Local furniture enthusiasts can now visit Swedish mega store IKEA to bask in functional modernism with a sleek aesthetic. I, however, muddle through everyday life with the bare minimum of style and functionality, so the appeal would be those meatballs I've heard so much about.
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Swedish popular culture has nevertheless been a drawcard for me in recent weeks given that a sizeable commercial chunk has landed in Canberra, with Swedish music taking centre stage. A story in The Financial Review last month explored the interesting fact that a good number of hits in recent years from Taylor Swift and Rihanna et al were written by crack Scandinavian songwriters, including Stockholm native Karl Martin Sandberg aka Max Martin, who have been cranking out a goldmine of top 10 nuggets in virtual anonymity.
Sandberg has been around for a while and wrote the Britney Spears' career starter Baby One More Time, so I wonder if this link between chart success and Scandinavian ancestry is simply a coincidence?
The genetic lineage must have something to do with ABBA, whose songwriters Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson crafted sublime melodies and soaring harmonies that hit the sweet spot with startling consistency. The flow of top 10 hits that followed Eurovision debut Waterloo from 1974 appealed to music fans of all ages and sensibilities, a rare feat the Beatles had accomplished some years before.
I was apparently quite taken with the helicopter on the cover shot of ABBA's album, Arrival, as a toddler, and later on discovered this music was fun and infectious and filled you with an uncontrollable urge to dance freely without a trace of self-consciousness. It would appear the Swedes have it sorted when it comes to the mainstream entertainment industry, although the subcultural flipside is just as interesting.
Swedish bands such as Entombed and In Flames reinvigorated the thrash and death metal genres with anger and energy when their US predecessors – Metallica in particular – decided to play the corporate game. In other news, less noisy but certainly stranger sounding musical groups avidly embraced an alternative ethos in the late 1960s. This involved communal living from which grassroots creativity emerged that moved beyond popular trends with a kaleidoscopic blend of traditional Swedish folk music, mutant blues, music concrete and general psychedelic weirdness.
The trance/drone minimalism of Parson Sound got things started on a series of late '60s recordings, but the scene nucleus was the outsider collective Trad Gras Och Stenar which took Scandinavian folk music into an alternate reality.
How good would it be to walk into IKEA and be enveloped by first-class Swedish psychedelic music drifting from the store speakers? An experience like that could potentially spark interest in a whole tray of meatballs.
