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Feature: Swedish music fans love pop
Pop music industry takes Sweden by storm
Thirty years after ABBA, the Swedish pop music industry has grown into a leading global force.
Almost three decades after ABBA sparked a worldwide Swede-pop craze, the Swedish music industry has grown into a powerful global force with a finger in every pie of the business.
Ask the Backstreet Boys or Britney Spears where they come to record and the answer is Sweden.
Check with N'Sync or Celine Dion where they found their favourite songwriters and the answer would be Sweden.
Or ask professionals who is the big challenger to the pop music supremacy of the United States and Britain and again the answer is Sweden.
While Swedes did not wait for ABBA's arrival before making music, the quartet's unique success story opened the floodgates for local bands and gave them an international outlet.
Former singer of Secret Service, a Swedish band with several top hits in the 1970s, Ola Hakansson said: "After ABBA, we could see that it was possible for a Swedish band to make it abroad."
But Mr Hakansson, who today runs Stockholm Records, a Universal Music subsidiary that produces top acts The Cardigans, A-Teens and Army of Lovers, remembers that everyone at home did not applaud ABBA's famous victory in the 1974 Eurovision song contest.
"For ABBA it was a big thing to win, but there was also a corny side," he said.
"In the left-oriented Sweden of the 1970s this music was not popular with club owners and journalists."
But even as ABBA made the critics cringe on occasion, the band perfected what has remained the hallmark of Swedish pop music: good, clear melodies, often sung by strong female voices.
"We're a small country, and can't be trendsetters," Mr Hakansson said.
"But we can have success with a song, if it's good enough. We always hunt for the perfect song."
And that hunt runs deep in Sweden, where century-old folk music traditions are still very much alive.
"Sweden is in the European tradition that is based on classical music, on Mozart," he said.
And ever since Anni-Frid and Agnetha of ABBA took the music world by storm, female voices have become a hallmark of Swedish music. Roxette thrives on them, as do The Cardigans, whose lead singer Nina Persson's voice "is so typically Swedish, so melancholic", Mr Hakansson said.
Another asset of Swedish music exports is the satin angelic voice of jazz singer Lisa Ekdahl.
"Maybe it's all thanks to the girls," muses Mr Hakansson.
Change in tune
Hand-in-hand with the international success of the Swedish scene goes the urge to sing in English rather than Swedish. This may be an obvious choice in a small country where almost everyone speaks fluent English and nobody bothers to dub foreign feature films or American TV shows.
But yet the sharp edge and grittiness that features in much American and British rock music is nowhere to be found in Swedish bands' lyrics, which often leave the listener with an aftertaste of sweet banality.
"We sing in English, but English is not our mother tongue, so our lyrics are not that good," Mr Hakansson acknowledges.
"We'll never produce a Dylan or a Springsteen."
In fact, in Sweden the loudest hard rock bands still sound like the ordinary boys-next-door, and even the scruffiest grungers seem more at home with Sweden's consensus society than with revolution.
"We haven't had war, and we don't really have ghettos, so even if we want to be rebellious, we're not very good at it," Mr Hakansson said.
But what Sweden is clearly very good at is producing generation after generation of top acts with daunting efficiency.
Aspiring musicians
Take David Hellberg, an 18-year-old high school student who has played "a mix of two-step and UK garage" music with his band, The New Born Music Productions, for three years now. David knows ABBA mostly as icons from the past.
"I don't look at them as my ideal pop group, but they were good at what they did," he said.
He first thought of a career in music when an acquaintance, enrolled at the Solna Music Production School, asked him to join an impromptu group, which played so well together that it just kept on going. Since then, David, who knows that "the music business is tough", has left little to chance.
Encouraged rather than defeated by a recent record label rejection, David is working on getting more "hook" into his music and will angle for a recording contract again as soon as he is ready.
In the meantime, he plans to enrol in an afro-soul music school and has recently joined another band, DE-2, which plays more mainstream pop, just to cast the net a little more widely.
He also makes the most of the absence of barriers between music styles in Sweden, and sings and tours with a choir whose repertoire ranges from Brahms to gospel. Most importantly, David has no plan B for his future and will not even consider the possibility of failure. With quiet confidence, he states that "I have a good voice" and admits that sometimes, when watching TV, he wonders why this or that group is on MTV instead of him.
But he fully expects to be there one day, and given how efficiently Sweden churns out pop stars it cannot possibly be long now.
Thanks to ABBAMAILer James O'Brien, Sydney, Australia
