely Hans Weisethaunet (2007, 195), who claims that music studies more often than not is “delimited by the

Urban Music and the “New Nationals”    339 borders of the nation,” and Jan Sverre Knudsen (2011, 81, 78), who maintains that transnational cultural expressions may be challenged by “complete new cultural constellations and social alliances.” The transregional perspective is adequate for musics of national or transnational significance, and it can undoubtedly be used for several purposes. In this specific case, it is useful for analyzing aspects of New Nationalnesss common to the national discourses in question. The most important aspect might be the challenging of immigrant-​critical right-​wing political agendas, which all four case studies bear evidence of. Even though each challenge has had different consequences, the four cases are similar in that a song has led to controversy in the media regarding New Nationals and the most xenophobic political party in each country. In all four cases, a similar New National agenda has succeeded in combining political criticism with a strong commercial following, supported by the media. Thus, this criticism is transregional even though the cases most likely did not inspire each other.

Conclusion In an era when postnationalism has been suggested as an analytical frame for the hypothetical decline of the nation-​state owing to globalization processes (Berezin and Schain 2003), as well as transnational processes (Knudsen 2011, 78), New Nationals in Europe seem to be less loyal to the concept of the nation as a society of fulfillment. To quote Appadurai (1996, 169) again, “[W]‌hile nations might continue to exist, the steady erosion of the capabilities of the nation-​state to monopolise loyalty will encourage the spread of national forms that are largely divorced from territorial states.” One of these national forms could easily be the diasporic pluralism that constitutes New Europeanness in combination with the hip hop nation, opposing itself against any kind of intolerance toward New Nationals of Europe based on a primordial idea of the nation-​state (Özkirimli 2000, 64), which for New Nationals of Scandinavia might have been one of the results of the self-​image related to the Nordic model. This is another reason for imposing a transregional perspective on the study of New Nationals within urban music, as well as other music genres and art forms. Following Paul Gilroy (1987), it is possible to view hip hop and urban genres in general as the latest development in the transatlantic black diaspora cultures that originated with the slave trade. Two central stances can be identified: the critique of illegitimate use of power (not least in the shape of prejudices fueled by the media) and the critique of the erasure of historical knowledge in late modern society. Both of these forms of critique are inherent in the four mentioned songs, especially the one by Outlandish. The illegitimate use of power concerns marginalization strategies advocated by politicians, opinion makers, and the media, which the incidents related to the four songs all proved. The erasure of historical knowledge in relation to New European identities, however, was turned upside down in the incidents as well, since they all

340   Identity pointed at a certain amount of knowledge about the nation in question and identification with the cultural heritage. However, the incidents also show how, in Helena Simonett’s (2007, 90)  phrasing, music can offer “palatable data for understanding societies in transition because music has played and continues to play a crucial role in the transformation of societies.” Moreover, the songs prove Martin Stokes’s (1997, 4) point that music “does not simply ‘reflect’ ” but, rather, “provides the means by which the hierarchies of place are negotiated and transformed.” The different contexts in which the songs emerged have brought forward new ways of reproducing the concept of transnationalism and transregionalism. The songs have emphasized the role of the New Nationals as participants in discourses concerning nationalism (Özkirimli 2000, 203) and regionalism as well, since ethnic identities “are constituted, maintained and evoked in social processes involving diverse intentions, constructions of meaning and conflicts” (221). In other words, the New Nationals have multiple identifications (O’Flynn 2007, 25). Thus, the analyzed songs might have contributed to a new cultural interaction between New Nationals and certain political agendas in the Scandinavian countries, which hitherto has been completely unseen in the history of popular music in the region. National matters related to the reception history of popular music have of course been at stake before, but the New Nationals have used their alterity as a creative resource for claiming statements related to their own national sentiment and to their appeal for inclusion of all ethnic Scandinavians. Owing to this, at least some of the urban music made by New Nationals has attempted to transcend the barriers between culture and politics, showing how self-​positioning of ethnic origins in popular musical contexts is a way to strike back at national “empires” when marginalism and social exclusion are at issue, on one hand, and respect, on the other. Kristine Ringsager (2016, 134)  claims that the alterity of New Nationalness in Denmark is being confronted on the music scene, but also made into a powerful branding tool, in which struggles related to politics, power, and representation are being fought. Keeping in mind how many New National urban artists have emerged since the early 2010s, it seems that scholars need new and more multicultural conceptions of the national perspective if the power relations between New Nationalness and transregional discourses are to be analyzed more elaborately with regard to musical value.

Notes This chapter was written as part of a research project at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen, Denmark, funded by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs. 1. For a short historical account of hip hop in Scandinavia, see Krogh and Pedersen 2008. 2. It is important to bear in mind that “ ‘ethnic’ markers, like any others, are the negotiated products of multiple, labile, and historically constituted difference-​making processes. They operate upon social space, and do not simply reflect differences already ‘there’ ” (Pegg et al. [n.d.], quoted in Skjelbo 2015, 41).

Urban Music and the “New Nationals”    341 3. A picture of the incident can be seen here: http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?progra mid=161&artikel=4075332. 4. The magazine front cover is shown with kind permission of Gaffa. 5. The words were written by Poul Henningsen in 1940 (and translated by the author). In the original version, the words are: “Man binder os på mund og hånd, men man kan ikke binde ånd/​og ingen er fangne, når tanken er fri/​Vi har en indre fæstning her som styrkes i sit eget værd/​når bare vi kæmper for det vi kan li’.” 6. This is only one part of the story, though. On its official website, the group stated shortly after the release of the single that the song was written in support of several oppressed peoples, among these the Palestinian people. 7. This notion is being paralleled in a study about colonialism in the Nordic region, where Diana Mulinari and others claim that the region consists of countries that “have managed to retain an image of themselves as untouched by colonial legacies” (Mulinari et al. 2009, 2). This is the case, even though “contemporary cultural racism … marginalises in particular those who have migrated from outside of Europe to the Nordic countries” (4). 8. The magazine front cover is shown with kind permission of Gaffa. 9. The magazine front cover is shown with kind permission of Dansk Folkeparti.

References Works Cited Anon. 2012. “Sverige Radio spiller musik som mordhotar Jimmie Åkesson” [The Swedish National Radio Plays Music Which Is a Death Threat to (leader of Sweden Democrats) Jimmie Åkesson]. Sverige i dag, February. At http://​sverigeidag.wordpress.com/​tag/​adam​tensta-​jimmie-​akesson. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Berezin, M., and M. Schain, eds. 2003. Europe Without Borders. Remapping Territory, Citizenship, and Identity in a Transnational Age. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Bhabha, H. 2004. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bleich, E. 2009. “Muslims and the State in the Post-​9/​11 West: Introduction.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35(3): 353–​360. Bohlman, P. V. 2004. The Music of European Nationalism: Cultural Identity and Modern History. Santa Barbara: ABC-​Clio. Bohlman, P. V. 2011. Focus. Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe, 2nd ed. New York and London: Routledge. Christensen, R. 2000. “Dansk hiphops nye farver” [The New Colours of Danish Hip hop]. Information, April 26. Connell, J., and C. Gibson. 2003. Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place. London and New York: Routledge. Dyer, R. 1997. White: Essays on Race and Culture. London: Routledge. Erlmann, V. 1993. “The Politics and Aesthetics of Transnational Musics.” World of Music 35(2): 3–​15. Erlmann, V. 1994. “‘Africa Civilised, Africa Uncivilised’:  Local Culture, World System and South African Music.” Journal of South African Studies 20(2): 165–​179.

342   Identity Fabian, J. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Fock, E. 1999. “With the Background in the Foreground—​Music Among Young Danes with Immigrant Backgrounds.” Young 7(2): 62–​77. Franzén, F. 2011. “För Sverige—​i tiden” [For Sweden—​in Present Times]. Gaffa [Swedish edition], April, 18–​20. Gilroy, P. 1987. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. London: Unwin Hyma. Glanowski, S. M. 2008. “DF’s brug af Natasja forarger” [The Danish Folk Party’s Use of Natasja’s Words Is Offending]. Politiken, May 3. Griffiths, T. 2004. Scandinavia: At War with Trolls: A History from the Napoleonic Era to the Third Millennium. London: Hurst. Harré, R., and L. van Langenhove. 1999. “Introducing Positioning Theory.” In Positioning Theory: Moral Contexts of Intentional Action, ed. R. Harré and L. van Langenhove, 14–​31. Oxford: Blackwell. Harrell-​Levy, M. K., J. L. Kerpelman, and D. Henry. 2016. “‘Minds Were Forced Wide Open’:  Black Adolescents’ Identity Exploration in a Transformative Social Justice Class.” Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, January 14, 1–​15. Hervik, P. 2011. The Annoying Difference: The Emergence of Danish Nationalism, Neoracism, and Populism in the Post-​1989 World. New York: Berghahn. Hesmondhalgh, D. 2013. Why Music Matters. Malden, MA: Wiley/​Blackwell. Jensen, E. 2010. “Det’ ik’ politik—​det’ pis og polemik” [It’s Not Politics—​It’s Bullshit and Polemics]. Politiken, December 29. Jensen, S. Q. 2011. “Othering, Identity Formation and Agency.” Qualitative Studies 2(2): 63–​78. Karlsen, S. 2012. “Multiple Repertoires of Ways of Being and Acting in Music:  Immigrant Students’ Musical Agency as an Impetus for Democracy.” Music Education Research 14(2): 131–​148. Kjølstad, C. 2012. “Rapper about tortur og drap” [(They) Rap About Torture and Murder]. Dagbladet, August 2. Knudsen, J. S. 2011. “Music of the Multiethnic Minority: A Postnational Perspective.” Music and Arts in Action 3(3): 77–​91. Krogh, M., and B. S. Pedersen, eds. 2008. Hiphop i Skandinavien [Hip Hop in Scandinavia]. Copenhagen: Aarhus Universitetsforlag. Lilliestam, L. 2013. Rock på svenska. Från Little Gerhard till Laleh [Rock in Swedish. From Little Gerhard to Laleh]. Gothenburg: Bo Ejeby Förlag. Lundberg, D., K. Malm, and O. Ronström. 2000. Musik—​medier—​mångkultur. Förändringar i svenska musiklandskap. Hedemora: Gidlunds. Magnusson, D. 2011. “Hiphop-​låt upprör SD-​medlemmar” [Hip Hop Song Causes Stir among Members of Sweden's Democrats]. Gaffa [Swedish edition], November 2, 2009. At http://​ gaffa.se/​nyhet/​54244. Mulinari, D., S. Keskinen, S. Irni, and S. Tuori. 2009. “Introduction:  Postcolonianism and the Nordic Models of Welfare and Gender.” In Complying with Colonialism: Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region, ed. S. Keskinen, S. Tuori, S. Irni, and D. Mulinari, 1–​16. London: Ashgate. O’Flynn, J. 2007. “National Identity and Music in Transition: Issues of Authenticity in a Global Setting.” In Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location, ed. I. Biddle and V. Knights, 19–​38. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Özkirimli, U. 2000. Theories of Nationalism:  A  Critical Introduction. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave.

Urban Music and the “New Nationals”    343 Patel, C., and M. Y. Abdelmaguid. 2012. “Når begynte vi å tolke alle sangtekster bokstavelig?” [When Did We Begin to Interpret All Song Lyrics Literally?]. Dagbladet, August 10. Pegg, C., H. Myers, P. Bohlman, and M. Stokes. n.d. “Ethnomusicology.” In Grove Music Online. At http://​www.oxfordmusiconline.com/​public/​book/​omo_​gmo. Peterson, A. 1995. “Walls and Bridges.” Young 3(4): 54–​70. Ringsager, K. 2016. ““Danmark, som vi kender det”: Forhandlinger af medborgerskab og andethed i hiphopmusik” [Denmark as We Know It: Negotiations of Citizenship and Otherness in Hip Hop]. In Populærmusikkultur i Danmark efter 2000 [Popular Music Culture in Denmark After 2000], ed. M. Krogh and H. Marstal, 127–​163. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark. Sassen, S. 2003. “Towards Post-​National and Denationalized Citizenship.” In Handbook of Citizenship Studies, ed. E. F. Isin and B. S. Turner, 277–​291. London: Sage. Sernhede, O. 2002. AlieNation Is My Nation. Hiphop och unga mäns utanförskap i Det Nye Sverige. Stockholm: Ordfront Förlag. Simonett, H. 2007. “Banda, a New Sound from the Barrios of Los Angeles: Transmigration and Transcultural Production.” In Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location, ed. I. Biddle and V. Knights, 81–​92. London and New York: Routledge. Skjelbo, J. F. 2015. Musik blandt unge med muslimsk baggrund. En etnografisk undersøgelse af praksis [Music-​Making Among Young People With Muslim Background. An Ethnographic Investigation of Praxis]. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Smith, A. 1995. Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity Press. Solvik, B. M. 2012. “Stortingsrepresentant ber om boikott av Øyafestivalen” [Member of the Parliament Asks for a Boycott of the Øya Festival]. Liberaleren, August 7. Stokes, M. 1997. Ethnicity, Identity and Music:  The Musical Construction of Place, 2nd ed. Oxford: Berg. Söderman, J. 2007. Rap(p) i käften. Hiphopmusikers konstnärliga och pedagogiska strategier [Blowing the Horn: Artistic and Pedagogic Strategies of Hip Hop Musicians]. Lund: Lund University Press. Söderman, J. 2011. “‘Folkbildning’ Through Hip-​Hop: How the Ideals of Three Rappers Parallel a Scandinavian Educational Tradition.” Music Education Research 2: 211–​225. Sveriges Radio. 2011. “Hård debatt om SD och Nobel” [Tough Debate on Sverigedemokraterna and the Nobel Institution]. Sverigesradio, November 16. Weisethaunet, H. 2007. “Historiography and Complexities: Why is Music ‘National?’” Popular Music History 2(2): 169–​199.

Discography Karpe Diem. 2010. Aldri solgt en løgn [Never Sold A Lie] (album). Latin Kings. 1994. Välkommen till förorten [Welcome to the Suburb] (album)​. Natasja. 2007. I Danmark er jeg født [I Am Born in Denmark] (album). Outlandish. 2000. Outlandish’s Official (album). Outlandish. 2004. “Man binder os på mund og hånd” [Our Mouths Are Sealed, Our Hands Are Tied] (single). Outlandish. 2005. Closer Than Veins, (album). Tensa, Adam. 2011. Scared of the Dark (album).

Chapter 18

R ap, Reggae, a nd W h i t e M inoritiz at i on Benjamin R. Teitelbaum

[White power music] is simply below standard. Why? One of the main problems is the ideological imperative to under no circumstances allow influences from “black music.” … It has closed essentially all doors to inspiration that are available to all other types of political music. The only way forward is metal. —​Anders Lokko, Expo 2005, nos. 3–​41

Race is something of a paradox in Nordic society. Centuries of pseudo-​science and international popular culture combine to make unparalleled whiteness a signature of Nordic national identities (Hübinette et al. 2012). However, as majority populations in the region maintain a global distinction as the whitest people in the world, race officially does not exist in most Nordic countries. Governments there follow their Western European neighbors by excluding race from statistics and policy on the grounds that it is a fictitious, scientifically indefensible concept. Even conversational use of the word “race” to describe humans is considered taboo throughout the North, just as the word “breed” might be in Anglo-​American contexts. Open reference to race is common only in the margins of Nordic society—​among those with a vested interest in challenging the status quo. This chapter focuses on the music of one such marginal group, the music of actors often referred to as “right-​wing extremists,” “neofascists,” or “neo-​Nazis,” but who tend to call themselves “nationalists.” The Nordic countries have been a global center for radical white nationalist activism and its late twentieth-​century musical icon, white power. This is especially true of Sweden, a country that, by 2005, appeared to have nearly three times the number of white power bands than could be found in all the other Nordic

346   Identity countries combined, and a higher rate of bands per capita than any other country in the world.2 During white power music’s heyday during the late 1990s, studies of listening habits among sixth through twelfth grade students in Sweden revealed that 12% of youths overall listened to “white power music” sometimes or often. That number was 15% when limited to boys and 19% when limited to boys in grades ten through twelve (Lange et al. 1997). As the quote that opens this chapter from popular journalist and music critic Anders Lokko explains, nationalists have long aspired to align their musical practices with their ideological dogmas by asserting that their music has to be white music. Accordingly, the whole of nationalist music making has been consumed with the ostensibly white style of metal and its closely related rock subgenres. While Lokko penned these words, however, nationalist music making was becoming complex in ways he likely never imagined, forcing its consumers to reflect anew on race and its expression in sound. In 2005, a young man from Umeå in northern Sweden—​a prolific ultra-​conservative and nationalist blogger—​began uploading rap songs that were available for free download. Zyklon Boom was his artist name, a reference to the Zyklon B gas used in Hitler’s gas chambers.3 Two years later, another young man from Stockholm rapping under the name Juice began producing and disseminating songs that demonized nonwhites. And in 2009, just as Zyklon Boom was releasing his first full album, the pan-​Scandinavian nationalist street action organization Nordic Youth released a reggae song that insulted immigrants and called for ethnic separatism. The introduction of rap and reggae generated controversy because it threatened to violate in new ways nationalists’ dogma of eschewing blackness in musical expression. But by shaking entrenched assumptions, these musical initiatives prompted nationalists to reconsider their understandings of white Nordic identity and the ways they portray it. In what follows, I  explore these recent shifts in nationalist music making and the heated insider discussions that surround them. This case study leads me to questions uncommon in the study of Nordic radical nationalist music. The Afro-​diasporic roots of rock notwithstanding, nationalists have rarely reflected with such fervor on the racial associations of the music they produce and consume—​their music’s whiteness has typically been taken for granted. Accordingly, scholarship on radical nationalist music in the Nordic countries (c.f., Lööw 1998a, 1998b; Fangen 2001; Corte and Edwards 2008; and Lagerlöf 2012)—​all of which deals with white power metal or rock—​seldom investigates the construction of racial identity through music. Instead, the existing literature focuses on music’s role in supporting nationalist political campaigning, fundraising, or propagandizing. In this chapter, however, I investigate song lyrics and online discussion forums, and report on interviews I conducted with insiders to assess how nationalists’ standards of racial and ethnic purity impinge on music, what associations they attach to rap and reggae, and how they conceptualize the categories of “black” and “white” in music and beyond. My analysis shows how the introduction of rap and reggae, and the discussions surrounding it, outline a new conception of Nordic whiteness, one modeled not on nostalgia (e.g., Hübinette and Lundström 2011) but, rather, on the expressive and discursive forms of contemporary Western nonwhite minority groups. Further, I show

Rap, Reggae, and White Minoritization    347 how this new conception of whiteness, forged as it is on mimicking nonwhite minority groups’ claims of oppression and using the language of justice in addition to their style, is allowing Nordic nationalists to alter their definitions of “white music” and the genres they can include in it. That last point requires further explanation before proceeding. Rap and reggae are not the first Afro-​diasporic musics to be used in organized white activism. Reggae and closely related genres like ska music were celebrated in 1970s British skinhead circles (Hebdige 1988; Mercer 1994; Griffiths 1995; Back 2002, 100). When an increasingly radicalized skinhead scene distanced itself from ska and reggae in the late 1970s, it replaced these Afro-​diasporic musics with others: rock, punk, and metal, all of which derive from rhythm and blues. To the extent that metal was for nationalists “white music” at the time Lokko wrote his article, this was due to their highly selective historiography and conceptualization of both the genre and whiteness. And just as metal’s whiteness is contingent on the impact of musical discourses, so too has the blackness of those genres long been excluded from European radical nationalist music making, such as rap. Scholars like Paul Gilroy (1994) and Tony Mitchell (2001a) have challenged the notion that rap is always experienced as African American music worldwide. To the extent that scholarship does expose fixed associations that follow rap throughout diverse settings, those associations tend to relate instead to what Craig Watkins (2006) calls the genre’s transcendent “oppositional ethos”—​opposition that may be conceived in terms that are gendered (Keeler 2009), generational (Brown 2006), or ethnic in the broadest sense (Mitchell 2001a). “White music” and “black music” are thus constructed categories that can be filled with diverse musical content, and the following sections reveal how that fluidity allows cosmopolitan musicality to coexist with agendas of rigid racial and cultural separatism.

White Nationalist Rap and Reggae When Nordic radical nationalist artists like Zyklon Boom and Juice began producing music, rap had already penetrated white activist circles in France, Germany, and elsewhere. During the late 1990s, the French act Basic Celtos believed themselves to be the only white nationalist rap group in Western Europe, though they mention having had contact with similar acts in Serbia (Batson 2009, 75). By the turn of the twenty-​first century, Germany had replaced France as the center of rap in radical nationalist Western Europe, with groups like Dissau Crime, Makss Damage, N’ Socialist Soundsystem, and Sprachgesang zum Untergang. The solo rapper Zyklon Boom is the only nationalist rapper in Sweden to produce a full-​length album. As with similar artists in Germany and France, his music is distributed almost exclusively online. He began producing and uploading individual songs in 2005, and released the album Welcome to the De-​Population Area (Välkommen till avfolkningsorten)4 on September 11, 2009, via free Internet downloading sites.

348   Identity Whereas German rap groups have explicitly aligned themselves with neo-​Nazism, Zyklon Boom avoids labeling his political orientation. He does call himself a conservative intellectual in “Damn, I Am So Tuff ” (Fy fan vad tuff jag är) and premodern in “Dumb Idea” (Dum idé), and he names early nineteenth-​century Romanian fascist Corneliu Codreanu as his idol in “Badass Party” (Fetjävla fest). But instances like these are few. It is rather his rhetorically playful attempts to obscure or sideline his ideology that distinguish him from other nationalist musicians in Sweden, and European radical nationalist hip hop more generally. The surface rhetoric in Zyklon Boom’s songs emphasizes the virtues of Zyklon Boom himself and the failings of his adversary, not politics. Most of his lyrics center on his ability to overpower, outsmart, or outdrink his opponent, the “you” to whom he addresses his polemic. Though this implied opponent takes various forms, he is typically not part of an ethnic or religious minority; instead, he is a white male—​sometimes a cosmopolitan contemptuous of his own majority status, sometimes an overzealous political activist from either the far left or the far right. But this opponent is always insufficiently masculine, insufficiently read, and cowardly. Zyklon Boom nonetheless reveals his political orientation within this scheme. He does this, in part, through his use of analogy, such as in the chorus to the song “Dumb Idea”: You fucked with me, but luck was not on your side. [That was] a dumb fucking idea, just like democracy. I will kick your head until it hangs by a thread, until Daniel Poohl becomes proud to be a European.

This chorus centers on the foolishness of his challenger and on Zyklon Boom’s impending vengeance. In supporting and coloring these statements, he mocks democracy, and calls the leading Swedish anti-​racist and editor of Expo magazine, Daniel Poohl, anti-​European. Though Zyklon Boom avoids clarifying his ideology, he does allow other voices to label him. Such is frequently the case in the introductions to his songs, which occasionally consist of other voices speaking about him. Consider, for example, the introduction to “Shut Up!” (Håll käften) on Welcome to the De-​Population Area: Voice 1:  It’s so damn unsettling. Voice 2:  Yes, exactly. I mean you just don’t know how people are thinking. He Is surly a racist, like a Sweden Democrat.[5] But he’s not some skinhead. He’s a well-​ read intellectual. Voice 3:  Yes, exactly, and those are the ones who are the most dangerous.

In cases like these, Zyklon Boom quickly emerges to skewer the voices in the introduction. But he does not question the labels they apply to him. He never denies being a race ideologue; such accusations are left standing as he begins his polemic. The rapper’s

Rap, Reggae, and White Minoritization    349 reluctance to forcefully declare a political position distinguishes the rhetorical profile of his music from that of 1990s white power bands. Political proselytizing forms the foreground of classic radical nationalist music, while here it is sidelined to figurative speech and eavesdropping on others’ conversations. Stockholm-​based rapper Juice would be more direct in announcing his Swedish pride and in demonizing minority groups in Sweden. His most popular track is “Now You Know” (Nu vet ni), which he released online in 2007, and which has been viewed over 160,000 times on YouTube—​a relatively high figure for a song produced by Swedish nationalists. “Now You Know” is an assault on the rappers Albys Kings (Albys Kungar)—​a group made up in part by immigrants from the former Yugoslavia. Though they haven’t experienced any significant commercial success, Albys Kungar gained attention in nationalist circles because of the crude insults of ethnic Swedes in their songs. Juice released “Now You Know” as a response to these songs, targeting the group’s front man, Abel, in particular. The track won Juice widespread adoration in nationalist circles—​even among individuals who otherwise oppose the use of rap in the scene: You were supposed to start the dissing, but I just can’t wait. Do I finally get to diss you? Damn, how I’ve been waiting for this. You don’t understand how fucking terrible you are, but it’s all your fault because you shouldn’t be here. You put down Svenne,[6] but you must be joking, since your greatest wish is to speak Swedish. Is it bad to be a Swede when you yourself moved here? Abel, he’s a queer, and he’ll be slaughtered. [Chorus] So now you know, that you’ll be slaughtered again. So now you know, that it’s time to go back home. Because now you know, that everyone hates you, so cut the shit because nobody can take it anymore …

Set to a beat from American rapper Eminem’s song “Lose Yourself,” enhanced with chorus effects, and rapped slowly with an unapologetic, unwavering, earnest inflection, the sonic character of “Now You Know” matches the aggressive nature of the lyrics. And though Juice departs from Zyklon Boom in the openness of his attacks on minority groups, he shares the other rapper’s prevailing commitment to common rap rhetorical themes. As the song proceeds, for example, Juice assails his opponent for being unable to rhyme, and adds: You’re so fucking hated, both you and your friend, what the hell do you know about the street?

Promotion of one’s own rhyming ability and claims to “street cred” are as foreign to white power lyrics as they are endemic to rap.

350   Identity Zyklon Boom and Juice were and remain novelties in Swedish radical nationalism’s musical landscape. However, three years after Juice’s debut, this scene would again be shaken by a new music project. In a move that to the best of my and my informants’ knowledge is unprecedented in European and American radical nationalism, activists from the organization Nordic Youth produced a nationalist reggae song. Nordic Youth is a political action group founded by disaffected members of the National Democrats’ youth chapter. The group gained recognition in nationalist circles for carrying out a string of high-​profile demonstrations and vandalisms, including egging refugee housing, casting pig’s blood on Holocaust memorials, spraying graffiti on walls in in major Swedish cities, and destroying what they consider to be decadent art. But before any of these events occurred, Nordic Youth attracted nationalist and nonnationalist attention by releasing the reggae song “Imagine” (Tänk) at their founding on January 30, 2010. The song features a standard reggae brass, guitar, bass, trap set, and bongo drum accompaniment, and it is sung in Swedish with a Jamaican accent. A single individual from western Sweden recorded all the tracks for the song, and the lyrics were written by a group of Nordic Youth members from Gothenburg. The song begins, Imagine living in a country populated only with your own kind. Imagine if my dreams were to come true, in a land where my forefathers toiled, that one nation shall be one nation, one nation where people take each other by the hand. So now’s the time to fight back, my friend, against their sickly lies and distortions. Losing your country is terrible indeed, so rise up, ethnopluralist! [Chorus] All have a right to their own homeland, indeed, so dear neighbor take me by the hand. Stand tall, grow up secure, because together we can solve the problems …

The content and tone of “Imagine’s” lyrics resonate with Nordic Youth’s official ideology: ethnopluralism. Named in the song just before the chorus, the ideology advocates a nonhierarchical racial separatism and is derived from the thinking of the European New Right (Teitelbaum 2013, 103–​105). Ethnopluralists recast separatism as integral to the cause of preserving human diversity—​albeit diversity in terms of race and ethnicity. “Imagine” likewise reframes calls for ethnic separatism in the language of justice, fellowship, and perseverance. As Dagens Nyheter journalist Fredrik Strage notes, the lyrics “evoke a bizarre ‘one love’ feeling,” referencing Bob Marley’s reconciliation and forgiveness-​themed hit “One Love.”7 “Imagine,” like the music of Zyklon Boom and Juice, created controversy among nationalists the moment it was released. These projects spurred more discussion of nationalism and music in online forums than had any song before or since. Discussion

Rap, Reggae, and White Minoritization    351 centered on whether or not the genres used in these music projects bore inherent associations and essences, and whether or not those features were reconcilable with contemporary radical nationalism and whiteness more generally.

Reception Zyklon Boom, Juice, and Nordic Youth make use of musical genres long demonized by nationalists. The wider rap and reggae scene in Sweden has historically been linked with immigrant communities and their calls for political change. Along these lines, nationalists and nonnationalists alike typically viewed rap and reggae not only as antithetical to nationalist politics but also as the musical antithesis of established nationalist genres like Viking rock and white power punk (Peterson 1995, 58). One rap act in particular, the Latin Kings, grew to serve as the chief musical icon of anti-​nationalism during the 1990s, and was often juxtaposed with the nationalist Viking rock band Ultima Thule in popular television and film (see Teitelbaum 2013). As an anonymous nationalist recalled to me in an interview: During high school [gymnasiet] in the early 1990s, when I was in high school, I heard that everyone in school who didn’t like blacks and immigrants listened to Ultima Thule, and everyone who liked blacks listened to the Latin Kings. And so I thought, fine, then I don’t like [the] Latin Kings.8

Organized nationalist political parties also painted hip hop music as being at variance with Swedish culture. We find examples of this in an unattributed article in the 1993 issue of the Sweden Democrats’ newspaper, SD-​Kuriren. The article, “On Art and Culture,” aimed to provide (narrow) guidelines for an upcoming discussion of the party’s official cultural policy ahead of a party congress scheduled for the following year. The author(s) wrote on the topic of music: Afro-​American music’s global expansion constitutes a setback of thousands and thousands of years. The lyrics typically encourage only sentimentalism, shallowness, bad morals, and low living ideals… . Music has degenerated such that it mainly consists only of rhythm. An immense decline, unfit for the Nordic person. (SD-​Kuriren 1993)

Here, the author(s) argue that Afro-​American musics, both through their lyrical content and their musical structure, conflict with healthy lifestyles in general and with the Nordic people in particular. The National Democrats also appear to have targeted expressive forms like hip hop music in the cultural policy section of their 2001 party platform. In a statement on culture retained in the platform up to the present, they describe their goal to oppose “manifestations of American ghetto culture.”9

352   Identity Expressions like those by the early Sweden Democrats and National Democrats imply that art forms like rap and reggae are inherently black and un-​Swedish. But there was no guarantee that contemporary nationalists who encountered Zyklon Boom, Juice, and Nordic Youth would interpret these music genres likewise. Scholarship on global rap has attacked the notion that the genre holds an inherent and transcendent association with blackness wherever and whenever it is received. Tony Mitchell criticizes Rose (1994) and Potter (1995) for, as he puts it, assuming that the global spread of rap constitutes “the appropriation of rap and hip hop as an essentialized, endemically African American cultural form”—​a position that seems to “deny [hip hop’s] appropriateness to other localities outside of the USA” (Mitchell 2001a, 5; see also Gilroy 1994). Mitchell’s claim that rap may not always be received and produced throughout the globe as a borrowed, black music enjoys the support of a host of case studies, including, implicitly, scholarship on rap in the Nordic countries (Sernhede 2002; Jensen 2008; Krogh and Pedersen 2008). Studies rejecting the notion that the genre bears an inherent racial character may still suggest that other associations follow rap in its global spread. The genre’s enduring ideal of opposition in particular, or as Craig Watkins (2006) calls it, rap’s “oppositional ethos,” appears to manifest in rap cultures throughout various historical, geographical, and social settings. Even Condry’s influential study of hip hop in Japan, so much of it geared to highlighting the peculiarities of Japan’s rap scene, still speaks in general terms of “hip hop ideals,” ideals of “opposition, self-​emphasis, and keeping it real” (2006, 214). If an oppositional ethos, rather than race, constitutes rap’s transcendent essence, scholars nonetheless suggest that this essence may be conceptualized in different ways. At times, rap’s oppositionalism bears specific gender associations. Keeler (2009), for example, claims that, regardless of national, racial, or economic background, those individuals most likely to identify with rap are “young males who feel powerless or, at least, worry the most obsessively about just how powerful or powerless they are, appear to be, feel themselves to be, and can expect to be in the future, relative to their peers, their kin, their potential sexual partners, and the world at large” (9). Others argue that the oppositional ethos of rap is often directed at situations of ethnic (though not specifically black–​white) tension. Timothy Brown (2006, 143) writes that rap, “supplies … a ready-​made model of ethnic solidarity and resistance against the ‘powers that be.’ ” Mitchell (2001a, 10) notes that in various places, rap has served as a voice for youth protest, and like Brown, that this protest frequently concerns the cause of ethnic minorities. Opposition to ethnic oppression in rap surfaces among various communities throughout the globe, including Native Americans (Ullestad 1999), North African minorities in France (Prévos 2001), the Maori (Mitchell 2001b), and Muslim minorities in Germany (Elflein 1998). Studies like these show that, to the extent that American rap is understood as a commentary on the disenfranchisement of African Americans, this characteristic can be generalized to apply to other instances of ethnic oppression and thereby loses any steadfast link with blackness. As Brown puts it, “the Blackness of hip

Rap, Reggae, and White Minoritization    353 hop is less important for its ethnic nationalist charge than for its ability to stand in for various types of oppression” (2006, 146). Notions of rap’s oppositional ethos figured prominently in Nordic nationalists’ reception of Zyklon Boom and Juice. However, so too did associations that scholars like Gilroy, Mitchell, and Keeler claim are less pervasive in the global spread of hip hop. Most nationalists who opposed the use of rap, as well as reggae, based their criticism on the notion that these genres are inherently black. For example, user “Robert,” in the nationalist frihet.nu forum, on February 1, 2010, wrote: “As far as I’m concerned niggers can have a monopoly on their drug abuse and Rastafari music. Because these are the people, and their sympathizers, who make this music… .”10 Likewise, user “xBXSx,” in the online forum nordisk.nu, on May 22, 2007, wrote of nationalist rap: “[H]‌ip hop was developed for monkeys. By monkeys—​for monkeys!”11 Defenses of Zyklon Boom, Juice, and Nordic Youth have taken various forms. A small number of apologists asserted that music genres have no inherent ideological or racial associations, and that music’s meaning and identity is based on the message of the lyrics or the ethnicity of the practitioners. Others claimed that rap and reggae have essential features, but that these features support, rather than undermine, radical white nationalism. Among this latter group, some claim that rap’s lyrical themes, or generalized ethnic specificity, resonates with contemporary nationalism, while others made a more daring assertion: Zyklon Boom’s and Juice’s music was appropriate for the scene because of its inherent, essential whiteness. One version of this argument makes its claim by denying that the Swedish nationalist artists are in fact producing rap. In a nordisk.nu online discussion thread devoted to Zyklon Boom, user “Bockas” wrote on April 21, 2007: You can draw pretty strong parallels between creating rap and old ancient Nordic balladry, and if you have heard rímur (which I doubt), that is exactly what you hear—​ Icelandic old men who “rap,” even without music, or by sitting and stamping the beat (that can be compared to “beatbox” if we would like to).12

In this statement, “Bockas” attempted to provide a Nordic equivalent for elements of rap music structure and practice. He finds such precedent in rímur—​the chanted poetry tradition from Iceland—​and he goes on to color this comparison with references to what he sees as the equivalent of “rap battles” in Norse mythology. With these comparisons, “Bockas” implies that nationalists need not feel that listening to or creating rap compromises their allegiances to Nordic culture or the white race. The “Bockas” comment is only one of multiple efforts by nationalists to locate Zyklon Boom and Juice in European music traditions. For example, user “Oliver” on the identitarian blog portal motpol.nu offered the following defense of Juice and Zyklon Boom on January 15, 2007: “[Zyklon Boom] is not ‘rap,’ but instead rhyming poetry, which according to European tradition emerged among British poets during the Middle Ages.”13 Here, Zyklon Boom’s music is again reduced to its structural elements, those of chanted poetry. This reduction allows “Bockas” to align the music with an Icelandic

354   Identity tradition, whereas “Oliver” linked it instead with a British tradition. The claims of “Oliver,” and perhaps those of “Bockas,” leave understandings of an inherent association between rap and blackness intact. Zyklon Boom is not producing black music because he is not producing rap. Other nationalist voices would go a step further and attack rap’s inherent blackness more directly. This ambitious effort comes from an author named “Alexis,” writing for the website of the Swedish Nihilist Underground Society. In an online article about the black roots of jazz and hip hop music often cited in discussions of Juice and Zyklon Boom, the author made the following statement: We are all too familiar with the prevailing climate in Sweden, where immigrant youths play up a “gangster roll” based on African American rappers. What is interesting in this case is not that they look past their own original culture, but that they think that hip hop is “black music” that rebels against white (European) society. Surprisingly enough, even that is a modern, multicultural myth. Hip hop and rap were not discovered by blacks at all, but were instead discovered by the Germanic synthesizer pop band, Kraftwerk, which basically laid the foundation for modern hip hop as the youth today know it.14

With this final approach, activists were able to suggest not only that Zyklon Boom and Juice were not making black music but also that rappers like 50 Cent, Snoop Doggy Dogg, or Sweden’s Latin Kings were in fact producing white music. The reception of rap in Nordic radical nationalism differs from reception of the genre in other places around the globe. Contrary to case studies of global rap reported by Keeler, Condry, and Mitchell, the nationalist insiders quoted here did not base their arguments on rap’s association with hyper-​masculinity, nor on any general oppositional ethos. Rather, Zyklon Boom’s and Juice’s music was typically rejected or accepted in this community based on its perceived racial essence, whether that essence is black or white. My survey of these discussions further suggests that nationalists’ devotion to “white music”—​the same devotion that Lokko observed when he wrote his article on white power metal for Expo in 2005—​lives on. Critics of Zyklon Boom and Juice have argued that the music was nonwhite, while most supporters argued the opposite. Indeed, the very strain with which some apologists worked to whiten nationalist rap is itself testimony to their continued investment in the racial purity of their musical practices. They could have defended rap, as a minority did, by denying that any music had fixed racial associations or by dismissing claims that their musical practices needed to channel their political agenda. Instead, most apologists rallied behind the notion that their music needed to be “white music,” and they fashioned their advocacy of Zyklon Boom and Juice accordingly. The debate over “Imagine” and white nationalist reggae occasionally resembled, and occasionally diverged from, that of rap. In parallel with the debate over rap, most advocates and opponents of “Imagine” regarded reggae as essentially race-​based music. Those criticizing Nordic Youth’s production often argued that the genre was fundamentally nonwhite. User “Robert” made such a case when he claimed in the forum frihet.nu on February 1, 2010: “Reggae is, as [they] say, likely the music style more connected to a foreign ethnicity than any other.”15

Rap, Reggae, and White Minoritization    355 In contrast with the debate over Zyklon Boom and Juice, none of the “Imagine” apologists argued that reggae was inherently white. Some looked past reggae’s racial associations, and instead linked the genre with a particular ethos. One individual who made this case was Andreas Nyberg, Nordic Youth leader and “Imagine” co-​producer. In one of my interviews with Nyberg, he justified the project based on what he saw as a specific link between reggae’s prevailing messages and contemporary radical nationalism in the North: We see nationalism as an ideology of love, not as a hate ideology that many others see it as. It is about love for your own people, but also love for there being many different cultures that can be experienced… . But there are a lot of influences of this, first and foremost in hip hop in Sweden, but also in part in reggae… . [Reggae is a genre] with an eye towards the Self, but even love for the Other, but not at the same time -​from a distance quite simply. But nonetheless love, I mean, reggae is very —​it is like the music genre of love16

Nyberg’s explanation dismisses the possibility that reggae’s calls for love of self might be intended for a particular context of race politics. Further, Nyberg did not indicate that the “people” who are the object of love in the genre are necessarily a racial community. Other apologists for white nationalist reggae would assert that the “people” of reggae are a black racial one, but that calls for black ethnic solidarity in reggae complements their own cause in the Nordic countries. For an example of this, we can look to user “Dennis,” who offered the following clarification for his support of reggae in the online comment field for Fredrik Strage’s article in Dagens Nyheter on February 28, 2010: One of the cornerstones in the Rastafari movement is among other things ethnic nationalism and the desire to see all blacks return to their motherland. That is to say, that blacks belong where they ethnically descend from, exactly like ethnopluralism means that you believe Europe should be European, etc… . [“Imagine”] is also a crystal-​clear statement for ethnopluralism considering the text “All have a right to their own homeland.”17

“Dennis” claims that, viewed through the prism of ethnopluralism, black nationalism is equally desirable as white nationalism. Therefore, reggae as a genre, with its Rastafari-​inspired calls for black nationalism, with its inherent blackness, is a legitimate object for praise by organizations like Nordic Youth. User “Nils”—​an individual linked with Nordic Youth—​offered a similar explanation when responding to criticism of “Imagine” by a left-​wing reggae fan on the nationalist online news magazine Nationell. nu on January 31, 2010. The left-​wing fan argued that Nordic Youth’s initiative insulted and “trampled upon” the true practitioners of Rastafarianism, a charge to which “Nils” replied: The Rastafari movement as a religion, is a religion that should to the greatest extent be understood as nationalistic, regardless of whether it is geared towards blacks or not. It is a stretch, I think, to say that we are trampling on an entire people through a

356   Identity song saying that everyone has a right to their own homeland. Especially considering the ethnopluralistic themes in reggae.18

In contrast with advocates of Zyklon Boom and Juice, these nationalists are content with the notion that Nordic Youth produced reggae, and that reggae is inherently black music. It is by universalizing the message of black nationalism—​rather than reggae per se—​that “Imagine” can be made to agree with campaigns for ethnic purity in the Nordic region. In sum, whereas nationalists’ reception of rap indicates that some remain concerned about the whiteness of their musical practices, reception of reggae suggests instead that other insiders’ rigid commitment to consuming and producing only “white music”—​ however conceived—​may be waning. Despite this, reggae’s apologists do not abandon all claims that their musical practices should and do resonate with their ideology and identity. Beneath their references to ethnopluralism lies an emerging conception of whiteness, one that has eluded scholarship on radical nationalism in the Nordic countries. Hübinette and Lundström (2011) claim that contemporary Swedish whiteness exists in two forms, both of which are grounded in nostalgia. The first form, called “racist whiteness,” longs for an imagined “old Sweden,” a society marked by racial and cultural homogeneity. The second, “anti-​racist” form craves the return of “good Sweden,” a nation that, starting roughly in the early 1970s, branded itself as “the most tolerant and liberal of all (Western) countries and (white) people in the world” (45; parentheticals in the original). Hübinette and Lundström argue that Swedish whiteness in either form is threatened by the growth of the country’s non-​Western immigrant population—​the former because immigration has fractured the country’s ethnic integrity, the latter because it makes being an anti-​racist more difficult. This second form has been further threatened by the unprecedented electoral success of the anti-​immigrant Sweden Democrats in 2010, a change to the country’s political landscape that undermines Sweden’s status as exceptionally progressive and tolerant relative to other nations. Hübinette et al. later suggest that these two forms of Swedish whiteness may appear throughout the Nordic countries (2012, 52). To the extent that this is true, it could stem from the region’s shared experience of residing on Europe’s periphery, on “the margin of some center or centers, which are presumed to be larger, more powerful, more influential, or otherwise more favored” (Parker 2002, 356; see also Oxfeldt 2005). Anti-​racist white identities in the Nordic countries benefit from the notion that their nations have been largely external to the colonial crimes of the major continental powers, and can therefore more easily present themselves as leading international voices of tolerance. Radical nationalist forces likewise build their notions of a racially, culturally, or ethnically pure past by believing that the Nordic region rests beyond transnational flows of people and cultures. The identity implied in the production and reception of nationalist rap and reggae, however, diverges from Hübinette’s and Lundström’s model of “racist Swedish whiteness”—​a whiteness that longs with nostalgia for a Sweden of the past. Instead, the discussions I have traced here show that some conceptions of whiteness among nationalists

Rap, Reggae, and White Minoritization    357 in the Nordic region are taking a form more in line with what Dyer (1997, 10–​11) calls white “me-​too-​ism” and what Wiegman (1999) calls “white minoritization.” These Nordic radical nationalists are not attempting to resurrect an earlier whiteness; rather, they are forging an identity modeled on the rhetoric and expressive forms of contemporary minority groups. We see a minoritized whiteness, both in the music that nationalists create and in the insider discourses surrounding that music. In “Now You Know,” Juice refers to ethnic Swedes with the semi-​derogatory term “Svenne,” treating the term as equivalent to others for nonwhites like “blatte” or “nigger.” Likewise, he includes street knowledge, or “street cred,” and rhyming ability among the measures by which he declares his superiority over his opponents. The song frames whites like Juice not as the bearers of a normative and invisible structural privilege unavailable to nonwhites (Lipsitz 1998, 1) but, rather, as victors in a competition where all ethnic groups—​including white Swedes—​ approach each other as equals. Further, it is a competition based on values and standards that nationalists previously ascribed to minority groups; it is a competition based on hip hop ideals. Nordic Youth’s “Imagine” similarly advances the notion that white Nordics struggle for rights, resources, and recognition at the level of a minority rather than as an empowered majority. This is most obvious with the opening of the chorus lines, “All have a right to their own homeland.” The tone here and throughout the song is not that of chauvinism and privilege. Rather, it recognizes that all have a universal, inherent right to something—​a “homeland”—​and seeks simply to see that right extended to whites. And just as Wiegman implies that claims of injury tend to underlie conceptions of white minoritization (1999, 116), so too does “Imagine” convey the voice of an oppressed, injured underdog seeking a rise to greater levels of justice and equality. The apologists for “Imagine” advanced a similar image of white minoritization when defending the song. Referring again to the opening lines of the chorus, users “Dennis” and “Nils” defended the song by equalizing black nationalism and white nationalism. The effort to secure one’s exclusive homeland was no more a black than a white cause. White Nordics, according to these nationalists, face challenges similar to those of black minority groups. And just as reggae was a voice for protesting injustice among nonwhites, so too can it be for Nordic radical nationalists and the people they idealize.

Conclusion Radical nationalists in the Nordic region, though they see their society as having been marred by a recent rise of immigration and multiculturalism, do not always seek a return to the past. Their posture can rather be forward-​looking—​one bent on crafting new identities by borrowing conceptual and expressive material from contemporary Others. Their ideal community may resemble those of old in its relative ethnic homogeneity, but its cultural characteristics and the form of its imagination would be novel—​ here, white Nordics would think, act, and music like nonwhite minority groups.

358   Identity Just as the foregoing analysis of nationalists’ musical practices prompts a reassessment of the temporal dimension of white identity in the North, so too does it indicate alternative geographical visions of Nordicness. Nationalists, it appears, do not always seek to seclude themselves in an imagined Nordic periphery, a realm detached from transnational transfers of culture. While the isolation implied in an imagined “North of the margins” would appeal to them in its ability to bypass the flow of nonwhite human beings, nationalists are poised to remain involved in transcontinental exchanges of expressive culture. Despite their declared opposition to globalization, their cultural practices are decidedly cosmopolitan. The insider discourses examined here show further that nationalists have adapted strategic historiographies that can allow them to assimilate global music styles into the category of white Nordic music. They possess, in other words, argumentative models to reconcile their behaved globalism with their declared anti-​globalism. Indeed, Anders Lokko’s claim—​that radical nationalist musicians have an overarching goal to “under no circumstances allow themselves to be influenced by ‘black music,’ ”—​is valid only at the level of semantics. Afro-​diasporic music permeates nationalist music making today just as it has throughout the contemporary movement’s history, in form of rock and its subgenres. Insiders continue to imagine and police a category of “white music,” but it is one they can populate with various styles. This suggests that radical nationalists’ music will continue to shift, and along with it, so too will their understandings of themselves and the people they claim to fight for.

Notes 1. Available online at http://​expo.se/​2005/​det-​vita-​oljudet_​1373.html. All translations are my own. 2. I base this claim on the Anti-​Defamation League’s 2005 database of white power bands throughout the globe (http://​archive.adl.org/​learn/​ext_​us/​music_​country.asp), and 2005 population estimates from the United Nations (www.un.org/​en/​development/​desa/​population/​) and the Office for National Statistics (www.ons.gov.uk). Sweden, with 44 white power bands and a population of 9,041,000, has a per capita rate of one band per 205,000 people. Note that the Anti-​Defamation League’s 2005 database has a number of flaws, such as making multiple entries for a single band that changed its name, the omission of prominent acts, and the inclusion of groups whose status as “white power” I find questionable. I explore the genre of white power in further detail later in this chapter. 3. The name was conceived more to shock than to celebrate Hitler. The individual behind the music project is one of a growing number of anti-​immigrant, ethnonationalists in Sweden who reject Nazism. 4. This album title is a play on the immigrant rap group The Latin Kings and their 1994 debut Welcome to the Suburbs (Välkommen till förorten). 5. The Sweden Democrats are an anti-​immigrant, anti-​Islam nationalist party that gained seats in Sweden’s Parliament. 6. “Svenne” is occasionally used as a derogatory term for ethnic Swedes.

Rap, Reggae, and White Minoritization    359 7. Available online at www.dn.se/​blogg/​pa-​stan/​2010/​02/​26/​fredriks-​kronika-​det-​finns-​en-​ framtid-​for-​nazistisk-​reggae-​2570/​, accessed October 30, 2011. 8. Author interview of anonymous person, July 14, 2011. 9. Available online at http://​web.archive.org/​web/​20120206071821/​http://​www.nd.se/​vaara-​ aasikter/​politik/​principprogram.aspx. 10. Available online at www.frihet.nu/​forum/​1421414548/​1325828286.html. 11. Available online at www.nordisk.nu/​showthread.php?t=269. 12. Available online at www.nordisk.nu/​showthread.php?t=269. 13. Available online at http://​oskorei.motpol.nu/​?p=349. 14. Available online at www.anus.com/​tribes/​snus/​nihilism/​artiklar/​alexis/​svartvit/​. 15. Available online at www.frihet.nu/​forum/​1421414548/​1325828286.html. 16. Author interview of Andreas Nyberg, July 4, 2011. 17. Available online at www.dn.se/​blogg/​pa-​stan/​2010/​02/​26/​fredriks-​kronika-​det-​finns-​en-​ framtid-​for-​nazistisk-​reggae-​2570/​. 18. Available online at www.nationell.nu/​2010/​01/​31/​nordisk-​ungdom-​lanserades-​i-​goteborg/​.

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Chapter 19

Sámi Festiva l s a nd In dig enous Sov e re i g nt y Thomas R. Hilder

Sámi music occupies a fragile and limited space within Nordic popular music studies. As a people whose traditional land, Sápmi, traverses northern regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Russian Kola Peninsula, the Sámi have largely been ignored in national historical narratives and discussions of Sámi culture, by fixating on “difference,” have often displaced the Sámi from Nordic modernity, temporally and geographically. Since World War II, a Sámi movement has resisted histories of land dispossession, Christianization, and cultural assimilation by articulating their status as an Indigenous people of today’s Nordic region (Minde 2003a, 2008). Mobilizing locally, nationally, and internationally, Sámi activists have secured significant forms of self-​determination within and across the Nordic states through the establishment of political bodies, the safeguarding of land rights, the creation of education programs, the building of media resources, and the founding of cultural institutions (Minde 2003b, 2008).1 A Sámi popular music scene emerged in the late 1960s by drawing on Sámi languages and the distinct vocal practice of joik, said to have existed throughout Sápmi. By setting joik to instrumental accompaniment and in popular music forms, collaborating with popular and jazz musicians, and composing and performing pop and rock songs in Sámi languages, Sámi musicians were committed to reviving culture and articulating identity. Over the last decades, a Sámi music scene has flourished owing to the emergence of festivals, record labels, funding bodies, educational programs, and digital media, and it is characterized by a diversity of artists experimenting in different genres. In these ways, Sámi popular music has emerged from the dynamic interplay of local Sámi traditions, Nordic national modernizing processes, Sámi transnational political aspirations, and globalizing trends throughout the Nordic region (Hilder 2015). While there exist numerous studies of traditional joik, Sámi popular music has received most explicit scholarly attention in the field of ethnomusicology (Diamond 2007a, 2007b; Jones-​Bamman 2006 [2001]; Ramnarine 2009, 2013). And although joik has been contextualized within wider northern European musical traditions (DuBois 2006), Sámi popular music has rarely

364   Identity been incorporated into discussions of Nordic popular music, which have largely been preoccupied with music scenes and publics that reinforce narratives of national distinctiveness and international success (see Introduction chapter). If, however, as Holt argues, “popular music is a medium of globalization in that it challenges localisms and creates new senses of place,” then Sámi popular music can offer important perspectives on the wider Nordic region. In this chapter I analyze music within its wider cultural performance at Sámi festivals. In the last two decades, numerous Sámi festivals have emerged that have built local and transnational publics and have challenged and transformed Nordic national democracies. Drawing on the models of wider national, Nordic, and international festival events, they cater to local, national, and international audiences by showcasing Sámi culture and generating political debate. Through a range of media and aesthetic forms, Sámi festivals address local issues within a global framework in ways that shape new forms of Indigenous activism, Nordic citizenship, and cosmopolitan exchange. While I mainly focus on two festivals—​the Kautokeino Easter Festival and the Riddu Riđđu Festival—​I also draw on a wider range of festival contexts that have emerged during the last four decades, including Márkomeannu, the Sámi Winter Festival, Oslo, the South Sámi Festival, and Sámi Week, in Tromsø. In particular, I explore how Sámi festivals, in working toward transnational self-​determination, shape wider Nordic culture, society, and politics in the twenty-​first century. I attend to three different levels of articulations of Indigeneity: the local, the Nordic, and the global. How do Sámi festivals perform local resistance against the Nordic nation? In what ways do these festivals nurture transnational publics that enable forms of sovereignty within and across the Nordic states? How do they foster cosmopolitan dialogue and exchange that point to deeper global political aspirations within contemporary Nordic globalizations and neoliberalisms? Based on multi-​sited ethnographic research I have been conducting in the Nordic peninsula over the last decade, I highlight the significance of the Sámi not only for nuancing accounts of Nordic popular music but also for reconsidering twenty-​first-​century Nordic politics and society. I draw on the sociology of festivals, postcolonial theory, and the literature of Sámi popular music. As has been discussed in recent literature, the festival has become an increasingly popular institution that has been adopted and adapted in many international contexts in order to address a diversity of aesthetic forms, social issues, and political agendas (Giorgi, Sassatelli, and Delanty 2011). Festivals—​including art, film, and music festivals, biennales, and world’s fairs—​have developed a repertoire of contemporary practices, media coverage, and strategies that have realigned the relationships between artists, organizers, and audiences, as well as bringing about a more dynamic connection between aesthetics and politics (Giorgi and Sassatelli 2011). Fueled by and in turn accelerating globalization and cosmopolitanism, festivals suggest a new understanding of public debate, citizenship, and democracy, and they have thus been posited as sites of the “cultural public sphere” (Giorgi and Sassatelli 2011). As Gerard Delanty (2011, 195) explains, “[d]‌emocracy has now extended into the cultural domain where [sic.], it has increasingly been recognized, is the arena in which much of the political is

Sámi Festivals and Indigenous Sovereignty    365 now articulated.” Thus, he summarizes, “[f]estivals explore the cultural politics that take place around these issues [place, identity, communication, consumption] and in doing so give a particular salience to cultural citizenship and more generally to democracy” (195). While these theories help to elucidate many features of Sámi festival contexts, they do not account for how Sámi festivals—​in their commitment to cross-​cultural exchange, Indigenous philosophies, and the politics of Indigenous sovereignty—​might also look beyond notions of citizenship and democracy in a Western liberal democratic tradition (Ivison, Patton, and Sanders 2000; Shaw 2008). Peter Phipps (2009, 29–​30) has argued that the “postcolonial possibilities of globalizing indigeneity … rests on an uneasy balance between the assertion of universal human rights and the special rights to local difference claimed by Indigenous peoples.” In particular, he locates Indigenous cultural festivals within a longer history of globalizing cultural encounters between Indigenous and colonizing populations (36–​37), encounters which have been marked by “cultural performances that disrupt the colonizing-​national narrative but which are not open for the colonizer’s easy interpretation” (36). Acknowledging the fraught and contradictory enterprise of Indigenous cultural performance, Phipps writes: “Cultural festivals are one of the few consistently positive spaces for Indigenous communities to forge and assert a more constructive view of themselves, both inter-​generationally and as part of a drive for recognition and respect as distinct cultures in various local, national and international contexts” (43). Building on these perspectives of festivals, as well as a postcolonial critique within Sámi studies, I argue how Sámi musical performance at festivals reveals an alternative narrative of musical creativity and transnational exchange that transforms liberal democratic ideologies and institutions in the Nordic region.

Local Mobilizations Sámi festivals have emerged from specific local histories and political mobilizations. By introducing the two main case studies, I focus in this section on local resistance to national hegemonies, the revival of local traditions, and the celebration of locality at festivals—​processes that articulate forms of Sámi sovereignty. The Kautokeino Easter Festival is the longest-​running Sámi festival and still stands as one of the main events in a Sámi cultural calendar. It takes place during the week leading up to Easter Sunday in the town of Kautokeino, located on the tundra in Norway’s northernmost county, Finnmark. Religious events—​services, weddings, confirmations—​have long rendered Easter a time of festivities in the Christian town of Kautokeino, as documented by Sámi scholar Odd Mathis Hætta (2006). As the Nordic states modernized and consolidated their welfare provisions of their northerly provinces after WWII, the Easter festivities became an institutionalized festival through the establishment of reindeer racing in 1954, the introduction of musical concerts in 1972, and the gradual increase in visitors (Hætta 2006). Since then, the festival has become an arena for wider cultural revival and performance, incorporating duodji (Sámi handicraft) markets, storytelling workshops,

366   Identity art exhibitions, and a film festival held in an open-​air ice cinema. Today, music is the focus of the festival through a line-​up of concerts held in the local pubs, sports hall, and hotel. These concerts provide a platform for local “traditional” joikers, up-​and-​ coming Sámi artists, local favorite bands, famous Sámi musical acts, and other popular Norwegian artists. The festival itself culminates on the evening of Easter Saturday in the local sports hall with a joik and song contest, the Sámi Grand Prix. Meanwhile, the Riddu Riđđu Festival is another significant event showcasing Sámi culture that contrasts and complements the Kautokeino Easter Festival in many ways. It takes place during one week every July in the municipality of Kåfjord in northern Norway, home to a large community of coastal Sámi and Kven, a Finnish-​speaking minority. As one of the original founders of the festival, Lene Hansen has documented in her book Storm på kysten (Storm at the Coast) what was at first a small and local two-​ day affair that expanded rapidly and soon gained its name of Riddu Riđđu, a clever alliteration in North Sámi meaning “little storm at the coast” (Hansen 2008, 28–​44). While one of the initial aims of the festival was to focus on reviving local coastal Sámi culture, organizers also had a desire for internationalization. By inviting musicians from other circumpolar and Indigenous communities, the festival was soon subtitled “Indigenous Peoples’ Festival” (2008, 31, 47). Today, the festival has a rich program including children’s activities, art exhibitions, academic presentations, theatre performances, cultural workshops, film showings, political debates, and music performances. It attracts a range of visitors, including artists, activists, academics, tourists, students, and journalists from Sápmi and other Indigenous communities, the larger Nordic region, and beyond, while its status as a Norwegian national festival has been crystallized by generous funding from the Norwegian Ministry of Culture since 2009. Key to both these festivals has been an ethos of resistance to local social forces, as I have argued elsewhere (Hilder 2015, 41–​45, 201–​208). Kautokeino has long been an important place for inland Sámi reindeer-​herding culture, and as one of the communities that has ardently resisted state assimilation, it is considered to have safeguarded many Sámi traditions. At the same time, the impact of a strict puritanical Christian doctrine of Læstadianism has made certain Sámi traditions sinful. Joik, owing to its association with “Sámi-​ness” and shamanism, was still widely considered shameful in 1970s Kautokeino (Jones-​Bamman 1993), yet it was joik that was the focus of the first concerts. Instigated in part by the multimedia artist Nils-​Aslak Valkeapää, the first concert in 1972 was one of the first public attempts to combine joik with popular music forms and instrumentation (278–​284). The performers and audiences at this and ensuing concerts were affiliated with the political and cultural movement called ČSV which, inspired by wider global movements of decolonization and liberation, called upon Sámi to literally “show the Sámi spirit” (Hætta 2006, 210–​225).2 In contrast, the population of Kåfjord experienced some of the harshest Norwegian assimilation policies, and as a stronghold of the Læstadian faith, was keen to silence its Sámi and Kven heritage after the war (Hansen 2008, 13–​24). The post-​WWII generation thus ceased to pass on local traditions such as the language and gákti (Sámi costumes) so as to become recognized as Norwegian citizens (Hansen 2008, 13–​27). However, a local

Sámi Festivals and Indigenous Sovereignty    367 youth group motivated by their education at the University of Tromsø, and inspired by leftist global social movements and the Sámi ČSV movement of inner Finnmark, decided to challenge that local silence and shame about its past (28–31). They established an annual festival in an attempt to revive local coastal traditions within a wider Sámi movement (28–42). By inviting members of the local community, local residents who still retained knowledge of local culture, and artists and cultural bearers from inland communities, the organizers held in 1991 the first edition of what was to become the Riddu Riđđu Festival (39–40). While joikers and musicians from inland areas have since then been a mainstay of Sámi musical performance at Riddu Riđđu, artists from local coastal and other regions have also been granted space to nurture their own popular musics. Both festivals, then, have sought to overcome oppression and shame by reviving Sámi musical traditions. Moreover, the specific traditions and symbols that have been a focus at these festivals—​language, gákti, joik—​became symbols in the imagination and performances of a pan-​Sámi community (Hilder 2015; Jones-​Bamman 1993). Locality, in both its natural and social dimensions, is key at both festivals. While contemporary festivals tend to articulate a “significant sense of place and are usually place specific” (Delanty 2011, 194), Phipps (2009, 32) notes how the emergence of Indigenous festivals marked a “subtle shift towards a globalizing indigenous identity which emphasizes the specifically local.” Sámi festivals allow audiences to have embodied experiences within a unique environmental setting. For example, at Easter, Kautokeino and the surrounding tundra are still covered with a thick layer of snow, and its frozen river forms a highway for local residents to travel on their snowmobiles. With festival events taking place across a wide area, visitors often walk long distances in the cold weather. Dog-​sled tours and snowmobiles are also ways tourists can have a closer encounter with the icy tundra and local Sámi culture. On Easter Saturday, the reindeer races on the hillside overlooking the town showcase a local lifestyle that reflects the supposed uniqueness of the Arctic environment and culture. The most explicit celebration of locality, however, is the open-​air cinema that in the evenings shows local and international Indigenous films on an ice screen to audiences who sit in a tiered ice-​block auditorium insulated by reindeer skins. A contrasting experience of the European Arctic is offered at Riddu Riđđu, with its spectacular fjord setting, majestic mountains, and weather permitting, midnight sun. Most of the events take place outdoors, on grounds surrounding what has now become the Center of Northern Peoples, a cultural center and museum. The various spaces within these grounds—​the stages, the market area, the traditional Sámi summer and winter tents, the food stalls, and camping areas—​and the dried-​grass fences that separate them highlight the connection to local nature and culture. Further connection to place is strengthened by requiring festivalgoers to camp on adjacent farm fields. In these ways, the festival location not only is a unique attraction but also showcases Sámi culture and highlights the significance of the local environment for that culture. Moreover, these festivals require resources, commitment, and participation from the local communities, not only during the festival but also year-​round. As Papastergiadis and Martin argue (2011, 46), festivals serve to increase social integration and encourage

368   Identity regeneration of and prosperity for the locality in which they take place. By boosting social and cultural engagement, focusing on regional areas, and promoting local and regional tourism, the festivals contribute to and reshape the local community socially, culturally, and economically. Locality is also politicized within the Sámi festivals through global discourses of Indigenous attachments to place. One of the activities offered at Riddu Riđđu is a walk in the surrounding countryside, where a guide teaches about the flora and fauna from a local perspective. At one of the early Riddu Riđđu festival editions, a course was held to teach people from the local community how to make their own gákti, according to local designs. Increased use of these local costumes, both at the festival and at other significant festive occasions during the year, has encouraged a powerful articulation of coastal Sámi culture (Hansen 2008, 50–​52). Issues of local and global Indigenous land rights have been themes at popular academic seminars and in film documentaries, as part of the film program at Riddu Riđđu; such issues are also topical at Kautokeino. At the 2008 Easter Festival, I witnessed the performance of the joik to the mountain Arvenjárga (Blåtind, in Norwegian) composed by Kirsten Marit Olsen. As the composer explained to me, the joik served to articulate the significance of this mountain for local Sámi reindeer herders so as to critique and resist development plans in conjunction with the (eventually unsuccessful) 2018 Tromsø Winter Olympics bid. Moreover, by drawing visitors from all over the world to a big cultural event on Sámi territory, the festivals challenge their perceived peripheral locality and articulate Sámi participation in a global, cosmopolitan network of cultural events. Sámi festivals, in Chalcraft and Magaudda’s (2011, 187) words, thus “help transform their localities into global spaces.” Indeed, like the festivals located beyond major global metropoles (Regev 2011), Sámi festivals make clear a commitment to Indigenous experience, knowledge, and identity in global modernity. Drawing on Phipps (2009), thus, Sámi festivals become sites for working through histories of colonization that create spaces for sovereignty on Sámi territory within the Nordic states (see also Hansen 2008, 88).

Pan-​Sámi Publics Festivals are key to the creation of a Sámi cultural public sphere. In particular, they can promote transnational belonging to a Sámi community, ignite political debate about Sámi issues, and transform notions of “Sámi-​ness.” The engendering of pan-​Sámi sentiments is most evident at the numerous festivals that coincide with February 6, Sámi National Day. The date marks the anniversary of the first transnational Sámi meeting held in Trondheim, in 1917, by the South Sámi activist Elsa Laula Renberg (1877–​ 1931). Since that day was selected by the Sámi Council (a transnational NGO) in 1993, February 6 has been celebrated in Sámi communities and has been officially recognized by Nordic state and public institutions, including a message of congratulations

Sámi Festivals and Indigenous Sovereignty    369 by the Norwegian government. The date coincides with the famous Jokkmokk Winter Market on the Swedish Arctic Circle, which has long had a special focus on local Lule Sámi culture. Here, Sámi from different parts of Sápmi, as well as tourists from Sweden and beyond, come to enjoy the huge market of local products, art exhibitions, seminars, workshops, and musical concerts. In Tromsø, the same week is celebrated as Sámi Week (Samisk uke), which celebrates the large local Sámi population and attracts numerous tourists from Norway’s key northern urban center, affectionately known as the “Paris of the North.” Featured during this festival week are art exhibitions, academic talks, reindeer racing, and musical performances at various locations throughout the city, including the university itself, the university museum, and the student center. Likewise, in Oslo there have been attempts to establish an annual Sámi Winter Festival during the same week, as a way of bringing together the Sámi community in Norway’s capital city, said to be home to the largest Sámi population outside of Sápmi. In 2009, the two-​day festival consisted of various events at the former premises of the local Sámi cultural center, Sámi House (Samisk hus), including a song and joik workshop for children, a market of duodji, books and CDs, and a concert by Norwegian Sámi composer Frode Fjellheim and Finnish Sámi joiker Ulla Pirttijärvi. As has been the tradition in Oslo since 2003, Sámi National Day is marked by a formal breakfast with the mayor of Oslo at the town hall (Rådhus), a building most famous for hosting the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. The breakfast is followed by musical performances by renowned Sámi artists and the raising of the Sámi flag. Sámi National Day also provides opportunity for live performances and communal singing of the Sámi National Anthem, “Sámi Soga Lávlla,” based on a text by the famous Norwegian Sámi politician, Isak Saba (1875–​1921), which calls for Sámi resistance and collective pride. Thus, these events, rituals, and musical performances within a festival context in geographically distant places do not simply help imagine a pan-​Sámi community; in line with Renberg’s early twentieth-​century vision, they moreover bring into being the notion of a transnational Sámi “nation”—​Sápmi. The key site in which Sápmi is performed musically is the Sámi Grand Prix, a musical contest that takes place on the evening of Easter Saturday during the Kautokeino Easter Festival. The competition was established in 1990 to encourage the growth of Sámi popular music and the revival of joik throughout Sápmi; since then, it has become a huge spectacle in the Sámi community (Hætta 2006). Modeled on the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), the competition is divided into two parts, one for “traditional” joik and one for “popular song.” Like the ESC, the Sámi Grand Prix inspires serious competition and also the occasional light-​hearted entry while engendering everything from avid interest, to ironic distance, to disdain within the wider Sámi community. The joik and song competitions draw applicants from all over the Sámi region, and the finals tend to include representation from minorities within the Sámi community—​for example, from Lule, South, and Russian Sámi communities. Nonetheless, joikers from local inland Sámi towns—​Kautokeino, Karasjok, and Masi—​which have strong and vibrant joik traditions, tend to dominate the competition. Meanwhile, live broadcast of the competition on Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish national radio, as well as via the Internet, enable a transnational Sámi community to listen to and watch the “national”

370   Identity competition collectively. Consolidation of the competition’s place in collective memory has been assisted by CD recordings of all Sámi Grand Prix concerts from 2001 to 2009, by Sámi producer Bernt Mikkel Haglund on his label Rieban. Thus, not only does the Sámi Grand Prix mobilize a Sámi public across Nordic national borders; by giving space to local cultural symbols such as joik it also crystallizes the image of Kautokeino as cultural center of Sápmi. But Sámi festivals do not simply perform a nation; like other contemporary festivals, they also provide a public arena for the conduct of Sámi politics (Giorgi and Sassatelli 2011). Following the model of other Indigenous, Nordic, and international cultural festivals, Sámi festivals introduce novel activities and formats to strengthen forms of local, national, and global political engagement. At the Riddu Riđđu Festival, there are various debates and seminars that allow the public to meet representatives of Sámi and national political parties, as well as officials from local public institutions, media corporations, and businesses. Here, topical and often controversial subjects are discussed, allowing a broader public to become aware of issues, form political opinions, and participate in debates. Likewise, academic seminars allow scholars to disseminate their research to both Sámi and broader interested publics, who can in turn learn about ongoing academic debates and offer new perspectives. Mirroring wider contemporary festivals, the “cultural” becomes political (Giorgi and Sassatelli 2011; see also Hansen 2008, 33). The film festivals at both Riddu Riđđu and the Kautokeino Easter Festival focus on Indigenous issues and matters of urgent debate. Likewise, art exhibitions offer commentary on local social and political issues. For example, in 2009 at Riddu Riđđu, the young Swedish Sámi painter Anders Sunna exhibited paintings that directly addressed the loss of reindeer-​herding land rights and suicide within the Sámi community. His provocative work, including the image of a skull superimposed on the Sámi flag, have ignited much discussion within the community about the nature of art, activism, and artistic ethics. Musicians also engage in political commentary during performances at the festivals by addressing particular local and global Indigenous matters in between their pieces and also within their music itself. Likewise, festival audiences become participants engaged in interpreting, evaluating, and debating both the aesthetic and the political aspects of those performances (Delanty 2011). Thus, art and music become constitutive elements of festival programs that contribute to and transform wider Sámi and Indigenous political debates. In these ways, Sámi festivals, as with other contemporary festivals, are a vital site for the creation of a Sámi “cultural public sphere” (Giorgi and Sassatelli 2011). Part of these debates, however, is a negotiation of what a Sámi “nation” might be—​ geographically, demographically, and culturally. At the 2013 Sámi Grand Prix, the song “Neavri” (Devil) by Sámi rapper SlinCraze and Kai Somby, lead singer of the Sámi heavy metal band Intrigue, elicited complaints for its supposed critique of Christianity. This in turn reignited discussions about the status of Christianity within the Sámi community and tensions between Læstadian and non-​Læstadian factions of Sámi society caused by the emergence of Sámi popular culture. Further, participants in the Sámi Grand Prix offer a representation of Sámi experience that goes beyond the inland Sámi region.

Sámi Festivals and Indigenous Sovereignty    371 Performances by artists from the Lule Sámi and South Sámi regions, as well as from southern Nordic cities, challenge classic representations of “Sámi-​ness” and highlight other Sámi experiences. Several artists from areas that have experienced “cultural loss” use their art to address feelings of disempowerment and exclusion from mainstream Sámi culture. One example is the autobiographical documentary film Sámi Nieida Jojk (Sámi Girl Joik), made in 2007, which traces the artist Liselotte Wajstedt in her painful search for her cultural roots and her desire to reclaim traditions by visiting the Kautokeino Easter Festival. The film was shown at many Sámi festivals, including the Kautokeino Easter Festival, instigating debates about notions of Sámi authenticity, exclusion, and an ever-​diversifying Sámi public. The emergence of other Sámi festivals in different regional contexts has been a response to and has thus further contributed to a diversifying Sámi public. Riddu Riđđu, for example, not only helped forge a coastal Sámi community but it also challenged prevailing understandings of Sámi identity from within the community (Hansen 2008, 31, 39, 53–55, 81). Based on the Riddu Riđđu model, the Márkomeannu Festival was established by local cultural activists in 1999, in Evenes municipality, Nordland, in northern Norway. Its organizers aimed to give voice to a local and distinct Marka Sámi community, revive its local cultural heritage, and articulate its belonging to and acceptance within a wider Sápmi. Similarly, the Sámi Winter Festival in Oslo has extended the network of Sámi festivals and thus further expanded and diversified a Sámi public. Meanwhile, the South Sámi Festival, which alternates locations between Røros (Norway) and Funäsdalen (Sweden), offers a space for transnational mobilization of a marginalized part of the wider Sámi community. That these diverse festivals articulate and thematize the cracks and hierarchies within the transnational Sámi community does not weaken pan-​Sámi sentiments; rather, they are vital institutions for expanding the cultural public sphere, transforming notions of Sámi belonging and strengthening the workings of Sámi sovereignty. Indeed, by creating a space for diverse musical expression and political debate, the festivals become sites of musical sovereignty in which Sámi shape their own future within and across the institutional and political frameworks of the Nordic states.

Cosmopolitan Transformations Sámi festivals have been characterized by an ethos of internationalism and cosmopolitanism. I focus next on the ways in which festivals appeal to international audiences, how they foster a global Indigenous network, and how they articulate Indigenous notions of cultural diplomacy and exchange. At the same time as fostering Sámi publics, many Sámi festivals have articulated a global outlook. While the smaller festivals—​the South Sámi Festival and the Sámi Winter Festival–​seem to cater more to their local Sámi communities, the larger festivals–​Riddu Riđđu and the Kautokeino Easter Festival—​ also attract publics from the wider Nordic peninsula and beyond. These festivals not

372   Identity only inspire creativity within their local Sámi communities; they also act as a showcase of Sámi culture for an international public. For festivalgoers with little prior experience in the northern Nordic region, the festivals enable a first encounter with Sámi culture, society, and politics. For example, the duodji markets at most Sámi festivals, the Indigenous film festival as part of the Kautokeino Easter festival, and the joik workshops at Riddu Riđđu all offer opportunities for audiences to learn about and engage in embodied dialogue with Sámi culture (Hilder 2012). International audiences, by articulating a cultural openness and a desire for cultural capital, become, in Regev’s words, “cosmopolitan omnivores” (2011, 111). But, contrary to pessimistic accounts of contemporary culture, these encounters do not turn audiences into passive spectators and consumers and Sámi performances into objectified commodities. Rather, in line with contemporary festivals (Giorgi and Sassatelli 2011), the performances become forms of intercultural communications that invite audiences to interpret Sámi culture and help construct the meaning and articulation of Indigeneity. Many performances at Riddu Riđđu are interactive—​for example, the controversial shamanic journey Mátki, which was offered to festival audiences in 2007. This feature allowed participants to take their own spiritual journey through the surrounding valley, a journey which included encountering figures within a Sámi cosmology, undertaking chakra healing, and going into trance as part of a shamanic ritual. Offering first-​hand experience of contemporary interpretations of Indigenous spirituality, this performance was heavily debated within the community for its supposed commercialization of Sámi spirituality. As I have argued elsewhere (Hilder 2012), Sámi festivals take on the role of a museum in offering a contact zone between Sámi culture and diverse publics. While in the past museums allowed bourgeois audiences in urban centers to imagine and learn about Sámi culture, the festivals offer live performances, interactive activities, and dialogic exchange, which transforms culture from something static into something live and embodied. Indeed, in contrast to museums, festivals do not represent a culture external to the festival context; the festival is itself the site where culture is curated, interpreted, and debated (Delanty 2011; see also Hansen 2008, 77–79). As Delanty has argued, contemporary festivals are “less the display or showcasing of already constituted objects than the exploration of contested meanings and identities” (193). Fueled by this international dimension, then, the festival becomes the site where culture is performed, put to the test, discussed, and transformed. Sámi festivals have channeled their internationalism by building links to specific publics. An international disposition was present from the outset of the Riddu Riđđu Festival, fueled by the organizers’ participation at World Indigenous Youth conferences around the globe (Hansen 2008, 34–​35). It did not take long for the festival to start inviting musicians from around the Arctic, such as Huun-​Huur-​Tu (from Tuva) and Kasaluk Quavigaq (Inuit, Greenland) in 1997, thus earning the name “circumpolar festival” (Hansen 2008, 42–​53, 75–77). Invitations, nonetheless, soon extended to Indigenous artists from all over the globe, such as Yothu Yindi (Australian Aboriginal) in 2002 and Oki Kano (Ainu, Japan) in 2006. The festival has since formally adopted the subtitle “An Indigenous Peoples’ Festival.”

Sámi Festivals and Indigenous Sovereignty    373 There are various events within the festival that maintain and nurture these cultural links—​for example, the “Northern People” (Nordlige Folk) program consisting of exhibitions, workshops, and cultural performances from a specific Arctic community each year. Anastassia Leonenko (2008, 82), a former student of Indigenous studies at the nearby University of Tromsø, argues that Riddu Riđđu has been significant in shaping an imagined global Indigenous community. This in turn echoes what Beverley Diamond (2007a) has theorized as the building of “alliances” between Indigenous communities through musical performance at Indigenous festivals. Indeed, as Chalcraft and Magaudda (2011, 186) have written, music festivals are “bound up in their host localities, but they also transcend them through global networks and global imaginaries.” Likewise, Riddu Riđđu has become an important local node in a wider international Indigenous network that, through each annual event, deepens pan-​Indigenous solidarity. It is the dynamic relationship between the local and the global at Sámi festivals such as Riddu Riđđu that fosters cosmopolitanism, as opposed to merely internationalism, as Delanty has theorized with contemporary festivals (2011, 196–​197). Contrasting it with the close coexistence and movement of diverse people in a globalized modernity, Delanty argues that cosmopolitanism “concerns self-​transformation in light of the encounter with the other” through “(1) the identification of openness to the world, (2) self-​transformation in light of the encounter with the Other, (3) the exploration of otherness within the self, (4) critical responses to globality and (5) critical spaces between globality and locality” (2011, 196). Potentials for cosmopolitan self-​ transformation are bountiful at the Riddu Riđđu Festival (Hilder 2015, 201–​208). An ethos of exchange and learning is nurtured at the Indigenous Youth Group, now an established and popular part of the festival program. Led by a Sámi artist, it includes cultural workshops, particularly for music and dance, for young Sámi and other Indigenous participants, typically focusing on traditional practice in modern settings. Similar cross-​cultural collaboration is promoted in workshops for diverse Indigenous musical traditions, which often inspire reflection about the similarities and differences of joik with other vocal traditions. Countless other programmed and spontaneous collaborations between Indigenous musicians during the festival foster musical exchanges and experimentations. In these ways, the Riddu Riđđu Festival has become a vital institution for Sámi to explore, reflect upon, and transform notions of their own cultural and political belongings in line with what Delanty terms a cosmopolitan “orientation” (2009; see also Hilder 2015, 206–​208). A cosmopolitan orientation is not exclusive to Riddu Riđđu’s Indigenous publics; it is also promoted more broadly. Non-​Sámi and non-​Indigenous audiences from the Nordic region and beyond are invited to take part in cultural encounters and exchange. At the joik workshop that has been part of the festival program for the last fifteen years, a respected joiker from Sápmi offers an introduction to joiking technique, repertoire, and philosophy. The intense two-​day course is not only intended for Sámi from areas that have experienced cultural loss but also for festival participants from all over the world who have a particular interest in Sámi culture. Such activities teach about Sámi

374   Identity and Indigenous epistemologies, thereby offering audiences the opportunity to imagine the world through the lens of alternative cosmologies. This pedagogical ethos works on another level, too, by raising awareness of traumatic Sámi histories and continuing political struggles. Sámi festivals act as a form of gifting of Indigenous Sámi knowledge—​knowledge that is otherwise difficult to access, recognize, or interpret (see also Kuokkanen 2007). Likewise, audiences are invited to reflect upon their own cultural knowledge and belonging, and in some cases are inspired to live differently. As Phipps (2007, 37) has written about Indigenous festivals, “gifting includes a strategy for cultural survival and renewal, but also a gesture towards a deeper intercultural dialogue about being.” At Sámi festivals it is tacitly acknowledged that these encounters can be politically charged and that transactions are conducted across uneven power relationships. But it is this willingness to remain open for cosmopolitan dialogue that reveals a particular aspiration for alternative Indigenous and global futures. This ethos is indeed what Phipps has theorized as an “invitation to reciprocity” that assists in working toward Indigenous decolonization and sovereignty (40). In the last decade, Sámi festivals have expanded their reach and political aspirations. Mirroring other contemporary art festivals, several Sámi festivals have transcended their physical locality and temporal existence (Giorgi and Sassatelli 2011). For instance, besides the need for year-​round organization and global networking, Riddu Riđđu has recently adopted new strategies for outreach and expansion. Through establishing links with other international festivals with similar political foci, Riddu Riđđu has enabled many of the artists it curates to find a space on other global stages. In October 2015, Riddu Riđđu, in cooperation with the music export organization Music Norway, hosted a stand at WOMEX in Budapest to promote Sámi music. Riddu Riđđu also has a presence at the annual week-​long Oslo World Music Festival in attempting to secure recognition of Sámi artists in national performance spaces. In addition, concerts have been organized at other festivals under the auspices of Riddu Riđđu—​for example, the Tromsø International Film Festival (TIFF). In these ways, Riddu Riđđu has become a “cultural broker” (Chalcraft and Magaudda 2011, 186), emulating and supporting the efforts of Nordic national institutions such as embassies and music export offices for marketing Sámi culture internationally. Complementing these activities is a strong online presence. Riddu Riđđu’s webpages, in addition to offering general festival information, have a feature on the festival’s history, an archive of pictures from the festival, and regular features on artists in three languages (North Sámi, Norwegian, and English). More significant, however, is Riddu Riđđu’s continual presence on other digital media platforms. It curates its own Spotify playlist featuring local Sámi artists and other Indigenous artists who have performed at the festival. On Instagram, it posts photos from the festival, while on Facebook, it often posts updates on the forthcoming festival, its year-​round work, and other artistic and political campaigns with which it is affiliated. These efforts do not simply “enhance the audience experience of events” (Roche 2011, 137) but also highlight the festival’s continual and global engagement in art and politics. Thus, Riddu Riđđu has in the last decade become an outreach and multimedia digital organization driven by and further driving the local,

Sámi Festivals and Indigenous Sovereignty    375 national, and global goals of the festival. In these ways, Sámi festivals like Riddu Riđđu act as agents of cultural diplomacy that offer platforms by which Sámi artists can participate in a “global cultural political sphere” (Delanty 2011, 195) and engage throughout the year in cosmopolitan encounters and exchanges with wider international publics.

Conclusion In the introduction to this volume, Holt writes, Nordic “[p]‌opular music sanctions and blurs national boundaries and images of the region … [and] highlights diverse evolutions and tensions in Nordic modernity rather than showing one main trend toward either nationalism or globalism.” This is especially the case for Sámi popular music, which, although often neglected in accounts of Nordic popular music, reveals important insights into the local and global aesthetic and political dynamics of the wider region. Sámi festivals have become a key arena for a Sámi music scene and for articulating Sámi Indigeneity to Sámi, Nordic, and global publics. They are dynamic spaces for musical performance, embodied learning, cosmopolitan transformation, multi-​sensorial participation, affective encounter, cross-​cultural reciprocity, and political debate—​ phenomena that are indebted to both local Nordic and global Indigenous modernities. Summarizing Chalcraft and Magaudda (2011), Giorgi and Sassatelli (2011, 10) write that “music festivals, however different they might be, are not only locally embedded—​ both in defining their localities as public spaces and also in that they are dependent on the local scenes of cultural institutions and networks for existence—​but, at the same time, really global in helping ferment music scenes that transcend national borders.” Likewise, by creating a space for the revival of local musical traditions, nurturing transnational music scenes, and fostering cosmopolitan musical encounters and transformations, Sámi festivals have become nodes in global networks of artists, institutions, and publics founded upon diverse aesthetic and political affiliations. Moreover, Sámi festivals offer fertile spaces for resisting mainstream Nordic culture, working toward self-​determination within the Nordic states, and mobilizing across global networks. It is these processes that have shaped the trajectories of Nordic modernity and globalization. On the one hand, it might be argued that Sámi festivals draw on Nordic and global aesthetic practices, discursive strategies, and institutional models. In a healthy Nordic liberal democratic tradition, they act like wider contemporary festivals by offering a “critical intervention” (Fabiani 2011, 92), allowing for “a multiplicity of voices … to be heard” (Delanty 2011, 190) and aspiring to a “cosmopolitan possibility for a reflexive relation between cultures” (197), thus nurturing local, transnational, and global cultural public spheres. However, I argue that the work and impact of Sámi festivals is deeper. As Phipps (2009, 32) contends, “culture is not just an object of rights-​based discourses but is also the terrain of global Indigenous political struggles; struggles which exceed the limits of rights-​based discourses by seeking to assert a counter-​universalist ethics of ontologically grounded ‘proper living,’ based on the primacy of Indigenous peoples and

376   Identity their connection to place.” Sámi culture, which is not simply showcased but is also performed, interpreted, and transformed through the very institution of the Sámi festival, challenges the foundations of Nordic liberal democratic philosophy. Acknowledging the complex multivalences of Indigenous festivals, Phipps admits that “[c]‌ultural performance can be simultaneously a commodity, a spiritual ritual, and a transformative political project; these are not necessarily mutually exclusive, nor are they without occasional contradictions and tensions” (32–​33). Nonetheless, he continues, “the effect of the festival and its cultural performances is to playfully yet deeply disrupt conventional notions of sovereignty and politics, colonial and anti-​colonial” (34) by “inviting a serious, deep intercultural dialogue, and as a deliberate pedagogical model for how the colonizing-​national story might be constituted very differently in a globalizing context through a shared process of decolonization” (42). Indeed, as I have argued, Sámi festivals provide a site where Nordic histories can be reworked but also where lies the potential to aspire to alternative Nordic futures.

Notes 1. While Sámi parliaments have been established in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, only Norway has formally recognized the Sámi as an Indigenous minority deserving special rights by adopting the International Labour Organisation (ILO) convention no. 169 and adjusting its constitution in 1987. 2. The ČSV movement lasted from the 1970s until the 1980s, having their first meeting in Kautokeino. Its name is based on the three most common letters in the Sámi language, and is thought to stand for Čájet Sámi Vuoiŋŋa, meaning “show Sámi spirit” (Hansen 2008, 18–​19).

References Chalcraft, J., and P. Magaudda. 2011. “‘Space Is the Place’: The Global Localities of the Sonár and WOMAD Music Festivals.” In Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere, ed. Liana Giorgi, Monica Sassatelli, and Gerard Delanty, 173–​189. London: Routledge. Delanty, G. 2009. The Cosmopolitan Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Delanty, G. 2011. “Conclusion:  On the Cultural Significance of Arts Festivals.” In Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere, ed. L. Giorgi, M. Sassatelli, and G. Delanty, 190–​198. London: Routledge. Diamond, B. 2007a. “The Music of Modern Indigeneity: From Identity to Alliance Studies.” ESEM 12: 169–​190. Diamond, B. 2007b. “‘Allowing the Listener to Fly as They Want To’: Sámi Perspectives on Indigenous CD Production in Northern Europe.” World of Music 49(1): 23–​48. DuBois, T. A. 2006. Lyric, Meaning, and Audience in the Oral Tradition of Northern Europe. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Fabiani, J-​L. 2011. “Festivals, Local and Global: Critical Interventions and the Cultural Public Sphere.” In Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere, ed. L. Giorgi, M. Sassatelli, and G. Delanty, 92–​107. London: Routledge.

Sámi Festivals and Indigenous Sovereignty    377 Giorgi, L., and M. Sassatelli. 2011. Introduction. In Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere, ed. L. Giorgi, M. Sassatelli, and G. Delanty, 1–​11. London: Routledge. Giorgi, L., M. Sassatelli, and G. Delanty, eds. 2011. Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere. London: Routledge. Hætta, O. M. 2006. Samiske Tradisjoner og Skikker:  Temaer fra Kautokeino. Karasjok: Davvi Girji. Hansen, L. 2008. Storm på Kysten. Tromsø: Margbok. Hilder, T. R. 2012. “Repatriation, Revival and Transmission: The Politics of a Sámi Cultural Heritage.” Ethnomusicology Forum 21(2): 161–​179. Hilder, T. R. 2015. Sámi Musical Performance and the Politics of Indigeneity in Northern Europe. Lanham, MD & London: Rowman and Littlefield. Ivison, Duncan, Paul Patton, and Will Sanders. 2000. Introduction. In Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous People, ed. Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton, and Will Sanders, 1–​21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones-​Bamman, R. 1993. “‘As Long as We Continue to Joik, We’ll Remember Who We Are’: Negotiating Identity and the Performance of Culture: The Saami Joik.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington. Jones-​Bamman, R. 2006 [2001]. “From ‘I’m a Lapp’ to ‘I am Saami’: Popular Music and Changing Images of Indigenous Ethnicity in Scandinavia.” In Ethnomusicology:  A  Contemporary Reader, ed. Jennifer C. Post, 351–​367. London and New York: Routledge. Kuokkanen, R. 2007. Reshaping the University: Responsibility, Indigenous Epistemes, and the Logic of the Gift. Vancouver: UBC Press. Leonenko, A. 2008. “Riddu Riđđu, Joik or Rock-​n-​roll: A Study of Riddu Riđđu Festivála and its Role as a Cultural Tool for Ethnic Revitalization.” MA thesis, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tromsø. Minde, H. 2003a. “Assimilation of the Sami—​Implementation and Consequences.” Acta Borealia 20(2): 121–​146. Minde, H. 2003b. “The Challenge of Indigenism: the Struggle for Sami Land Rights and Self-​ government in Norway 1960–​1990.” In Indigenous Peoples: Resource Management and Global Rights, ed. Henry Minde, Ragnar Nilsen, and Svein Jentoft, 75–​106. Delft: Eburon. Minde, H. 2008. “The Destination and the Journey:  Indigenous Peoples and the United Nations from the 1960s through 1985.” In Indigenous Peoples: Self-​Determination, Knowledge, Indigeneity, ed. Henry Minde, Harald Gaski, Svein Jentoft, and Georges Midré, 49–​86. Delft: Eburon. Papastergiadis, N., and M. Martin. 2011. “Art Biennales and Cities as Platforms for Global Dialogue.” In Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere, ed. L. Giorgi, M. Sassatelli, and G. Delanty, 45–​62. London: Routledge. Phipps, P. 2009. “Globalization, Indigeneity and Performing Culture.” Local-​Global: Identity, Security, Community 6: 28–​48. Ramnarine, T. K. 2009. “Acoustemology, Indigeneity, and Joik in Valkeapää’s Symphonic Activism:  Views from Europe’s Arctic Fringes for Environmental Ethnomusicology.” Ethnomusicology 53(2): 187–​217. Ramnarine, T. K. 2013. “‘In Our Foremothers” Arms’: Goddesses, Feminism, and the Politics of Emotion in Sámi Song.” In Performing Gender, Place, and Emotion in Music:  Global Perspectives, ed. Fiona Magowan and Louise Josepha Wrazen, 162–​184. Rochester: University of Rochester Press.

378   Identity Regev, M. 2011. “International Festivals in a Small Country:  Rites of Recognition and Cosmopolitanism.” In Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere, ed. Liana Giorgi, Monica Sassatelli, and Gerard Delanty, 108–​123. London: Routledge. Roche, M. 2011. “Festivalization, Cosmopolitanism and European Culture:  On the Sociocultural Significance of Mega-​Events.” In Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere, ed. L. Giorgi, M. Sassatelli, and G. Delanty, 124–​141. London: Routledge. Shaw, K. 2008. Indigeneity and Political Theory:  Sovereignty and the Limits of the Political. London: Routledge.

Chapter 20

Di gitally M e diat e d Identit y in t h e C ase s of T wo Sámi A rt i sts Ann Werner

The global corporate media are core drivers of transnational processes and they present particular analytical challenges for the methodological nationalism of much Nordic cultural research, with a continuing national framing of genres and culture industries. This chapter is firmly grounded in Nordic cultural studies of identity politics (e.g., Vestel 1999; Fornäs 2004) and feminist cultural studies (McRobbie 2009, 14). The chapter contributes to this tradition by examining how identity is constructed through digital marketing in social media and streaming services, offering case studies of two Sámi artists: Mari Boine and Sofia Jannok. Ideas about Nordic or Scandinavian culture are intricately interwoven in contemporary cultural production in the region (Lindeborg and Lindkvist 2013, 5). While Nordic stereotypes of blonde, tall, quiet, or melancholic white subjects proliferate in images of the region, contrasted with ideas about Sámis as short and dark, these images are also challenged in the region’s cultural production. This has been discussed closely in other chapters in this section. Stereotypes of easy-​going Danes, vodka-​drinking Finns, or rule-​abiding Swedes shape constructions of ethnicity, race, and gender within histories of inequality and nationalism (Hall 1997, 3). The dynamics of cultural identity are embedded in deep societal power relations. Music and culture in the Nordic region, seen from this perspective, is aesthetic as well as political, affective as well as social, and a potent place for identity struggles. Here, Boine and Jannok serve as case studies for illustrating identity in an evolving media landscape. As such, the chapter does not offer a detailed examination of Sámi culture (see Chapters 14 and 19). Rather, it investigates the power dynamics of ethnicity, race, and gender in digitally mediated representations of Nordic music in the cases of two Sámi artists. Popular music is known to be an important arena for the politics of difference (Rose 1994; Whiteley 2000). Representations of ethnicity, race, and gender are highlighted, for

380   Identity example, in visual representations, audio, genre and sound, lyrics, instrument choice, and production work. Music culture is thus a rich field for expressing identity, here seen as continuously constructed in mediated representation, without foundation in a stable essence beyond its constructions (Bhabha 1996, 57). The culture industries have long participated in the making of cultural identity through processes of curation and marketing (Ryan 1992). Research efforts include analyses of “fabricated” images of authenticity (Peterson 1997), celebrity culture (Marshall 1997), and the political dimensions of genre in production and circulation (Holt 2007). The distribution of popular music has entered a new phase with the mass proliferation of digital streaming in the 2010s. Indeed, streaming has become a dominant form of music distribution in the Nordic countries, with the most popular services being transnational corporations such as Google (YouTube), Spotify, and Apple. Streaming is increasingly dependent on code (Morris 2015, 447f); algorithms govern and order possible choices both when searching for popular music and when consuming it. Morris is one of many cultural studies scholars arguing that media technology shape the distribution of music; digital technology is not a mere channel (see also McNeil 2007). Therefore, studies of the social and cultural implications of software (Manovich 2013) are important for popular music studies today—​in particular, for Nordic popular music, where artists and fans have been early adopters of digital media technology. To investigate current online music marketing and the representations of ethnicity, race, and gender, this chapter analyzes the cultural significance of artist representations in the online marketing of two Sámi musicians (Mari Boine, from the Norwegian part; Sofia Jannok, from the Swedish).1 The chapter also pays attention to the design of the online contexts in which those representations are framed. It argues that the medium is relevant, even though the analysis is mainly one of artist identity representation. Thus it combines analysis of artist representation and marketing with an interest in how digital media are currently changing the face of Nordic popular music. Such an interest in representations and digital media is taken as a necessary point of departure to understand Nordic popular music.

An Analytical Approach The core analytical operations in this chapter employ concepts of discourse analysis. The material—​representations on websites and streaming services—​is understood as a set of multimodal cultural texts, existing in discursive and social contexts. The analysis focuses on these texts by identifying nodal points—​signs around which other signs are organized and filled with meaning (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, 112). Also, in line with discourse analysis, certain concepts and ideas that frequent the material are discussed as

Digitally Mediated Identity of Two Sámi Artists    381 ideological dilemmas, structuring meaning when one thing is articulated but its opposite is in play (Billig et al. 1988, 2)—​for example, the celebrating of traditional culture accompanied by a cosmopolitan lifestyle. This analytical approach derives from an understanding of identity representations as repetitions without essence, in line with the anti-​essential ontology of contemporary cultural studies. The approach also acknowledges that visual and auditory materials in digital mediation are in flux, framed and structured by code. Thus, the medium takes part in the making of meaning. The interpretative framing of the chapter is grounded in feminist cultural studies and in science and technology studies. From cultural studies I draw inspiration for the analysis of representations of ethnicity, race, and gender, taking seriously the critiques from postcolonial feminist theory. A key conceptual idea in this field is intersectional thinking, which emphasizes the intersection of gender with class, sexuality, ethnicity, race, and more (Brah and Phoenix 2004, 80). The analysis of ethnicity and race makes little sense without engagement with gender, and vice versa. The present analysis presents examples of the intersection of these dimensions. From science and technology studies, moreover, the chapter draws inspiration from theory about the political dimensions of technological processes (McNeil 2007). Computer-​based music marketing continuously constructs gender, race, and ethnicity for music consumption, with representations like photos and descriptive texts embedded in the hypertext of the technologically unconscious, hidden behind the interface (Thrift 2004, 176). The idea that software technology takes part in constructing our world, rather than just describing it, is imperative here. In the case of the online representation of music artists, these processes have evolved rapidly since the introduction of Napster in the 1990s (Guzman and Jones 2014). In more practical terms, the focus here is not on streaming technology itself but, rather, on its role in constructing identities as representations. The Nordic region is the birthplace of two of the biggest music streaming services in the world, and streaming services continue to have a higher penetration there than in many other parts of the world.2 Swedish Spotify and Norwegian Wimp (since 2015 renamed Tidal, after it was acquired by an American artist-​owned company) have both transformed online music consumption. They provide a means for the consumer to purchase and listen to music through subscriptions, utilizing database search options and self-​made playlists. However, these streaming services also offer more or less personalized recommendation systems, radio channels (like Pandora), professionally produced playlists, visual and textual information about artists, releases and live events, and the possibilities for personal playlists (Nylund 2015, 2). The purchase of a monthly subscription gives access to more facilities and eliminates advertising. Artists’ websites, YouTube, and MySpace are also based on streaming technology and they predate music streaming services like Spotify; watching and listening to music digitally increasingly happens in the form of streaming.

382   Identity

Introducing the Case Studies If you enter the Mari Boine artist page on the streaming service Spotify from a Swedish IP address at a certain time, you receive the recommendation to also listen to Sofia Jannok. The recommendation is made by Spotify’s software algorithms, which reproduce typical consumer patterns in the user’s region. Spotify’s software design also involves photographs and written biographies of the artists, radio channels based on them, and genre divisions, among other things. This contributes to a particular ordering of dynamic but fragmented and individualized assemblages for music consumption, driven by marketing tools, mass consumer activity, and software technology (Mackenzie 2006, 44). The order of Spotify’s interface assumes what the user would like to listen to. These assumptions are constructed from genre divisions and previous user activity. In this way, computer-​based digital music services reflect larger commercial structures and how these take shape through technologies in our contemporary society (for example, in Schwartz 2014; Pariser 2011).3 In similar ways, websites such as MySpace and the artists’ own websites shape how they are used and organized. What is put to the front, at the top, and blown up in size is emphasized as important. Both artists discussed here are well known. Mari Boine is primarily famous to a global market for her productions in electronic dance music, while she has also been involved in folk music/​world music, has performed at many festivals, and is politically active in Norway. Sofia Jannok’s music follows pop and rock tradition, with references to folk music and traditional instruments of Sápmi. They live in different countries, they are from different generations (Boine is considerably older), they sing about different topics, and their music is stylistically different. However, they are both Sámi women singers, singing in English and Sámi, and aspiring for global careers; therefore, it is interesting to discuss similarities and differences in their representations. On YouTube, MySpace, Spotify, and the artists’ own websites, music is today available to stream more or less globally and perpetually. These two women Sámi artists construct their presentations aligned with the indigenous ethic group of Sápmi, a region in the far north overlapping Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia (Axelsson and Sköld 2011, 187). It has been shown by Hilder (2012, 175; see also Chapter 19) that music and embodied musical performances are central to reconstructing ideas about Sámi cultural heritage and traditions. This reconstruction of musical heritage is most often done through traditional music in hybrid conjunction with popular music genres such as, for example, rock and electronic dance music (Jones-​Bamman 2001). Embodiment of indigeneity through hybrid popular music—​combining Western pop music with “global” or “traditional” sounds—​has also been studied in New Zealand with Maori and Pacific Islander hip hop (Zemke-​White 2005), and in Canada with Inuit country and rock (Diamond 2001). Working with material from Aboriginal musicians in Australia, Ottosson (2016, xiii) argues that much of the indigenous music performed does not deliver ideas of authentic

Digitally Mediated Identity of Two Sámi Artists    383 and real indigeneity. For instance, there is Sámi music that does not deliver on expectations of indigeneity, there is also traditional music for tourists and hybrid forms inbetween. There seems to be a market for indigenous music that is not “too indigenous” but is understood as traditional sounds clashing with worldwide popular musical genres, as with Boine and Jannok. Thus, their music can be marketed as different enough to be exciting, but not so different that its Otherness is threatening. World music scholars have reached similar conclusions concerning other sounds and places. For instance, Hutnyk (2000, 99) accounts for how India is described as “another world” in the mediated images of contemporary Asian sounds in a British context, and concludes that the exotic Other is still reconstructed in hybrid popular music when “Asian” sounds are combined with electronic dance music. In this chapter, scholarship about the Other is used to analyze Boine and Jannok’s online representations as taking part in global discourses when selling local identities in terms of difference. In the era of scientific racism, Swedish race studies identified Sámis as inferior to the Swedes (Dahlberg 1941). Their difference was not mainly constructed in terms of skin tone but, rather, through racial signifiers like facial features and skull shape. Discursive ideas about Sámi as ethnically different in place of origin, traditions, language, and beliefs prevailed in the Nordic region long after race studies became obsolete. Eriksen (2002, 29) argues that Sámis in Norway during the 1900s were still seen as inferior, primitive, and undesirable owing to ethnicity rather than to race, thus labeling their culture rather than their biology as cause of the group’s inferiority. In contemporary Swedish research, the history of race studies is rarely mentioned, but at the same time ideas about the Sámi as different—​visually, racially, and ethnically—​ are upheld in public discourse; this is also the case in Sámi media focusing on political and cultural protection of Sápmi, but with positive counter-​images of Sámi. While ethnic, racial, and cultural identity has been researched by Sámi scholars, gender has not received the same attention. Indeed, Sámi identity has often seemed genderless, or predominantly male. As a postcolonial feminist theorist, Mohanty (2003, 24) has written in regards to women in the margins: “defining women as archetypal victims freezes them into ‘objects-​who-​defend-​themselves.’  ”

Stable Regions? Stretching across the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, Sápmi is a transnational area with which many are familiar through tourism marketing (Müller and Pettersson 2013, 208). Sofia Jannok has observed the relationship between the regional and the global; one example is when she wrote on her blog about her experiences when visiting New York City, traveling around the world on tour. She described Manhattan as a “vast tundra of skyscrapers that spreads out around her.” By using tundra, Jannok was referring to Sápmi’s tundra and its nature, which she sings about in

384   Identity several songs. The nature of the Sápmi region functions as a point of reference for her in this blog entry. Her references to and longing for the closeness with nature have also appeared in her blog posts about life in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. She described touring in Sápmi as “going home” from the busy city in which she lives. In this way, she represents her ideas about Sápmi as a desired geographical place of nature and home, and herself as belonging there more than in the other places where she lives or passes through. This was done not only in words but also in how her post was framed by photographs of concerts in crowded rooms—​images of the city—​versus landscapes of Sápmi without human presence. While her personal blog posts are presented in a timeline, they are mainly written when she is on tour; therefore, the longing for Sápmi frames the region as stable, existing independent of her movements. This idea of Swedish Sápmi is central to Jannok’s website and in the stories she tells with words and images. Jannok herself travels the world, and as a subject upholding Sámi identity, one may argue that she is global; but the local is emphasized in her representation of herself. Her way of describing home upholds the difference and reinforces the nature/​culture, tradition/​modern, and periphery/​center binaries. This way of framing the representations of Sápmi and the artist’s own identity is contrasted by Boine’s approach to discourses of home—​home for her being a nodal point for negotiations of ethnicity, gender, and belonging. On the first page of Boine’s website she is described—​the narrator writes about her in the third person—​as growing up ashamed of her Sámi identity. When she started to write music in the early 1980s, it was after a political awakening, described as an epiphany involving discovery of the struggles of the Sámi people in her region of Norway. In the narrative, Boine is described as being shocked by the colonization, decolonization, and abuse of natural resources by the nation-​state, without compensation for the locals. Like Jannok’s blog, her entries foreground a local region and its nature in terms of natural resources, but the rhetoric is different. It is colored by anger and not nostalgia. Boine is further described as being a political player, fighting for Sámi rights, and her image as an artist is interwoven with her identity as an activist. Unlike Jannok, Boine is not presented on her website as a worldwide traveler. The top track of her MySpace page is a remix by famous German DJ Henrik Schwartz, and notices of her live performances around the world can be found on MySpace. The type of electronic dance music (EDM) presented at the top of Boine’s list of songs to stream connotes global (contemporary and even trendy) Western music, but the backdrop of the track is a photograph of snow-​covered mountains, presenting interesting contradictions between the local and the global. The code of the website is a co-​constructer of these contradicting messages, since MySpace’s code determines what track is the top one by counting how many times someone has listened to a song. Popularity is thus a structuring force in how the presentation of streamed music is organized. As on other platforms, other songs are presented first on Boine’s own website, with the songs selected as not the most popular ones, or the latest ones; rather, they seem to be ones selected by her or her management as representative of her career.

Digitally Mediated Identity of Two Sámi Artists    385 While gender is not explicitly addressed in both women’s descriptions of home and region, the artists’ relation to Sámi identity and Sápmi is individual, not associated with partners, parents, or other family ties. They are both presented as independent women with a longing for home.

The Role of Digital Media in Artist Representations Boine is an artist who has come to be known to different audiences through melancholic traditional folk songs and EDM remixes. The latter phenomenon, where both DJs and clubs go worldwide through travel and mediate music and events online, has made hybrid indigeneity available to ravers in Goa, as well as visitors at the winter markets and festivals in Sápmi. While the popularity of Sámi music cannot be attributed to technology, the range and availability of it has increased simultaneously with the evolution of digital technology. The software enabling photography, text, sound, and video to be part of the online representations of Jannok and Boine thus shapes and organizes the content. While streaming technology has revolutionized the shape of online mediation of music, allowing music to be listened to without downloading, and has become imperative for the creation of the sites, other software is also important. As has been discussed, the ordering of songs based on popularity is such a function of the software. Also, the mere networked architecture of the artists’ websites, where blog posts, music, history, and upcoming events are linked further enhances the representation. When analyzing the photographs of tours for both artists, I note that they are not the first images we see, and photographs mostly portray Jannok and Boine on stage, performing, or posing in a seemingly northern nature. Neither of the artists is shown with production technology in a studio, holding a smartphone, or boarding a plane.4 It seems likely that Boine and Jannok both need digital technology in their professional practice, whether traveling or communicating in their everyday life. Still, the photographs of them on Spotify, MySpace, and their own websites are as if the technologies of media and transportation do not exist in their lives. In contrast, there are artists whose photographs always contain representations of digital media equipment and transportation technologies in some form. Technology-​ rich representations are, for example, popular among male EDM producers, who are often shown in the studio with a set of headphones or traveling via planes, buses, and taxis (see, for example, Swedish House Mafia). Thus these different photographs display how genre as well as gender can be more or less associated with technology as a broader pattern, not only in Sámi popular music. If the technological devices are made invisible in the online images of Jannok and Boine, the technology that filters the content online is even more invisible. It is unclear

386   Identity why some photos, music videos, songs, and live performances are posted while others are not, and why they are linked. The network of representations renders the structure beneath invisible, as in much code today (Morris 2015, 447f). The photos and videos that the user meets when entering the websites of both artists feature nature and portraits of the women.5 This choice of opening images can be understood as a way of putting nature and the artists at the center, tying them together. Yet technology, machines, and code are often understood as incompatible opposites to nature, emotion, and femininity within the music culture (Gavanas 2008); that is, the emphasis on nature of necessity excludes technology from representations of the artists in any discourse where nature and technology are incompatible. As Brah and Phoenix (2004, 76) have put it: “We regard the concept of ‘intersectionality’ as signifying the complex, irreducible, varied, and variable effects which ensue when multiple axis of differentiation—​economic, political, cultural, psychic, subjective and experiential—​intersect in historically specific contexts.” Therefore, femininity in the portraits intersects with ideas of ethnicity and race that the landscapes of Sápmi come to represent. In the cases of Jannok and Boine, though, there can be no Sámi ethnicity without investments in other belongings, such as femininity and nature loving. Digital technology—​as invisible as it is—​strengthens the ties between the artists and this nature-​centric, picturesque representation of themselves and Sápmi. Thus, absence of technology in the representation is meaningful, even though it is used to present and order the representations of the artists.

Sámi Histories Represented through Music Sámi music tradition is first and foremost known for the joik, a special style of singing, and the shaman drum, and these traditions have merged with other genres and styles. However, ideas about indigeneity as being close to “older” traditions such as Sámi arts and crafts are upheld by both Jannok and Boine in their visual styles—​their clothes, accessories, and instruments. In the image gallery of Boine’s MySpace profile, every photograph depicts her wearing Sámi craft items and jewelry, embroideries, feathers, and/​or chunks of fabric in patterns and colors common in Sámi handicraft. Jannok also promotes Sámi crafts and arts, but combines some Sámi jewelry and colors with Western commodified accessories like a leather jacket—​for example, in the music video of “Árvas” (name of a tundra). The endorsing of indigenous arts and crafts can be seen as a way to strengthen Sámi identity while financially supporting local businesses. Since the 1970s, Sámi land struggles have given rise to musical, as well as political and judicial, expressions. In contrast with Boine, Jannok chooses not to present herself as explicitly political in her lyrics or biographical information. The Sámi people have during the last decades won a certain degree of local governance in Norway, Sweden, and

Digitally Mediated Identity of Two Sámi Artists    387 Finland. Jannok, being younger than Boine, has become famous during a later time, which is not to say that political movements are any less important today. In Boine’s musical production, political struggle and love for nature often coexist. The snow, ice, and mountains are featured as places of musical expression and political points of reference in many of her productions. For example, in the music video for “Vuolgge mu mielde Bassivárrái” (Follow Me to the Holy Mountain), Sámi people are persecuted by men dressed as priests burning Sámi drums, and are forced to go to church. In the middle section of the video, a woman manages to flee from the Christian invaders and go up into the mountains, while the camera sweeps across the dramatic landscape of northwest Sápmi. The nature and the mountains are constructed as safe spaces one can escape to. She, on the other hand, becomes part of nature when it embraces and protects her; she is taken in by the mountain and goes into a cave. The mountains, sparse trees, and snow are contrasted with the priests and their houses—​a culture the woman is not part of. Similarly, a spiritual relation to the land, inspired by indigenous beliefs, is depicted by Jannok in her blog when she calls the region of Sápmi an “emotional landscape.” Her way of describing nature and the region as emotional places (calling to her) is enhanced by inclusion of nature photography and self-​portraits (often of her face and upper torso in a northern landscape, without people looking serious). Indigenous women are often represented as being in nature or close to nature (Für 2006). Such stereotypes of ethnicity, race, and gender seem to materialize differently in Jannok and Boine’s online representations. Boine, in contrast, foregrounds spirituality and tradition alongside her political activism—​for example, in the song “Uldda Nieida” about an earth spirit, a female figure who enchants men. This music video is the first one the user sees on her MySpace page, and it features women wearing white dresses, dancing in a meadow. Being an artistic music video of a slow song, it easily contrasts with the EDM remix presented on her MySpace page. However, of the five songs in the “Songs” category on Boine’s MySpace page, three have female names in the titles. In this way, the selections and ordering of the content of Boine’s MySpace page help construct her music as often about women and about women concerned with nature (sometimes in a spiritual way).

Images and Sounds of Spirituality The mystic aspects of Sámi tradition are foregrounded by Boine when she sings about the holy mountain or the female earth spirit. Her way of using Sámi ideas about spirituality and deity can be understood as both political and nature-​centric, since Sámi beliefs and traditions revolving around nature have historically been politicized. The drums came to hold symbolic importance for the political awakening in Sápmi during the 1970s, and in some of Boine’s concert pictures on her website or Spotify page she can be seen holding a drum.

388   Identity Even though the drum as an instrument and a medium is ascribed great significance in Sámi beliefs, music, and identity, the joik is Sápmi’s most well-​known contribution to the international music scene. There is a reference to the joik when the melody carries both meaning and words (Gaski 2000). In melodic structure, the joik is personal, since the joiker has his or her own style of joik, which serves as individual expression. Therefore, the joik has traditionally not been a performing art but, rather, functions socially both for storytelling and for communication with other people and with nature (Gaski 2000). Thus, the joik singing style is spiritual and is traditionally performed mainly by Sámi men. But Jannok incorporates elements of joiking in her singing—​for example, in one of her more popular songs “Irene,” presented on her website. The song is structured like a pop-​rock song, performed with instruments and electronically produced. Most of the lyrics are not performed with joiking, but the joik becomes an element of meaning, used in one short section. As such, it hybridizes the Sámi tradition, joining elements of different musical traditions. This can be understood as a sign of Sámi style, an element not dominating the song but adding flavor. More interestingly, Jannok reshapes a spiritual performing style most commonly associated with Sámi men. Her technique of voice performance not only is aesthetically pleasing but also represents Sámi ethnicity, transforming Jannok’s place as a woman and bringing spirituality into modern music production. In the music video of the same song, Jannok is seen singing and dancing in the barren Nordic winter nature—​a furthering of the practice of singing to nature, as done in Sámi spiritual tradition.

Commodified Identity So far, in the online representations of these two artists, home/​nature, political struggles, Sámi arts and crafts, and spirituality have been interpreted as signs around which meaning is arranged. Discursively embodied beauty, concerning oneself with beauty and femininity, is another theme central to the digital presentations of both Jannok and Boine. Femininity is constructed, for example, by showing dancing women with flowing hair—​nature’s beauty—​as well as colorful clothes and silver jewelry. But what can all these elements be said to mean? Aspiring to global careers, the artists construct ethnicity, race, and gender through elements of meaning. On one level, they can be understood as branding themselves and their music, trying to find a unique style to distinguish them from other artists in a competitive market. While Sámi traditions are used visually and musically by both artists, these traditions are blended with modern styles—​as world music today always is—​and so it is not possible to talk about “pure” Sámi music. A minority culture like Sámi is never one side of a minority/​majority duality; rather, the cultural imagery of a minority is shaped by history, always involving different groups and cultures, from majorities and minorities (Bhabha 1996). Thus, the blending of cultural styles is neither new nor surprising. Also, cultural imagery and representations, as well as experiences, differ

Digitally Mediated Identity of Two Sámi Artists    389 within the Sámi community, divided as it is, for example, by social class, nation, age, and gender. For Jannok and Boine, finding “an edge” in their branding as artists means combining the expected with the unexpected. This can be seen in their longing for home and celebration of nature while also challenging traditions, such as in women’s appropriating of drums and joik. Hutnyk (2000) has pointed out that hybrid music cultures, where so-​called Third World and indigenous musicians meet the Western musical tradition, often serve Westerners and global record companies looking for commercial gain (96). Therefore, one should not be too naïve about what can be achieved politically with hybrid world music. Hutnyk (2000, 43) sees “third world,” “indigenous,” and “hybrid” as terms the music industry uses as marketing tools for neoliberal capitalism. Regarding Boine and Jannok, they are very much portrayed as controlling their representations. But, still selling Otherness; with their Sámi-​ness, and through their themes of emotions and nature, they firmly identify as Sámi women suited for a global market of buyers. The struggles of colonization and discrimination experienced by the Sámi come to function as a cultural commodity in Boine’s images, as do the traditions, crafts, and photographs of an unspoiled nature in Jannok’s music videos. In their online representations, both nature and politics feature as nodal points of meaning. It is clear that the artists have several motives (surely, they have good intentions), but the marketing nonetheless is economically motivated, since this is their livelihood. The representations of both Boine and Jannok often place them in the “traditional,” “folk,” or “world” genre when they are reviewed or discussed in the media. According to Huq (2006, 65), world music is often described as traditional music in a modern time. The “world” in world music is imagined as other places—​places from which mainstream popular music does not come, places outside the modern Western world. In this “world music” context, the Sámi traditional elements and instruments visually and musically used by Boine and Jannok can be considered “economic assets.” For instance, Jannok has been a popular artist to hire for official ceremonies, such as the National Day celebrations in Sweden, where she becomes a symbol of Sweden as a tolerant and multicultural nation, one that includes indigenous groups. Images from the celebration appear in her photo gallery and in her list of live performances on her website. With development of a tourism industry for Sápmi, most noticeably in the promotion of the Ice Hotel in Jukkasjärvi and the winter market, this ethnic exoticness can offer an edge when selling Nordic tourism to visitors from all over the world. But while Jannok has performed at several official Swedish ceremonies, Boine refused to perform at the opening of the Olympic Games in Lillehammar, Norway, claiming that the invitation was an attempt to add a token minority to the show and attract tourists, and that the invitation did not mirror a true interest in Sámi culture or politics. On her website, Boine discusses her opinions on where or where not to perform. Thus, the artists’ strategies for endorsing their ethnicity and indigeneity differ. There are ambiguities in how the identity struggles are to be performed, and where. As mentioned earlier, there are also differences in how the two artists portray themselves visually. Boine is more firmly traditional in her visual image and more radically

390   Identity political in her statements. Jannok presents herself as more of an average pop singer in her blog, where she invites her audience to share her everyday life, in which she integrates her ethnic origins with her music and life.

Conclusion While digital streaming has been recognized in media studies as an emerging dominant form for the distribution of popular music, with obvious implications for the entire music industry, little has been said about the deeper cultural ramifications of streaming and online marketing. This chapter has presented an analysis of the digital representations of two Nordic artists that might prove useful for further research on issues of ethnicity, race, and gender in contemporary music culture. The core argument in this analysis is that the digital representations of Boine and Jannok reproduce stereotypes of gender and indigeneity, even as the technology seems passive and inconspicuous. Nature and home are evoked in the artists’ online representations—​signs that are discursively associated with femininity. By using geographic images of places and landscapes to represent home, the artists’ identities are articulated as closely connected to the land, and the land is associated with emotions, spirituality, and women. On the one hand, centering nature in these representations can be understood as promoting Sápmi, thereby resisting colonization’s negative images of the region and striving to preserve the land and culture. On the other hand, it can be seen as reinforcing stereotypical images of indigeneity and femininity so as to sell “Otherness.” The commercial streaming services are part of a global system of capitalist connectivity that is at once transnational and unequal. Representations of indigeneity, nature, folk music and festivals, and so-​called primitive artifacts are often commoditized in Western culture (Kirschenblatt-​Gimblett 1998, 44). Besides nature and home, Sámi arts and crafts are important signs of this when the artists use them in their portraits. Through dress and accessories, these presentations can be said to fulfill the audience’s craving for an authentic Other (Brusila 2001, 52) while also supporting the culture of their region. However, the double nature of this strategy is a version of the classic dilemma of stereotypes and counter-​images (Hall 1997). That is, countering racial and gendered stereotypes with positive representations can empower Sámi women, but it risks backfiring. Indeed, the difference between stereotypes and empowering representations can be blurred, and not only for the audience, since the stereotypes are embedded in discursive understandings of indigeneity and femininity. Otherness and subordination in Nordic postcolonial society is structured by difference—​in gender as well as ethnicity and race (Mohanty 2003). Additionally, Boine and Jannok have built international careers characterized by travel and online information and communication technologies (ICT). Their music careers are presented online, embedded in code, but the technology used to accomplish this is absent

Digitally Mediated Identity of Two Sámi Artists    391 in the representations. Such presence of digital media technology in their images and texts would present a dilemma: the traditional land, spiritual artifacts, and emotional states they offer are counterparts of today’s technology. In their online material, it is almost as if there were no digital technology at all—​this is especially true in the photographs and other visuals showing the two women in nature. Boine and Jannok are constructing ideas about themselves as Sámi women, close to nature, spiritual, political, as representatives of the land as well as the people. Yet while the political ethos and cultural traditions are present in the material, and contemporary styles are incorporated online, the commercial distribution of these artists perpetuates sexist and racist discourses in the process. A more politically informed analysis of the digital mediations of Nordic popular music studies can fill a gap in studies of the role of media. Moreover, such analysis can broaden the interpretation and stimulate wider discussions of meaning in popular music, as well as consider the purpose of popular music studies in the Nordic region and beyond.

Notes 1. This online representation of the two artists was found on Spotify, YouTube, MySpace, and the artists’ own websites. User-​generated content in commentary fields is left out of the analysis; the material was initially collected in 2009 and then again from the platforms in late 2012. In 2009, funding from STINT for a short associate researcher period in New Zealand made the initiation of this work possible. 2. Excluding South Korea. 3. The introductory example is taken from the project Music in the Online Media World, conducted in Sweden in 2012–​2014 and funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. 4. As per when visited in December 2012. 5. In 2013, they both rebuilt their websites and changed the presentation of their physical appearance to black-​and-​white portrait photographs on the first page. The analysis was undertaken in 2009 and 2012; online material is always in flux.

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Name Index

ABBA “Dancing Queen,” 1 dismissed from progressive movement, 222 and emergence of Björk, 59 place in regional culture, 71n1 and postwar Anglo-​style pop music, 64 “Waterloo,” 51, 64 Abdelmaguid, Magdi Ytreeide, 330–​31. See also Karpe Diem Ace of Base, 3 Acerbi, Guiseppe, 282 Ahmed, Sara, 220–​21 “Áhpi” (Wide as Oceans) (Jannok), 284 Åkesson, Jimmie, 321, 330 “Akka Delekatka” (Myllärit), 247 Á Köldum klaka (Cold Fever), 154–​55, 159 Albys Kings (Albys Kungar), 349 Alcoa, 151, 177n12 Aldred, Oscar, 148 “Alexis,” 354 Altairograph, 138–​39 Alte Volkslieder (Ancient Folk Songs) (Herder), 33–​34, 41, 48–​49 Amidon, Sam, 151 Amoc, 285–​87 Amok-​kaèèâm (Amoc), 285 Andersen, Arild, 103 Anderson, Benedict, 211, 265 Andersson, Greger, 14 Andersson, J., 177n10 Andersson, Stikkan, 222 Antestor, 132 Appadurai, Arjun, 105, 187, 280, 287, 313, 335–​37, 339 Apple, 174 “Armoittoman Lapsen Uni” (Dream of the Orphan) (Talvisovat), 245 Árnasonar, Þórðar, 211 Árvas Foundation, 284

asarunefer12, 136 Aslakson, Tarkjell, 103 Attenborough, David, 174, 178n19 Avatar, 283–​84 A Voi Voi! Karelian Fever (Myllärit), 248 Bachiri, Isam, 333, 335 “Bad Dream” (Sóley), 1 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 299 Band, The, 102, 103 Baqwa, Tshawe, 297. See also Madcon Basic Celtos, 347 Beaty, Ross, 168 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 261 Benediktsson, Karl, 147, 149, 169, 171 Berger, H., 124 Berkaak, Odd Are, 15, 96 Berland, J., 62 Bernhoft, Jarle, 301–​4, 308, 309nn11,13 Bhabha, Homi, 197, 198, 306–​7, 328 Biddle, Ian, 301 Bíodagar (Movie Days), 154 Biophilia (Björk), 172–​74, 175–​76, 178nn19,22 Bird Symphony (Valkeapää), 283 Bjarnason, Daníel, 151 Bjørgum, Hallvard T., 98–​100, 101–​4, 105–​6. See also Hank, Harding Bjørgum, Torleiv Hallvardsson, 98, 106 Björk ABBA’s role in emergence of, 59 Biophilia, 172–​74, 175–​76, 178nn19,22 on exoticization of Iceland, 209 and “global commons” idea, 178n18 landscape in music of, 146 opposes Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Project, 151, 168 in Screaming Masterpiece: 1000 Years of Icelandic Popular Music, 208 success of, 16

396   Name Index Björnberg, Alf, 78 Björnsdóttir, Inga Dóra, 205, 206 “A Blaze in the Northern Sky” (Darkthrone), 1 Blue Planet, 174, 178nn19,22 “Bockas,” 353–​54 Bogason, Þórir, 113 Bogdanova, Jelena, 245 Bohlman, Philip, 13, 258, 266, 272, 327, 333 Böhme, Gernot, 148–​49 Boine, Mari, 379–​91 Born, Georgina, 95 Börn Náttúrunur (Children of Nature), 154, 159 Børsheim, Annlaug, 97, 107n18 Boym, Svetlana, 241 Brady, Emily, 149, 158 Brah, A., 386 Breivik, Anders Behring, 52, 262, 298, 307 Brendojev, Vladimir, 242 Brown, Timothy, 352–​53 Browne, Jackson, 91, 93, 94, 96–​97, 107n16 Bruton, Stephen, 96 Bruun, S., 190–​91, 192, 194 Brydon, Anne, 149–​50, 151 Bull, Ole, 104 Butler, Judith, 299–​300 Bykadorov, Aleksandr, 244, 246, 248 Carlson, Dean, 155 Casey, Edward, 91, 105 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 206 Chalcraft, J., 368, 373 Chang, Jeff, 313 Chaplin, Blondie, 103 Chartier, Daniel, 112–​13 Chase, Gilbert, 13, 28n6 Children of Nature (Börn Náttúrunur), 154, 159 Chuck D, 313 Clayton, Martin, 258 Clifford, James, 92 Clinton, Bill, 8 Closer Than Veins (Outlandish), 337 Condry, I., 352 Connell, J., 113 Conolly, Jez, 156 Conversations with Landscape (Benediktson and Lund), 147–​50 Cooder, Ry, 97, 107n19

Corley, Paul, 151 Crawford, R., 13 Crimson Moonlight, 135 Cubbitt, Sean, 174, 178n22 Dahl, Jens, 93, 106n5 Dahl, Kristian Thulesen, 337 “Dancing Queen” (ABBA), 1 Danish Broadcasting Corporation, 6 Danko, Rick, 100, 101fig. Dansk Folkeparti (Danish Folk Party), 329, 335, 337 Darkthrone, 1 Davidson, Peter, 42 de Forest, Emilie, 51 Delanty, Gerard, 364–​65, 372, 373 Demin, Dmitry, 246 Denmark colonialism and, 205–​7 jazz in, 198–​99 popular music historiography of, 197, 198 popular music in school curricula, 77, 80 urban music and national identity in, 328, 329 “Dennis,” 355 DeNora, Tia, 260, 266 Dettifloss (Leifs), 146 Deuteronomium, 132 Diamond, Beverley, 373 Dibben, Nicola, 113, 146–​47 Dico, Tina, 69 Domaruth, I., 160 Donaldson, Mary, 334–​35 “Dopeboy” (Tensta), 318 Draumalandið (Dreamland), 151–​53, 163 Dreamland: A Self-​Help Manual for a Frightened Nation (Magnason), 151 “Dumb Idea” (Zyklon Boom), 348 Dungen, 229, 230 Eboi, 311, 314, 315, 317–​22 Edda of Snorri Sturluson, The, 48 Edensor, Tim, 150 Efterklang, 69 Egholm, John Áki, 1, 121 Egilsson, Sveinn Yngvi, 149 Ég man Þig (I Remember You), 158

Name Index   397 Eivør, 208, 212, 215 Eivør Pálsdóttir (Eivør), 215 Ejstes, Gustav, 229 Ellestad, Laura, 108n39 El Suprimo, 223–​24 Englar alheimsins (Angels of the Universe), 155 Eriksen, T. H., 383 Erlmann, Veit, 332–​33 Espeland, M., 81 Estonia, 241 “Eto Pravda” (Myllärit), 247 Eto Pravda (Myllärit), 247 “Euophoria” (Loreen), 51 Europe distance between Northern Europe and, 42 Herder and North’s connection to, 50 historical link of North and, 46 European Council, Nordic resistance to, 42 European Union Nordic resistance to, 42 and relevance of Nordic Council, 8–​9 Eurovision Song Contest, 35–​39, 50–​51, 297–​300 Eyerman, Rolf, 297 Eysteinsson, Ástráður, 149 Fabbri, Franco, 14, 221 Fabian, Johannes, 206 “Fairytale” (Rybak), 51 FAME (Faroese Alliance for Music Export), 118, 126 Faremo, Olav, 101, 102–​3 Faremo, Tarjei, 101 Faroe Islands. See also Faroese music colonialism and, 205–​7 emerging marketing of, 213–​15 exoticization of, 203, 215–​16 Faroese Alliance for Music Export (FAME), 118, 126 Feld, Steven, 105, 214 Festen på Gärdet, 226 Finland authenticity of Finnish rap, 289n8 democratic participation in education system, 83 exceptionalist discourse in popular music historiography of, 197–​98

historiography of popular music in, 190–​92, 193 Karelian music and, 237, 239–​40, 241, 249–​50 popular music in school curricula, 77, 79, 80, 81–​82, 86n2 Santtu Karhu’s relationship with, 243–​44 youth and religion in, 139 Fintelligens, 285 Fischman, G., 313 Fish Story (Sekula), 307 Fiske, Reine, 229–​30 Fjállabræður (Mountain Brothers), 212 Fjellheim, Frode, 281, 369 Fletcher, L., 171 Fock, Eva, 16 Fornäs, Johan, 15 Frank, Bella, 319 Fraser, Nancy, 314 Fricke, David, 207–​8 Friðriksson, Friðrik Þór, 153, 154, 155, 159 Frikar Dance Company, 39 Frith, Simon, 12, 216, 297 Frost, Ben, 151 Frost-​haired and the Dream Seer, The (Valkeapää), 283 Ganz, Bruno, 154 Garofalo, Reebee, 196, 259 Getz, Stan, 64 Geysir (Leifs), 146 Gibson, C., 113 Gillis, John R., 207 Gilroy, Paul, 105, 339, 347 “Gi’ mig Danmark tilbage” (Natasja), 329 Giorgi, L., 375 Giroux, Henry A., 316 Gísladóttir, Ragnhildar, 211 Glacier Mafia, 147 Global Battle of the Bands (GBOB), 115–​16 “Glow” (Madcon), 297–​300 Gothenburg University, 6 Gråbøl, Sophie, 270 gramirez1814, 139 Gramsci, A., 313 Gressgård, Randi, 263 Grieg, Nordahl, 261, 266, 268–​7 1

398   Name Index Gripsrud, Jostein, 271, 272 Grossberg, Lawrence, 220 Grundtvig, N. F. S., 206 “Grýlukvæði,” 151–​52 Guðjónsdóttir, Gerður Kristný, 160 Guðmundsdottír, Björk, 208 Guðmundsson, Einar Már, 155 Guðmundsson, Gestur, 15–16 Guðnason, Þorfinnur, 151 Guffey, Elisabeth, 221 Gullestad, Marianne, 272 Hætta, Mattis, 51 Hætta, Odd Matis, 365 Haglél (Mugison), 212 Haglund, Bernt Mikkel, 370 Hajacos, Rob, 96, 107n15 Håkansson, Kenny, 230 Hall, D., 171 Hallgrímsson, Jónas, 149 Hamferð, 112, 115–​16, 117, 118–​21, 123–​24, 125 Hank, Harding, 99–​100, 105. See also Bjørgum, Hallvard T. Hansen, Jón, 116 Hansen, Lene, 366 Harald, King, 259, 260 “Hard Rock Hallelujah” (Lordi), 51 Harmony Project, 247 Harrison, Lou, 98 Haugen, Aslag, 91, 96 Haugen, Lars Haavard, 95–​96, 105 Haugen, Margareth, 93, 106n5 Haugen, Sigurd Arne, 96 Hauser, Otto, 224 Hebert, D., 79 Heddi, Knut Jonsson, 98 Heima (Sigur Rós), 169–​72, 174, 175–​76 Heise, U. K., 164, 165, 176n3 Hekla (Leifs), 146 Hellbillies, 91, 95–​96, 105, 107n13 Helle, Hallvard B., 101 Hellig Usvart (Holy Unblack) (Horde), 134 Hendrix, Jimi, 225 Henriksen, J., 279 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 33–​34, 40–​41, 48–​50 “Heroes” (Zelmerlöw), 51 “Heysátan” (Sigur Rós), 171

Hilder, T., 382 Hilmarson, Hilmar Örn, 153–​54, 155 Hilson, M., 177n10 Hirschman, Albert, 287–​88 Hitchcock, H. Wiley, 13 Holmegard, Johan, 229 Homogenic (Björk), 146 Horde, 134–​36 Horn, Melissa, 270 Hübinette, T., 356 Huq, R., 389 Hutnyk, J., 383, 389 Hylland-​Erikson, Thomas, 303, 305 Ibrahimović, Zlatan, 3 Iceland Biophilia and environmental movement, 172–​74 borealism and film of, 158–​60 colonialism and, 205–​7 democratic participation in education system, 83 exoticization of, 112–​13, 203–​4, 215–​16 hydropower in Highlands, 166–​68 landscape and music in film of, 153–​58 landscape in music of, 145–​53, 177n14 marketing of popular music in, 209–​13 music and environmentalism in, 163–​64, 175–​76 music journalism on, 207–​9 as music tourism destination, 62 and place in music, 164–​66 popular music and environmentalism in, 168–​69 popular music in school curricula, 77 statistics on, 145, 166–​67 topophilia in Sigur Rós’s Heima, 169–​72 “Í Gøtu ein dag” (In Gøtu One Day) (Eivør), 215 Ihlemann, Lisbeth, 15 Ikea, 3 “Imagine” (Tänk) (Nordic Youth), 350, 354–​56, 357 Indigenous Youth Group, 373 Ingold, Tim, 150 Ingrian, 251n4 “Irene” (Jannok), 388

Name Index   399 IRONxEWOK, 135 “Iso Seppy Ilmollinen” (The Great Smith Ilmollinen) (Talvisovat), 244–​45 Jalkanen, Pekka, 188, 189, 190–​92, 194, 195, 199 Jamison, Andrew, 297 Jannok, Sofia, 283–​85, 379–​91 Jantelov, 302 Jarman-​Ivens, Freya, 301 Jenkins, H., 166 Jensen, Sune Qvortrup, 328 Jerusalem, 132 Joenniemi, Pertti, 126 Jóhannesdóttir, Anna, 149 Jóhannesdóttir, Guðbjörg, 148–​49 Jóhannsson, Jóhan, 208 Johansson, Jan, 64 Joikuja (Joiks) (Valkeapää), 281–​82 Jonsi, 168 Jónsson, Orri, 157 “Jörru, Jörru,” 49 Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769 (Journal of My Journey in 1769) (Herder), 49 Juice, 346, 349–​50, 353, 354, 357 “Jungle” (Eboi), 318–​19 Kaasinen, Sari, 247 Kaercher, Ed, 100 Kahn-​Harris, K., 115 Kaiser, Henry, 97–​98 Kalevala, 45, 250n2 Kallioniemi, Kari, 197–​98 Kantele, 244, 245, 246, 247, 252n31 Kapnas, Theodor, 116, 119–​20, 125 Karelia and Karelian music, 237–​38 as border area, 238–​40 border crossing in Russian Karelian society, 240–​41 Finnish view of, 239–​40, 241, 249–​50 Myllärit, 246–​49 Santtu Karhu and Talvisovat, 242–​46 Karhu, Santtu, 240, 241, 242–​46, 249–​50 Karlsen, Sidsel, 326 Karlsen, Stig, 260 Karpe Diem, 264, 273, 274, 330–​32 Keeler, W., 352 Keightley, Keir, 113

“Keldaine Kuu” (Yellow Moon) (Talvisovat), 245 Kertz-​Welzel, A., 79 Ketting, K., 193 Khan, Adil, 264 Kjærsgaard, Pia, 335, 337 Kjelsberg, Sverre, 51 Kjølstad, Christer, 332 KK, 212 Knudsen, Jan Sverre, 339 Korgh, Mads, 326 Kotilainen, Esa, 282 Krogh, M., 194 Kurkela, Vesa, 188, 189, 190–​92, 194, 195, 199 Kyrkjebø, Sissel, 261, 269, 274n2 Kytölä, S., 132, 135 Lacan, Jacques, 303 Laitinen, Heikki, 243 Lándsbókasafn, 212 Latin Kings, 351 Latour, Bruno, 5, 148 Lefebvre, H., 10 Leifs, Jón, 146, 150 Leonenko, Anastassia, 373 Lerche, Sondre, 301, 304–​7, 308 Levkin, Ivan, 247 Levy, Morten, 100 Lilliestam, Lars, 193–​94, 198, 328 Lindley, David, 97–​99, 107n19 Ling, Jan, 6 Liszt, Franz, 13 Loftsdottïr, Kristín, 204 Lokko, Anders, 345, 346, 354, 358 London, England, 68 Lönnrot, Elias, 45, 250n2 Lordi, 51 Loreen, 51 Lund, Katrín Anna, 147 Lundberg, Dan, 326 Lundén, Petri, 66 Lundström, C., 356 MacCannell, Dean, 113–​14 Madcon, 296, 297–​300, 308 Madsen, Flemming, 197, 198 Magaudda, P., 368, 373

400   Name Index Magnason, Andri Snær, 151–​52 Mäkelä, Janne, 186 Malkmus, Stephen, 223, 225 Malm, Krister, 326 Malmström, Dan, 188, 190, 191, 192, 195, 198, 199 “Man binder os på mund og hånd” (Our Mouths Are Sealed, Our Hands Are Tied) (Outlandish), 333–​34, 335, 337 Markusse, Jan, 238–​39 Martin, M., 367–​68 Martinez, Lenny, 333 Mátki, 372 McLaren, P., 313 Mera Gartz, Thomas, 225 Metal Battle, 118, 124 Metaldude1945, 136 Middleton, R., 12, 28n6 Mills, Charles W., 315 Minde, H., 286 Minemo, Olav, 101 Mitchell, Tony, 347, 352 “Mitt Lille Land” (My Little Country) (Paus), 266–​68 Moberg, M., 132, 133 Mohanty, C., 383 Møller, Birgir Thor, 153, 154–​55 Moore, Jack, 223–​24, 227–​28 Moore, Tim, 50 Morottaja, Matti, 285 Morottaja, Mikkâl Antti, 285–​86 Morris, J. W., 380 Mortensen, Otto, 261, 266, 268–​7 1 Morton, T., 175 Mosh4Yesh777, 136 “Moskovan Kämmen” (Hand of Moscow) (Talvisovat), 245 Moslåtten, Arne, 95 Mt. Hekla, 146 Mugison, 209, 211, 212–​13, 216 Muhly, Nico, 151 Mulinari, Diana, 315, 341n7 Music in Denmark (Ketting), 193 Musik i Norden (Music in the North) (Andersson), 14 “Mustas Kois” (Talvisovat), 242–​43 Myhre, Peter N., 332

Myllärit, 239, 246–​49, 250 Myllärit Center, 248–​49 Myrdahl, Eileen M., 273 Myrin, 159 Natasja, 329 “Náttúra” (Björk), 172 Negus, Keith, 192, 193, 194, 300–​301 Neset, Ånond, 103 Níelsdóttir, Sigríður, 156–​57 Niezen, R., 286 “Nils,” 355–​56 N’jie, Haddy, 264, 270, 271 Nói Albínói (Nói the Albino), 156–​58, 159 Norðfjörð, Björn Ægir, 157–​58 Nordic Council creation of, 4 cultural unity as priority of, 3, 28n1 intra-​Nordic collaborations funded by, 14–15 Nordic cool promoted by, 69–​70 relevance of, 8–​9 Nordic Music Export, 69–​70 Nordic Youth, 346, 350, 353, 354–​56, 357 Norðurlandahúsið, 118 Norway. See also Utøya massacre memorial ceremony Bjørgum and Setesdal music, 98–​100, 102–​4 Hellbillies’ success in, 95–​96 homosociality in Vaular and Lerche works, 304–​7 impact of American music in, 94–​95, 105 Lindley and Kaiser record in, 97–​98 masculinity, race, and transculturalism in, 295–​96 masquerade and cultural transmission in, 297–​300 migration from, 93–​94 nationhood and nostalgia in, 307–​8 “New Norway,” 258, 271–​74 popular music in school curricula, 77 relations between roots and routes in, 104–​6 strategies of solidarity and distancing in, 300–​304 urban music and national identity in, 330–​32 Norwegian Open Air Museum (Norsk Folkemuseum), 35fig., 39 Norwegian Radio Orchestra, 264

Name Index   401 “Now You Know” (Nu vet ni) (Juice), 349, 357 Nuori Karjala, 249, 250, 252n42 Nuss, David, 225–​26 Nussbaum, Martha, 261 Nyberg, Andreas, 355 Of Monsters and Men, 147 “Oliver,” 353–​54 Olsen, Kirsten Marit, 368 Olson, William, 103 “Only Teardrops” (de Forest), 51 Ottosson, Å., 382–​83 Outlandish, 333–​37 Oxfeldt, Elizabeth, 158 “Øynene Lukket” (Eyes Shut) (Vaular and Lerche), 304–​6 Paakkunainen, Seppo, 278, 282 Pahoin Brihoin Pajatukset (Karhu), 244 Palmberg, M., 316–​17 Palmer, Robert, 108n40 Pálmi, Gísli, 147 Papastergiadis, N., 367–​68 Pärson Sound, 224, 231 Pasanen, A., 285 Patel, Chirag, 330–​31. See also Karpe Diem Paus, Ole, 266–​68 Peace Will Come (Bjørgum), 100 Pedersen, Birgitte Stougaard, 326 Pedersen, P., 77 Persson, Bo Anders, 226 “Petroskoi” (Myllärit), 247 Pétursson, Dagur Kári, 156, 157, 159 “Philanthropic Voices of Civic Society, The” conference (2012), 8, 28n3 Phipps, Peter, 365, 367, 374, 375–​76 Phoenix, A., 386 Phonophile, 66 Picard, John, 146 Pilgrim, 135 Pirttijärvi, Ulla, 278, 369 Pitchfork.com, 65 “Place and Meaning in Nordic Popular Music,” 15–​16 Plastino, Goffredo, 14 Potter, R., 352 “Precinct” (Eboi), 319

Prestvik, Leiv, 105, 108n41 Prior, Nick, 113, 145–​46 Public Enemy, 313 Pussycats, The, 104 Qadri, Waqas, 333 rafalopes93, 138 “Rag Mama Rag” (Bjørgum), 102–​4 “Rammeslått no. 1, ” 102–​3 Rasmussen, Anders Fogh, 335 Rastas, Anna, 197 Real Dania, 8, 28n3 Regev, Motti, 220, 372 Reiersrud, Knut, 97, 107n21 Renberg, Elsa Laula, 368 Reykjavíkurdætur (Daughters of Reykjavík), 147 Richards, Keith, 99 Richardson, J., 171 Ridanpää, J., 285 Rihanna, 64–​65 Ringsager, Kristine, 328, 340 Rinne, Arto, 242, 246, 248, 249 Robertson, Robbie, 102 Robertson, Roland, 197 Rolling Stone, 207–​8 Rolling Stones, 99 Román Velázquez, Patria, 300–​301 Romero, Raul Sebastian, 134, 135 Ronström, Owe, 326 Room (Eivør), 215 roorie, 138 Rose, T., 352 Rosenberg, Göran, 63 Rushdie, Salman, 92 Russell-​Brown, Katheryn, 318 Russian Karelia border crossing in, 240–​41 contact with, 243 Finnish enthusiasm for, 238, 239–​40 Rybak, Alexander, 37fig., 39, 51 Rypdal, Terje, 103 Rysstad, Andres K., 98 Saad, Natasja, 329 Säfström, Carl Anders, 316 Said, Edward, 39, 46, 204, 251n10

402   Name Index Salmi, Hannu, 197–​98 Sámi Grand Prix, 369–​7 1 Sámi National Day, 368–​69 Sámi Nieida Jojk (Sámi Girl Joik), 371 Sámi Week, 369 Samla Mammas Manna, 225 SÄMUS, 76 Sandén-​Warg, Daniel, 103, 106 Sápmi, 363, 369–​70, 383–​84 Sassatelli, M., 375 Scandinavian Metal Praise, 137–​39 Scared of the Dark (Tensta), 330 Schram, Kristinn, 34, 42, 158–​60, 204, 232 Schwab, Heinrich W., 14 Scott, Derek, 269, 300 Screaming Masterpiece: 1000 Years of Icelandic Popular Music, 208–​9 Segalen, Victor, 232 Sekula, Allan, 307 Sen, Amartya, 288 Sernhede, Ove, 311, 327 Setesdal, Norway, 107n24 Seventh Symphony (Beethoven), 261 “Shup Up!” (Zyklon Boom), 348 signofthegoat, 135–​36 Sigurðardóttir, Yrsa, 158 Sigurðsson, Valgeir, 151, 153 Sigur Rós, 151, 168, 169–​72, 174, 175–​76, 177n16, 209–​10 Simonett, Helena, 340 Sirota, Nadia, 151 Sjöström, Jonas, 70 Skaarup, Peter, 337 Skar, Johannes, 103 Skjoldmøyslaget: Faremoslåttar frå Setesdal (Bjørgum), 98 Skovgaard, Ib, 198–​99 Snæbjörnsdóttir, Bryndís, 150 Snyder, Timothy, 46 Söderman, Johan, 311, 317, 326 Sóley, 1 “Song of Atli” (“Atlakviða in Grœnlenzka”), 47 Sonic, 223 Sound of the North, The, 6 Souther, John David, 96, 107n16 Soviet Union, 241

Spellmannslag, Vømmøl, 105 Spotify, 381–​82 “Stay with Me” (Bernhoft), 303–​4 Stedje, Olav, 96–​97 Stefánsson, Davið, 211 Stereogum, 65 “Stingum af” (Mugison), 211, 212 Stokes, Martin, 214, 340 Stoltenberg, Jens, 259, 262, 263, 332 Stømsing, Peter, 101 Strage, Fredrik, 350, 355 Street, John, 298 “Streetlights” (Bernhoft), 302–​3 Stryper, 132 Sturluson, Snorri, 48 Sugarcubes, 207–​8 Sullivan, Paul, 147, 157 Sunna, Anders, 370 El Suprimo, 223–​24 Survo, Arnold, 247 Sveinsson, Atli Heimir, 211 Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden Democrats), 330 “Svyatoj Vetsher” (Myllärit), 247 Sweden. See also prog rock Anglo-​style pop music in postwar, 63–​65 democratic participation in education system, 82–​83, 84 hip hop as form of expression in, 327 historiography of popular music in, 190 and Nordic cool narrative, 70–​7 1 popular music historiography of, 198 popular music in school curricula, 76, 79, 86n2 rap pedagogy in Swedish and Nordic context, 315–​17 urban music and national identity in, 330 white power music in, 345–​46, 351–​52, 358n2 Sweden Democrats, 317, 319, 321 Sweet Sunny North, The, Vols. 1 and 2 (Lindley and Kaiser), 97–​98 Szomjas-​Schiffert, ???, 282 Talvisovat, 239, 242–​46, 250 Taylor, Charles, 287 Teitur, 67–​68, 69, 111

Name Index   403 Tensta, Adam, 311, 314, 315, 317–​22, 330 Terveh Petroskoi (Hello Petrozavodsk) (Talvisovat), 244 Théberge, Paul, 230 Tidal, 381 “Til Ungdommen” (For the Youth) (Grieg/​ Mortensen), 261, 266, 268–​7 1, 274n8 Tirén, Karl, 278 Toive (Hope), 242 Tomao, Greg, 116 “To the Reindeer/​Ans Rennthier” (Herder), 41 Träd, Gräs och Stenar (TGS), 223, 224, 225–​26, 231 “Tusen Tegninger” (A Thousand Drawings) (Karpe Diem), 264, 273, 332 Tutl, 214 Týr, 112, 119, 120, 123–​24, 125 Tyril, Jón, 116–​17, 124 “Tystas Ner” (Quieted Down) (Eboi and Tensta), 320–​21, 330 “Tystas Ner Remix” (Quieted Down) (Eboi and Tensta), 320–​21 Über die Wirkung der Dichtkunst auf die Sitten der Völker in alten und neuen Zeiten (On the Impact of Poesy on the Customs of Peoples in Ancient and Modern Times) (Herder), 49–​50 “Uldda Nieida” (Boine), 387 Ulf-​Hansen, Christian, 67–​69 Ultima Thule, 351 Urry, John, 113, 117 “Vaka” (Sigur Rós), 170 Valkeapää, Nils-​Aslak, 281–​84, 289, 366 van den Berg, Ilana, 113 Värttinä, 247 Vaular, Lars, 301, 304–​7, 308 Vestel, Viggo, 15 Vinaccia, Paolo, 103 Volvo, 3

von Uexküll, Jakob, 148, 149 “Vuolgge mu mielde Bassivárrái” (Follow Me to the Holy Mountain) (Boine), 387 Vuorela, Ulla, 288 Waage, Edda, 148 Wacquant, Loic J. D., 328 Wajstedt, Liselotte, 371 Wald, Elijah, 187 Wall, Tim, 192–​93 Walle, Rune, 104 Walser, R., 132 “Waterloo” (ABBA), 51, 64 Watkins, Craig, 347, 352 Weinstein, Deena, 121 Weisethaunet, Hans, 196–​97, 326, 338–​39 Wenders, Wim, 154 Westbye, Øyvind, 274n8 Weston, Donna, 124 Whelan, Caroline, 156 White, Hayden, 187 Williams, Hank, 99–​100, 101 Wilson, Mark, 148, 150 Wimme, 285 Wimp, 381 Wind, Marlene, 28n4 Winton, Ezra, 151 Wolde-​Mariam, Yosef, 297. See also Madcon Wolff, Larry, 39, 46 World out of Time, A, Vols. 1, 2, and 3 (Lindley and Kaiser), 97 “Worthy Is the Lamb” (Scandinavian Metal Praise), 138–​39 Young, 15–​16 YouTube, 133–​39 Zelmerlöw, Måns, 51 Zobnev, Sergei, 248–​49 Zschech, Darlene, 138 Zyklon Boom, 346, 347–​50, 353–​54

Subject Index

affective alliances, 220–​21 affordances, musical, 260–​61 American music, 13, 94–​96, 105. See also Anglo-​American post rock ‘n’ roll Americo-​centrism, 15–16 Anglo-​American post rock ‘n’ roll, 186, 190 Anglocentrism, 15, 16. See also Anglo-​ American post rock ‘n’ roll Anglo idioms, 69 Anglophone popular culture, 59 Anglo-​style pop music, 63–​65 anti-​Islam rallies, 51–​53 anti-​racist Swedish whiteness, 356 Area Turns Red project, 320 “artifice of history,” 188 aspiration as conceptual frame for Sámi music, 279–​86 for global future, 287–​89 authenticity, as motivator of tourism and music consumption, 114

bossa nova, 113 boundaries, in Nordic popular music,  91–​92

Baltic songs, 48 Balto-​Finnic languages, 251n4 Basque metal, 124 black metal, 70, 132, 133–​37, 140 black nationalism, 355–​56 borealism, 33–​34 and exoticism, 112–​13, 204 geographies of, 43–​45 historiographies of, 43–​56 and historiography of popular music, 187 and Icelandic film, 158–​60 moment of modernity, 39–​41 Nordic music beyond nationalism, 53–​54 Nordic musicians’ participation in, 27 Nordic nationality and modernity reconsidered, 41–​43 and prog rock, 232

Degi íslenskar tónlistar (Icelandic Music Day), 211 democracy festivals and understanding of, 364–​65 fostering, in classroom, 77–​78, 82–​84, 85 digital distribution of music, 313–​14 digitalization, 11–​12, 379–​91 distancing, strategies of, 300–​304

Christian metal, 131–​40 colonialism, 4, 188, 204, 205–​7, 214, 284, 288 “colonial mimicry,” 198 corporate recording industry, declining power of, 69 cosmopolitanism, 108n34, 165–​66, 220, 371–​75. See also roots and routes country music, 95, 99–​100, 106n9, 193 critical pedagogy, 316 cultural creativity, 285–​86 cultural musicology, 10, 28n6 cultural public sphere creation of Sámi, 368–​7 1 festivals as sites of, 364–​65 cultural sustainability, 285–​87, 289–​90n9 cultural unity, 3–​4, 28n1

eco-​cosmopolitanism, 165–​66, 176n3 economic collapse, Icelandic, 211 Edda, 41, 45, 47–​48 education. See music education electronic dance music (EDM), 384, 385 Enlightenment, 39–​40, 48

406   Subject Index environmentalism. See also landscape; nature Biophilia and, 172–​74 Draumlandið and, 151–​53 and hydropower in Icelandic Highlands, 166–​67 and Icelandic music, 163–​64, 168–​69,  175–​76 Jannok and, 283–​85 and place in music, 164–​66 and topophilia in Sigur Rós’s Heima,  169–​72 Valkeapää and, 283 epic tales, 40, 45 Estonian songs, 49 ethnic music, 61, 80, 81 ethnopluralism, 350 etnisk norsk, 296, 306 euro, Nordic resistance to, 42 Evangelicalism, 133, 136, 137, 139 everyday, borealism and music of nation and, 35–​39 exceptionalism, 196–​99 exoticism/​exoticization of Iceland and Faroe Islands, 203–​4, 215–​16 and Icelandic film, 159–​60 and listener-​tourism, 112–​15 marketing, 119–​21, 123, 125 and prog rock, 232 and risks of glocalization, 197 self-​exoticization, 123–​24, 127n11 Faroese music, 111–​12, 124–​26 and listener-​tourism and exoticism, 112–​15 marketing of, 119–​21, 123, 125, 213–​15 transnational character of, 115–​19 Týr and constructing Faroeseness, 123–​24 festivals. See also Sámi festivals Faroese music and, 115–​19 Gärdet Festival, 222, 226–​27 G! Festival, 116–​19, 126 Iceland Airwaves Music Festival, 6–​8, 68, 117, 210–​11 Mela Festival, 263 multicultural, 263 Nordic Delight Festival, 117, 126n4 Nordicness as central concern of, 126n4 Roskilde Festival, 64–​65, 66

and transnational landscape of indie music, 66–​67 Wacken Open Air Festival, 118, 124 film, landscape and music in Icelandic, 153–​60 flash mobs, 298 flexible ethnicities, 240 flinkis, 302 folkbildning, 317 folk music, 48–​50 food, exoticization of Icelandic, 159–​60 fragments, 220 Gärdet Festival, 222, 226–​27 gender and digitally mediated identity of Boine and Jannok, 379–​91 Finnish female rock, 193, 194–​95 and homosociality in Vaular and Lerche works, 304–​7 and masquerade and cultural transmission, 297–​300 in Nordic transcultural context, 295–​96 and oppositionalism of rap, 352 and strategies of solidarity and distancing, 300–​304 genre, musical, 221 geography/​geographies as cultural dimension of Nordic popular music, 11–​12, 26–​27 of musical borealism, 43–​45 and space in modernity, 61–​62 G! Festival, 116–​19, 126 “global commons,” 172, 178n18 global future, aspirations for, 287–​89 globalization Faroese music and, 124–​25 indie music as case of, 65 influence of, 91–​92 and music education, 79–​82 and music in Nordic countries, 1–​2, 4 popular music as medium of, 27 and Sámi festivals, 371–​75 scholarship on music and, 277 and transnational regional powers, 9 glocalization, 196–​97, 326 “gnome rock,” 228 gorrlaus slått, 102–​3

Subject Index   407 Heroic Age, 47 hip hop. See also rap; urban music as colonized by rock, 194–​95 politics of rap pedagogy, 312–​14 popularity of, 325 as public pedagogy, 311–​12, 321–​22 public pedagogy of Adam Tensta and Eboi, 317–​21 rap pedagogy in Swedish and Nordic context, 315–​17 research on Scandinavian, 326 historiographies of musical borealism, 43–​56 history closing of teleological gap between myth and, 40 as cultural dimension of Nordic popular music, 11–​12, 26–​27 and musical borealism, 34 music without, as geography of borealism, 44–​45 “Hobbit rock,” 228 homosociality, 304–​7 huldufólk (“hidden people”), 148, 203, 208 hybridity, 198, 389 hydropower, 166–​67, 172. See also Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Project Iceland Airwaves Music Festival, 6–​8, 68, 117, 210–​11 identification, and emotional response to popular music performance, 262 identity Bhabha on, 306–​7 case studies of urban music and, 329–​33 commodified, 388–​90 construed by popular music, 297 critique of identity-​driven approaches to Nordic music, 58–​61 as cultural dimension of Nordic popular music, 12–​13, 26–​27 digitally mediated, of Boine and Jannok, 379–​91 of ethnic minorities, 239–​40 formation of Karelian, 250 and hip hop as public pedagogy, 311–​22 and homosociality in Vaular and Lerche works, 304–​7

indigenous, of Sámi people, 282–​83, 286, 288–​89 and masquerade and cultural transmission, 297–​300 nationhood and nostalgia in, 307–​8 Outlandish and challenge of national power relations, 333–​37 and rap pedagogy in Swedish and Nordic context, 315–​17 social, of music, 266–​68 and strategies of solidarity and distancing, 300–​304 urban music and national, 327–​28 and Utøya massacre memorial ceremony, 257 immigration, 93–​94 Inari Sámi language, 285, 286, 287 indie music, 65–​69 indigeneity of circumpolar peoples, 40 and creation of Sámi cultural public sphere, 368–​7 1 and digitally mediated identity of Boine and Jannok, 379–​91 embodiment through hybrid popular music, 382–​83 and internationalist and cosmopolitanist ethos of Sámi festivals, 371–​75 ontologies of, 44 and Sámi festivals, 363–​65, 375–​76 Sámi festivals and local mobilizations, 365–​68 of Sámi people, 282–​83, 286, 288–​89 internationalism, 80, 371–​75 Internet age, 313–​14, 379–​91 intersectionality, 381, 386 jazz, 59, 63–​64, 77, 197, 198–​99 joik, 278, 281–​82, 285, 363–​64, 366–​68, 386, 388 jordnær, 304, 306 journalism, on Icelandic music, 207–​9 Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Project, 151, 167, 168, 169, 170, 177n12 Karelianism, 237, 244, 250, 251nn3,10 Karelian language, 241, 242–​46

408   Subject Index Kautokeino Easter Festival, 365–​66, 367, 368, 369, 371–​72 Klemt Echolette tape echo, 230 “krútt,” 160, 177–​78n16 Læstadianism, 366, 370 landscape. See also environmentalism; nature and borealism in Icelandic film, 158–​60 and exoticization of Iceland, 203–​4 and Icelandic music, 145–​53, 177n14 and music in Icelandic film, 153–​58 “Nordic” understanding of, 148 language as key factor in national popular music, 196–​97 sustainability of, 286 Latvian songs, 49 listener-​tourism. See also music tourism and Faroe Islands, 112–​15 and marketing exoticism, 119–​21 and marketing of Iceland, 206, 209–​13 locality, 95, 367–​68 localization, 15–16 Lutheranism, 133 “Made by Sweden” Volvo ads, 3 Márkomeannu Festival, 371 masculinity and homosociality in Vaular and Lerche works, 304–​7 and masquerade and cultural transmission, 297–​300 in Nordic transcultural context, 295–​96 and strategies of solidarity and distancing, 300–​304 masquerade, 297–​300 Mela Festival, 263 metahistory, 187–​90, 198 metal music, 115, 118, 121, 132, 186, 192. See also black metal; Christian metal minoritized whiteness, 357 modernity and borealism, 39–​41 critique of identity-​driven approaches to Nordic music, 58–​61 and Nordic cool narrative, 69–​7 1 popular music and Nordic, 61–​69

reconsideration of Nordic nationality and, 41–​43 and structure of musical landscape, 57–​58 multiculturalism, 79–​82, 85, 262–​64, 307 musical affordances, 260–​61 musical landscape, Nordic modernity and structure of, 57–​61 music education, 75–​85 music journalism, 207–​9 “musicking,” 99 music tourism, 62. See also listener-​tourism music videos, 190 myths/​mythology, 40, 47–​48, 60, 186, 302–​3 national anthem(s), 79, 258, 265, 307, 369 national broadcasting corporations, 6–​8 nationalism. See also nationalist music borealism and production of, 42 and historiography of Nordic popular music, 186, 187, 196–​98 Icelandic, 167–​68, 177n10 Karelian, 238, 250 and music education, 79–​82 Nyberg on, 355 nationalist music, 345–​47, 357–​58 rap and reggae, 347–​51 reception of, 351–​57 national representation, 265–​7 1 nationhood, 303, 307–​8 natural North, 44–​45 nature. See also environmentalism; landscape attachment of prog rock to, 225, 226–​27 in Boine and Jannok works, 385–​87, 390 “New Europeanness,” 258, 272 “New Nationals,” 325–​27, 339–​40 case studies, 329–​33 and national identity, 327–​28 Outlandish and challenge of national power relations, 333–​37 transregional aspects of, 337–​39 New North, 52–​53 “New Norway,” 258, 271–​74 Nibelungenlieder, 41 non-​Nordic Nordic, 52–​53 Nordic anthem, 28n1, 269 Nordic broadcasting corporations, 6–​8 Nordic cool, 69–​7 1 Nordic Council Literature Prize, 145

Subject Index   409 Nordic Council Music Prize, 145 Nordic Delight Festival, 117, 126n4 Nordic Film and TV Fund, 6 Nordic global, 50–​51 Nordic music acquisition of meaning of, 34 diversity of, 27 five sites for historiographies of, 47–​53 and globalization, 1–​2, 4 historiographies of, 43t scholarship on, 2–​4, 5–​6, 13–​17 Nordicness and Christian metal, 131, 140 as concern of music festivals, 126n4 as export commodity, 69 representation of, 27 scholarly responses to, 2–​3 signified by Nordic-​style music, 62 Nordic popular music, scholarship on, 5–​6, 15–​17, 391 Nordic region/​societies creation of, 9 increasing importance of, 280 institutional formations of, 26 institutionalization of, 4 localization in, 15–16 national structures of power in, 8 Nordic-​style music, 14, 59, 60, 64 Nordic ultra-​nation, 51–​52 “Northern People” (Nordlige Folk) program, 373 nostalgia, 307–​8, 356 Nuuk underground, 16–17 organic intellectual, 313 orientalism, 39–​40, 46, 158, 160, 204, 232, 251n10 Othering, 114–​15, 121, 328. See also exoticism/​ exoticization paganism, 134–​37, 140 Perestroika, 238, 241 performance-​based rituals, 297 place, 164–​66, 175. See also space popular music and Nordic modernity, 61–​69 problems of term, 5 scholarship on, 5–​6, 59, 61, 163–​64, 192, 257, 296, 363

print media, 265 prog rock, 219–​20, 231–​33 communal feeling in, 225–​27 dissemination and revival of, 223–​25 and historicizing and mythological view of Sweden and Nordic countries, 227–​28 history of, 221–​23 literatures and concepts of, 220–​21 nostalgia and, 228–​31 public pedagogy of Adam Tensta and Eboi, 317–​21 defined, 311, 314 hip hop as, 311–​12, 321–​22 politics of, 314 of rap in Swedish and Nordic context, 315–​17 race and digitally mediated identity of Boine and Jannok, 379–​91 and homosociality in Vaular and Lerche works, 304–​7 and masquerade and cultural transmission, 297–​300 in Nordic countries, 345 in Nordic transcultural context, 295–​96 and public pedagogy of Adam Tensta and Eboi, 317–​21 race studies, 383 racial contract, 315 “racist whiteness,” 356 and rap pedagogy in Swedish and Nordic context, 315–​17 and strategies of solidarity and distancing, 300–​304 rap. See also hip hop; urban music authenticity of Finnish, 289n8 as colonized by rock, 194–​95 emergence of, 285 in historiography of Nordic popular music, 190–​92 in nationalist music, 346, 347–​52 oppositional ethos of, 352–​53 pedagogy in Swedish and Nordic context, 315–​17 politics of, pedagogy, 312–​14 Sámi, 285–​87 terms used in, 289n7

410   Subject Index refugees, 318–​19 reggae, 346, 347–​52, 355–​56 regional critique of identity-​driven approaches to Nordic music, 58–​60 versus global, 383–​84 as secondary to national identity, 12–13 retrologies, 221, 230 “rhythmic music,” 64, 77 Riddu Riððu Festival, 366–​67, 368, 370, 371–​72, 373, 374–​75 right-​wing popular music, 51–​52. See also nationalist music rímur, 353 ritualized practice, 297 rock, 190, 192. See also prog rock rock imperialism, 193–​96 Rock ‘n’ Royal, 334–​37 romanticism, 60 roots and routes, 91–​94, 98–​99, 102, 104–​6. See also travel and musical exchange Roskilde Festival, 64–​65, 66 Sámi political and national rights in Eurovision Contest, 51 self-​determination of, 279 Sámi festivals, 363–​65, 375–​76 and creation of Sámi cultural public sphere, 368–​7 1 internationalist and cosmopolitanist ethos of, 371–​75 and local mobilizations, 365–​68 Sámi Winter Festival, 369, 371 Sámi music, 277–​79 aspiration as conceptual frame for, 279–​86 and aspirations for global future, 287–​89 digitally mediated identity of Boine and Jannok, 379–​91 indications of history of, 186–​87 Sámi histories represented through, 386–​87 scholarship on, 363–​64 in school curricula, 81–​82 use of dialect in hip hop, 45 self-​determination, 279, 363, 364, 375 self-​exoticization, 115, 123–​24, 127n11

Setesdal music, 98–​106 sexuality, scholarship on, in Nordic music, 3 showcase festivals, 66–​67 ska, 347 social identity of music, 266–​68 of “Til Ungdommen,” 269 social media, 379–​91 sófamálverk (“sofa paintings”), 149 solidarity, strategies of, 300–​304 South Sámi Festival, 371 space, 61–​62. See also place stereotypes, 82, 226, 304–​5, 318, 379, 387, 390 streaming services, 379–​91 Summarfestivalur, 116 suomirock, 193 Swedish whiteness, 356 technology in artist representations, 385–​86, 390–​91 and nature in Biophilia, 174, 178n19 and space in modernity, 62 time and timespace, 171, 231 topophilia, 169–​72 transculturalism and homosociality in Vaular and Lerche works, 304–​7 and masquerade and cultural transmission, 297–​300 and race and gender in Norway, 295–​96 and strategies of solidarity and distancing, 300–​304 translocality, 131–​40 transnational North, 45 travel and musical exchange, 94–​95, 96, 100–102. See also roots and routes tvisongur, 146 “unhomeliness,” 328 unisonance, 265 urban music, 325–​27, 339–​40 case studies, 329–​33 and national identity, 327–​28 Outlandish and challenge of national power relations, 333–​37 transregional aspects of, 337–​39

Subject Index   411 utopia, 42, 231–​32, 316 Utøya massacre memorial ceremony, 257–​60 Bernhoft’s performance at, 303–​4 Karpe Diem’s performance at, 332 music and emotion at, 257, 260–​62 and national representation, 265–​7 1 and postnational “New Norway,” 271–​74 and promotion of multiculturalism, 262–​64 Viking imagery and metal, 15, 123, 186 Wacken Open Air Festival, 118, 124 whiteness, and nationalist music, 346–​47 white power music. See nationalist music white privilege, 315 women. See gender “world music,” 104–​5, 214, 389

youth and youth culture anti-​racist youth organizations, 317, 320 evangelical Christianity and, 133–​40 Faroe Islands, 111 immigrant youths, 354 Karelia, 242 music education, 77–​78, 83–​84 Narcissus, 302 “New Nationals,” 325, 327 Nordic Youth (street action organization), 346, 350–​56 political organizations, 332 Sámi and indegenous, 284, 286, 367, 372, 373 scholarship on, 15–​17, 197, 220, 259 “Til Ungdommen,” 261, 268–​7 1 Utøya, 257 and white power music, 346