Do you like Swedish pop music? The answer is probably yes, even if you can’t name a single artist born in Sweden. Do you like Katy Perry’s “Hot N Cold”? Pink’s “Please Don’t Leave Me”? Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone”? Many of the songs on the new Taylor Swift album, “1989,” half of which were co-written by Max Martin, a Swede? “1989” sold almost 1.3 million copies in its first week, the biggest week for an album since “The Eminem Show,” in 2002. Swift’s album is a big moment for the musical influence of Sweden, but new albums by the Stockholm residents Tove Lo and Mapei reinforce the fact that the Swedish sound may now be the reigning pop language everywhere.
The first Swedes to dominate the charts were the group abba, in the nineteen-seventies. They were followed by the brief but intense reign of Ace of Base, in the early nineties. Today, Martin, who started as the singer in a hair-metal band called It’s Alive before moving into songwriting, can be credited with either writing or influencing a large proportion of the Swedish pop produced in the past twenty years. He and his cohort of songwriters are backstage workers, who write mostly for, and with, others, a version of the classic assembly-line songwriting model that has served artists as disparate as Frank Sinatra, George Jones, and Whitney Houston. (This team process does not diminish Martin’s individual fame in Sweden, where he will soon appear on a postage stamp.) As Taylor Swift shows, Swedish pop doesn’t need actual Swedes singing it.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/01/sound-sweden
The foundation, the source, the heart is where to start:
Not too shabby for a socialist country
