High Water

FOR THE RECORD: Super video-heavy post.

So the topic for today is Swedish music, which I'm afraid is one I'm spectacularly unqualified to talk about in many ways.

Branch asked, basically, what the Swedish music scene is like right now.

I do at least listen to P3, which is the younger-people national radio station, because it has shows like Tankesmedjan (that one which Liv Strömquist is often on), and am by proxy exposed to current music, but to be honest, it mostly doesn't stick. One does notice, basically, that:

1. almost everyone sings in English, presumably in the hope of making some kind of international breakthrough. If they do not sing in English, they are Kent, who gave up on such hopes about 10 years ago. (No, OK, there are others who sing in Swedish right now. But not that many who're showing up on the radio!)

2. there are lots of girls singing very hesitantly/softly. I do wish the ladies in mainstream music would just go for it a bit more often, you know? Prettiness is all well and good, but damn. It seems to be the only option!

3. Unless you're Robyn I guess. Who has a robot fetish. Your mileage on this may vary, but I am kind of endeared by the robots, even though I am pretty sure all my music cred will be taken away the second I admit to liking anything about Robyn. (Here is the thing: I do not care about my music cred. I think I acquired it completely by accident anyway.)



[Video embed: Robyn singing Robotboy, no actual video image, just music & stills]

So, you know, so much for my pop culture awareness.


Also: although I spent my childhood playing instruments and was pretty good at some of them I'm really not that musically inclined, which means that I can listen to music without the same kind of analytical approach I often have to reading - which is lovely, I can just listen. It does mean, though, that I tend to file things as "like this" or "don't like this" without much deeper thought about technical skill etc. This will make detailed thoughts tricky; I'll mostly be presenting artists quite briefly and then giving out some music links.

But! I do listen to quite a bit of Swedish music. Let's start by just pulling a list from my profile, and I'll work from there!



Ane Brun

Oops - Ane Brun is actually Norwegian, not Swedish, ( but she lives in Stockholm )


Anna Ternheim

( Read more... )


Broder Daniel

Valborg describes Broder Daniel as "the best worst band ever". ( Read more... )

P.S. In association with posting about Broder Daniel I feel the need to point out that Fucking Åmål is a brilliant film. About growing up in a tiny shitty town and already feeling trapped and then you are also a lesbian! AND IT'S NOT ONE OF THOSE TRAGEDIES WHERE EVERYONE DIES! It's brilliant. Sometimes uncomfortable, since, you know, teenagers, but it left me pretty :D :D :D.


Ebba Grön

Oh look! The first band on the list to actually sing in Swedish!

( Read more... )


Frida Hyvönen

I actually have posted about Frida Hyvönen before. But. ( Read more... )


Kent

Right, well, Kent I've posted a lot about before. ( Read more... )


Maud Lindström

Maud Lindström is, well. Let's take her own words. "Sweden's only official love-critical bisexual feminist singer, writer and poet!"

( You can already tell why I love her, right? )


Nationalteatern

( Read more... )


The Knife

( Read more... )


This post is basically really long now already, damn.

OK, I'll just leave you with a couple more.


The Ark, since they're so iconic among Swedish bands and one of the few current ones that's really well-known overseas. Although they did recently announce that they're quitting this year. And then they released a single.

The single is called "Breaking Up With God".

This strikes me as very representative behaviour.

( Breaking up with god )


Jakob Hellman only released one album, at the end of the 80s, but has been influential for Swedish pop. Kent are fans; you can catch a lot of references back to him in their songs.

( Vackert väder )

Which traces of can be found in a bunch of different early Kent songs! (Kent love referencing stuff, for the record. I think it's a hobby.)


Monica Zetterlund - jazz icon!

( Some other time )

Fidget were a 90s indie band I think? I don't listen to them all that much generally but I have this one song which I love:

( Stop Losing )


Håkan Hellström

( Read more... )


Make of all this what you will! That's a range of music, though nowhere near definitive, from several different genres and decades. (I will note that I'm pretty sure that Swedish music cannot actually be this overwhelmingly white, since Sweden isn't this overwhelmingly white, damn it, but... *headscratch*)

& if anyone wants to rec me more Swedish musicians that I really should be listening to, then please! Go for it!

1. When I saw my doctor last week she took me to task for not believing in my own point of view, emotions, ideas. It's true; I absolutely don't. It makes it hard to speak, post, write, decide what to have for dinner. I am saying this out loud, again, because I need to tell myself, again (and again and again and again), that it's a perception error, not reality, that I have no worth & nothing to say.

Not being the most talented person in the world is not the same as being worthless. Being wrong is not a disaster. Food is not out to get me.* I'm definitely allowed to post in my own space about things I don't think other people will be very interested in; "I wanted to say it" is a reason sometimes & being boring isn't actually a crime. Not everything has to be perfect. Producing imperfect results doesn't mean I'm a terrible human being. Maybe I'm really not a good writer like wot my brain tells me so often, but if so, that doesn't mean I have nothing to offer anyone at all.

* except assorted grains, which totally are.


2. Isen på Riddarfjärden
smäller som gevär
Blåljus vid Tegelbacken
Våren är här
Du står i spegelsalen
med ett brännbollsträ
Där ute väntar natten
på att stan ska implodera

I'm kind of fascinated.

("The ice on Riddarfjärden
cracks like guns
Blue lights at Tegelbacken
The spring is here
You stand in the hall of mirrors
with a rounders bat
Out there the night waits
for the city to implode"

... or something like that. I think.)

(There! This is boring and totally pointless because I refuse to elaborate at this time on why I find it interesting and I'M POSTING IT ANYWAY. Take THAT, brain!)


3. My writing process right now:

On Monday, I opened a word document. I wrote five words.

On Tuesday I turned the five words into an actual sentence by the cunning addition of punctuation, and added a second sentence. I got annoyed, opened a new word document and made notes on something completely different.

Today I went back to the first document and changed around a few things in the first two sentences, turned them into a paragraph, and began working on a second paragraph. It was about then that my subconscious realised what it was letting me get away with and decided that the sky must be about to fall.

I do wish it wouldn't do that.

1. Jag drömde om
en barndomsvän igår
som telenäten drömmer
om svalorna i vår

say Kent. (Cowboys.) I like this song in English, but it's clearly better in Swedish, which shouldn't surprise me at all - of course the lyrics are going to be more expressive in Jocke's native language, both in terms of writing and singing.

(The English version - as in the official release, not the actual translation of the above Swedish - goes, "The wires dream / about swallows in the spring / I dreamed about my childhood / surrounded by dead things". The above means more, I think, "I dreamed about / a childhood friend yesterday / like the telephone wires dream / of swallows in spring". Or it might be the telephone network dreaming about swallows, not the wires? - I'm not even sure why I use this as an example, given that there are tracks on Hagnesta Hill that I like more, but it happened to grab me at the right moment, I suppose.)

I haven't actually listened to Hagnesta Hill in Swedish very much - at least not to pay attention to the words - but apparently I really should. I got into Kent mostly via Hagnesta Hill in English, so I have affection for it (and would still recommend it to non-Swedish-speakers, actually, at least as a gateway). But I know the songs are going to be a lot better in Swedish.

I guess this goes for Isola as well, but I don't feel very motivated - it's not one of my favourite albums of theirs in English, and the only tracks I have a really strong sense of are 747 (which is a really spectacular song in either language & which stands up to their later work way better than the rest of the album) and Velvet (which was only released in English anyway).


2. (or possibly 1.b.) It's also interesting, when I try to translate songs from the Swedish versions of Hagnesta Hill and Isola, how much my word-choice and phrasing ends up influenced by the English versions - as well as the similarity-and-difference between the respective versions. There are quirks of expression unique to each version in every case but some of them are pretty similar overall and others feel, from brief examination, almost tenuously related. More on this another time when I have proper translations of the Swedish versions. I'd quite like to run through a comparison some time. I think there's probably stuff to be got from doing that.


3. I'm still trying to make up my mind on En plats i solen. I don't know what bits I like best, or how much I like it as a whole album. Val has been describing it as one of the happier ones, which seemed like a bit of a strong statement to me (I mean, it's an album which makes pretty heavy use of the word "disappear", for example, though in total fairness this is probably true of a number of Kent's albums - it's kind of one of their favourite words) until I got back to working on the lyrics for Du & Jag Döden, at which point it made perfect sense... everything is relative.

Right now I think that maybe Ensam lång väg hem is doing something for me; I have probably the strongest impression of what it's like of all the tracks on the album so far. But it's still a bit soon to say. It's completely possible I'm partly just sold on it because of the travel aspect. (See below.)

A bunch of other songs definitely have lines that strike me well, too. But I'll work through my thoughts a bit more before I try to pin bits down.

If there's something that I'm not really getting from the album as a whole, it's probably to do with the sort of forward momentum I felt with Röd. Röd is going somewhere, although it isn't sure if it'll get there, or that's how it registers in my mind. En plats i solen is, you know. Just kind of hanging out.

Which is fair enough. But I liked Röd's drive. (And bursts of desperation.)

(I think Du & jag döden also had some kind of drive, in a different direction, which is what makes it a really good listen as a whole album despite several tracks I don't like very much.)


4. Moving more firmly backwards to Röd, I don't know as Svarta linjer struck me very strongly at first - it was possibly overwhelmed between Vals för satan and Det finns inga ord, which were my instant favourites and which I still feel pretty strongly about - but I find myself going back to it quite a bit right now. I don't have particularly amazing things to offer as to why (though I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the "vita linjer / i en tunnel ser jag ljus..." section towards the end, because that gives me a really strong mental image; and the song as a whole practically plays a little film in my head, which a lot of the ones I like most do... I'm also coming to understand that a lot of my favourite Kent songs feel a lot like journeys), but will take this as a lesson about how long it can take for an album/individual songs to settle in one's mind.


5. Basically, I'm going to see Kent live at Långholmsparken later this month, and I'm presumably going to be completely insufferable until then. I apologise to everyone following along to whom I didn't advertise this as The Kent Obsession Journal. I apologise also to valborg, who is discovering that she's not the only one capable of obsessive monofocus. But I go ahead and post this anyway, because we've just had a conversation about how I need to worry a bit less about whether I'm saying exactly the right thing in exactly the right way, and just say things a bit more.

Actually saying anything at all is a well-established problem of mine. I think we've touched on this.

So it seems Kent are releasing a new album. Again! It seems like just yesterday they released Röd, and actually it was less than a year ago (Röd was last autumn, maybe seven or eight months ago I guess?). On the whole I'm pretty surprised!

The album is called en plats i solen - a place in the sun. There are two songs from it out as a single as of today.

...did I mention I'm pretty surprised?

marshtide: Who does that? Who thinks, I'm having a crap mental health week - I know what it needs! A deeper understanding of Kent lyrics!
valborg: You. Apparently.
marshtide: ...yes. :(

I'm going to keep inflicting these on you, anyway. Because I can.

"Du & Jag Döden" means "You & I Death". Just so you have some idea of exactly how upbeat this is likely to be!


1. 400 Slag (400 Blows)

Song

( Swedish )

( English )


2. Du är ånga (You are steam)

Song

( Swedish )

( English )


3. Den döda vinkeln (The dead angle)

Song

( Swedish )

( English )

2/2

The second half of Röd. In this case I'm providing slightly more extensive notes on translation for at least some of the songs, because I've only just been working on it and hey, someone might be interested in how some concepts translate or don't, for example, or how I reached my crazy linguistic conclusions. (& at least if I'm wrong you can see how creatively I'm wrong.)


7. Idioter (Idiots)

on youtube

( Lyrics )


8. Svarta linjer (Black Lines)

on youtube

( Lyrics )


9. Ensamheten (The Loneliness)

on youtube

( Lyrics )


10. Töntarna (The Losers)

on youtube

( Lyrics )


11. Det finns inga ord (There are no words)

on youtube

( Lyrics )


Now I go forth and work on the patio a bit more! Those weeds and dead leaves have to go away eventually. I know there are flower beds at the edges somewhere.