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a primer to music pop culture from the eighties to the noughties

Category: Swanky Sweden

Songs from the motherland of ABBA

The Singing Dentist

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On 15 August 2022

In 1992, 90ies, Swanky Sweden

Alban Uzoma Nwapa was born and raised in Southeastern Nigeria and came to Sweden at the age of 23 to study dentistry. To help with the costs he took up a job as a DJ at a local Stockholm club where he often sang along to the tunes and soon became well-known, so he kept doing it as a lucrative side-job after finishing his studies and opening his own practice.

Fast-forward to 1992, when his second album “One Love” was released under the stage name Dr. Alban. It contained two Euro-dance songs, which became very popular all over Europe: the Gospel “Sing Hallelujah!” and “It’s My Life”, which was further popularised by featuring in the background of a Tampax commercial.

The Love-Child of Country and Techno

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On 19 July 2022

In 1994, 90ies, Must-See-Video, Swanky Sweden

Two weeks ago we learned about a high point of Swedish music videos. This week we’re having a look at the other end of that scale.

We do not even need to go into Hegelian dialectic to realise that sometimes when you mix two things a beautiful new synthesis may result. Unfortunately, the opposite is true as well: take the worst of two musical genres and you might just end up with a frightening chimera. I honestly tried my best to do proper research and put some kind of spin on it. But you know what? It’s simply utter trash. And that’s all it is.

Highly successful trash, to be fair though. It held number one for over 13 weeks in Switzerland’s hit-parade, for example. So if nothing else this internal education gives an answer to whether really “everything was better in the olden times”, at least when these olden times happen to be just about 30 years ago. Hell, no, it wasn’t.

The Other Salvation Army

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On 6 July 2022

In 1991, 90ies, Must-See-Video, Swanky Sweden

Many people the world over have a hard time telling Switzerland and Sweden apart. Sure, they’re both small countries in Europe with excellent quality-of-life, they both start with “Sw”, they’re both really bad when it comes to saving people’s life in a pandemic thanks to their high number of vaccine refusers and people in both countries talk some weird Germanic dialect. But one of them has something the other does not:

From A like Abba to Z as in ZZAJ Sweden has continuously exported a wide variety of pop music over the years. Some were one-hit wonders, some were brilliant, and some were just way ahead of their time.

Which to me is the only possible explanation why the complete works of the “Army of Lovers” gets so little spotlight these days.

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