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July 24, 2020 13 comments

Pop Music is a Satanic Mind-Virus!
Part Three: Sweden, Yes

Scott Weisswald

Icona Pop performs at Summerburst Festival, Gothenburg.

1,813 words

White people are the undisputed masters of making catchy music. American and European pop songs make their way onto the airwaves of the entire world through a robust mechanism of economic globalization and sheer memetic power. But why is the music we make so catchy to just about all ears? And who doesn’t find our music appealing? It would be easy to chalk it up to the undeniable creative strength of our people, but like all endeavors in the arts in the modern world, songwriting has taken on the forms of science and cynical commercialism. The best example to point towards would be that of our Nordic brethren in the fair land of Sweden, the thirdmost productive hitmaker per capita in the entire world, behind only America and Britain.

Sweden’s public education system is unique in its music offerings. Pupils can choose music as the main track of their academic career, immersing them in theory, songwriting, performance, and musical professionals who have already made their mark on the industry. Swedish culture places an emphasis on songwriting and music as a career, and not an aspiration — “pop musician” is a job with an education track, rather than an anomaly of fame. This seems noble on the face of it. Rather than leave the arts up to invisible (or visible) hands to fiddle with, the path towards culture is democratized into the hands of Swedish youth.

The success of the Swedish experiment is self-evident. Max Martin, who may be the world’s most successful music producer, insists that he has “public music education to thank for everything.” He grew up in Stenhamra, a suburb of Stockholm, where he was able to take advantage of Sweden’s music education programs to learn French horn before forming the glam metal band It’s Alive. Through It’s Alive, Martin met Denniz Pop and others associated with the Cheiron label — Martin’s input in Cheiron helped spawn that perennial favorite, Ace of Base’s Happy Nation / The Sign. He rode this to great success; Martin was the production brain behind everything from Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Celine Dion, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, and an endless list of others. Martin isn’t just a relic of the 90s, either; he cracked #22 on Billboard’s year-end list of producers for 2019, mostly drowned out by American hip-hop producers. Beside producers, Swedish pop acts that saw massive international success include Europe, The Cardigans, ABBA, Rednex, Robyn, Eric Prydz, Basshunter, Avicii, Tove Lo — the list continues. Listen to the radio? You’ve heard plenty of Swedes.

While this success can be partially attributed to good public policy, there is an element missing from the equation. We could dump billions into training American schoolchildren how to be rocket scientists, but unless our nation’s youth have a knack for propulsion, we might not get anywhere. The Atlantic offers a few explanations, even including a tepid disclaimer that the Swedish pop prowess has no biological basis:

Swedes speak English. It’s true — 89% of them. English alone does grant some access to the global market, but that alone isn’t a recipe for success. The Swedes’ English is, however, remarkably good; you wouldn’t be foolish for thinking pop songs penned by Swedes were actually written by an Anglophone. One of the more recent (and in my opinion, amusing) examples of this would be the vulgarities spewed by Swedish cloud rappers.

Swedes are cosmopolitan. That’s undeniable; always at the cutting edge of globalizing forces, Sweden keeps up with trends from abroad and is very happy to force them down the throats of the citizenry. I would crack a joke here about the memes, but that almost seems cruel.

Swedes have many musical role models. National heroes in modern Swedish culture include the behemoths of ABBA, Europe, and other groups that dominated Anglophone airwaves at the height of the glam rock era, setting both an example and a standard for Swedish music in years to come. Imagine Björn Ulvaeus’ spirit looking over your shoulder in the recording booth.

The Swedish government pours money into the industry. Yes.

You can buy The World in Flames: The Shorter Writings of Francis Parker Yockey here.

Even those don’t fully explain the Swedish phenomenon adequately enough. It’s good and well to point at the why’s and how’s of Swedish pop stars rising to prominence, but the music they write must have some kind of substance or innate goodness behind it for it to be consumed worldwide. One could argue from a high place here and claim that the Swedish government is simply handing the tools needed to tap into the European creative spirit to the youth, with great things coming as a result. There is some truth to that, but this ignores a very important piece of the pedagogic puzzle; Swedish music schools are able to turn teenagers into phenoms because they, and the world more generally, have the methods of pop music production down to a literal science.

Take the aforementioned legend Max Martin, for instance, whose production style of slamming American bass-heavy, hip-hop-inspired beats together with lighter melodic interspersions led to the sound we hear on the radio all of the time now. Songs are crafted assembly-line style; people with the ears for melody compose beats and shoot them off towards pop songwriters in a very efficient process that helps keep pop radio chock full of commuter fodder. These are the methods taught to Swedish music students; methods that have some pretty solid psychological credibility.

Even still, we haven’t fully explained why pop music is so catchy, just how catchy songs are made so easily and quickly — and who makes them. Researchers Alison Pawley and Daniel Mullensiefen at the University of London teased out the common attributes of England’s favorite pop tunes of all time, identifying four key characteristics:

  1. Longer and detailed musical phrases.
  2. A higher number of pitches in the chorus hook.
  3. Male vocalists.
  4. Higher male voices with noticeable vocal effort.

Of course, there are exceptions to all of these things, as well as important caveats. Martin is fond of vaguely describing pop music as being complicated, but not too complicated. Male vocalists work great across many genres, but are less favored in dance music, where a low register could interfere with the bassline. It is two and four that are most interesting for our purposes, which is getting at the memetic power of a pop track; significant variation in the melodic arrangement of the chorus hook means that there is greater distinction between notes in the chorus, making it easier for us to remember because of our highly-refined sense of relative pitch memory, a phenomenon also observed by Mullensiefen. In other words, the more different notes in a chorus are, the more likely we are to remember them. This could explain, in part, why the so-called “millennial whoop” is a mainstay in pop music; simple enough to be exceedingly familiar, yet it hits the sweet spot in melodic variation: up, down, up, down, up, down!

The “noticeable vocal effort” component is worth a mention as well, since in the aforementioned study by Mullensiefen and Jakubowski, the memorability of a tune was impacted by the “music-elicited emotions” from the song — in other words, does the track make us feel something? It’s why we remember Kurt Cobain screaming about mosquitoes and his libido, even if you had no idea what the hell he was saying at the time; he was saying it like it meant something. These textbook pop rules are subject to some constraints, of course — the average Joe likes hearing music that stays in key and doesn’t hurt our eardrums, which is why industrial never truly saw its moment in the limelight despite following all of these rules. Or, at least, until Trent Reznor composed Pretty Hate Machine in verse-chorus structure and sampled Prince. But that’s beside the point.

When a song is truly catchy, it doesn’t need to make much sense at all. I mentioned “Teen Spirit” and its blablublabloowww refrain, but there are endless examples of pop tunes that are either unintelligible or consisting of lyrics that are complete nonsense. This is another area in which the Swedes seemed to have hit upon something true about how the human mind understands music: lyrics play a backseat role when crafting a banger beyond their ease of reproduction:

“For Sweden [melody is] number one and has always been,” [Ace of Base member Ulf Ekberg] says. “While the Americans, it’s the lyrics first, production second and melody last. I am not saying the lyrics are not important, but for us Swedes, for whom English is our second language, we just try to make it understood by a world audience. Because of this focus on lyrics, some of the American songs are complicated and can sometimes be not much fun. While for us, we always try to reach to as many people as we can, so we have feel-good melodies and simple lyrics so everyone can have fun.”

Got it. Keep it simple, catchy, fun; fly me to the moon, and let me play among the stars. The message of the song seems to bypass our higher-level faculties, instead becoming a vehicle that carries an earworm melodic hook. That’s fine when lyrics are either meaningless or just amusing. But what happens when this curiosity of the Western mind gets turned against us? What happens when pop music is taken over by people who have ill wishes against us, who might start injecting catchy hooks full of brain poisons of the worst kinds? I am a young man, so I have been mildly inebriated and irked in one too many house parties with “Mo Bamba” blaring on the speakers. I find white teenagers slurring “I got hooooeeeees” a bit unbecoming.

Will we even notice just how absurd the music we’re dancing to is? Some of us have, and have therefore tuned out, judging by my readership’s taste in music. Far too many of us are still plugged in, though, which is less of a glitch in the mind of our people than it is an attack on the very thing that made us great in the first place. Like many things made possible by the clinical, observant minds of whites, the precision of pop can become a vector for the worst possible of mind viruses.

But just what kind of propaganda could be pushed through radio hits? And more importantly — what can we do about it?

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13 comments

  1. George Poulos says:
    July 24, 2020 at 8:04 am

    All I have to say about Swedish music is Trad Gras Och Stenar… “Djungelns Lag” heavy rock circa 1971, Won’t hear this on Radio…

    1. Callan Andresson says:
      July 28, 2020 at 4:17 am

      I’ve never heard of them, so I checked them out on ‘Discogs’; they remind me of International Harvester / Parson Sound. Rather strange version of “The Last Time” by those chaps.
      Oh, and by the way; ABBA, Ace of Base and Swedish plastic pop music is just as bad as any other rubbish.

  2. Amas says:
    July 24, 2020 at 8:24 am

    Some recommendations for anyone looking for good music of our spirit; Wardruna(Norway), their first two albums especially are excellent; Nebelung(Germany), Vigil; Umbría(Spain), Farwalker; Silly Wizard(Scotland), So Many Partings.
    I can’t think of/don’t know of, anything high quality from Sweden that isn’t black metal unfortunately.

    1. Razvan says:
      July 24, 2020 at 11:19 am

      Not Swedes, but I think Heilung are great too.

    2. wanred says:
      July 24, 2020 at 11:46 am

      Parasite, Count Raven, Candlemass and Heavy Load jump to mind, the Swedes make good metal.

      1. Amas says:
        July 25, 2020 at 3:56 pm

        They do make good metal. Marduk and Hermodr are two of my favourites in that vein.

  3. Olert says:
    July 24, 2020 at 9:37 am

    Hallas is a Swedish Metal band who is doing a fantastic job.

  4. Razvan says:
    July 24, 2020 at 11:11 am

    Speaking about Swedes, what do you think about the band ISON? I love “Andromeda Skyline”.

  5. Bigfoot says:
    July 24, 2020 at 11:20 am

    Amon Amarth is an excellent death metal band from Sweden. They sing about viking history and Norse mythology. The lead singer sings in a low guttural voice, but there music is pretty good.

  6. Archer says:
    July 24, 2020 at 11:25 am

    Again, most interesting. I’ve often wondered about Sweden’s musical prowess, but thought it was easily explained by IQ, much like their proportion of chess gms and Nobel laureates. According to the north south iq gradient theory they are close to the top!

    Does this article apply to Norway too? They have Ah ha and some other acts, don’t they? What about Roxette? It’s probably cultural. The Norwegians have all that oil money so they may want to leave music to their Swedish brethren.

    Have you guys ever heard Ring by the Connells? 74-75 the song was a hit in Scandinavia, so they have adopted it. It’s heavily influenced by the gin blossoms but less commercial.

    The song The Hook by blues traveller is about the nonsensical character of pop lyrics. “It doesn’t matter what I sing, so long as I sing with inflection, you’ll think my words reflect some inner truth of vast reflection!” The hook brings you back. Actually it’s worse than that. It’s natural that song words should have meaning. All lyrics in western music by the vast majority are invective against certain enemies of the system, or the system’s enemies depending on your perspective. Each verse will directly attack or mock a separate enemy, representing things the person actually said and did. All songs are like this going pretty far back. I believe it’s state controlled or mandated somehow, although I’m unclear on the precise mechanism, but it’s pervasive, in metal, everything.

  7. Lush Fan says:
    July 24, 2020 at 12:04 pm

    I’ll take this opportunity to shill for what I think is the catchiest pop rock ever, Lush. They lasted from 1988 to 1996 and went through phases of shoegazing and Brit pop or Brit rock. Emma Anderson was their songwriter and she could do no wrong. With the exotic-looking Miki Berenyi as frontwoman and a decent-playing male rhythm section, they had some success in the early 90s. Throughout, Anderson’s songs were diamonds, and she went on to have a group called Sing Sing. They owed a litlle to female vocal groups like the B52s and Abba, but I think they had their own thing, involving quite erotic lyrics that were ambiguous and hard to make out over the roaring instruments. They had several great videos that were made at the height of MTV.

    I would paste URLs here but not sure if it’s right. “Sweetness and Light,” ” De Luxe,” and “Superblast” are their best videos if anyone cares.

  8. Rhodok says:
    July 24, 2020 at 10:17 pm

    I do not know much of music (besides knowing what I like) but might there be another reason why producers like this whopp thing: Do these songs become boaring very fast? (to me they do). Hence the need for another fix – same melody, but different?

  9. Felix Krull says:
    July 25, 2020 at 9:00 pm

    In the fifties, when the first rock’n’roll hit Scandinavia, Sweden decided that if Sweden were to have an indigenous music industry, they would have to play American music, so that’s what the Swedish state subsidized.

    In Denmark, the state subsidized Danish music, which is why all the big Danish names sing in Danish: Gasolin, Shubidua, Gnags, TV2, Lis Sørensen, Sanne Salomonsen etc. So Denmark didn’t have an ABBA, a Roxette or an Ace of Base, but we had pop music in Danish.

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