Popular Music and Nordic Modernity

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Mon Apr 17 2017, NEWGEN

Chapter 2

Nordic Mode rn i t y a n d the Struc t ure of t he M u si cal L and s c ape 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

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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


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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


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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.


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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., Ramnarine, 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 nonEnglish 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


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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.


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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 Anglostyle 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


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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 middleclass 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,


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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 punkderived rock sounds and with local distribution via college radio stations and mailordering 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


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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–

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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, UlfHansen 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


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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


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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 selfpromotion, 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


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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.


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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. ?? 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.

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