Beautiful Idiots - The Ark

Glam rock is a genre with which I am not especially taken.  Kiss was okay - in the eighties.  In the late nineties, Marilyn Manson did a lot for the marketing of drug dealers.  It was the Ark's In Lust We Trust that turned me on to them.  The drama of that album, and the charisma of the lead singer Ola Salo, was hard to ignore in 2003.

One of the very touching Ola Salo stories I read was from a young lesbian groupie from Gothenburg who toured with the band.  She wound up in Nyköping (or some other Swedish provincial town) and didn't have a hotel booked.  On hearing that she didn't have a bed to sleep in, Ola gave up his hotel room for her and slept in a room with one of the other band members. 

He is flamboyant, colorful and a 'showman' par excellence.  I write the gender-specific showman in inverted commas because it can't go unremarked; Ola cuts a rather androgynous figure as he struts his stuff.  He is probably best described as a closet heterosexual.  He has a wife and two kids, but to descend to mere pigeonholing is to denigrate the central tenet of the Ark: that we are all special and beautiful no matter what others think about us.

It sounds like the usual ecstasy-riddled rock cook and bull, but if one kid out there found solace in their message and could turn their self-hate around, then it was all worthwhile - and in the last 15 years there's been a lot more than one - there's a generation of Swedes to whom this music means so much.  In terms of impact on a national level one could think of Rammstein in Germany, or perhaps Oasis in the UK.

Perhaps I'm comparing apples with oranges, but the Ark is monumental, and their testament is not hindered by bowing out now with their heads held high.  There's nothing more ludicrous and devaluing to a message born in rock than old rock stars, but Ola we will miss you.

The last word is from Ola and Ola is never short on words.  This the last half of his prelude to a song played during the Ark's final performance at the Malmö festival last Friday night.   [clumsy translation mine - original video here]

-Exactly thirteen years ago, to the day, I sat in a cramped little apartment on Sturegatan in Rörsjöstaden, not far from here.  I thought about the times [we live in].  I sat and thought about how scared we are of each other, and how that fear suffocates us, and how that fear is expressed in so many different ways, like ironic and cynical jokes.  One should understand, that this was the ironic and cynical era at the end of the nineties.  It [the fear] is expressed in status and prestige and the fear of that which is different.  And I felt that I was so incredibly tired of that fear.  I was so tired of that fear that could be found everywhere.  I was so tired of that fear which existed in me.  And I felt that everybody was going around being scared about losing face in front of one another.  And so I thought, if only one could get people to be a little bit less scared of losing face in front of each other, think what a wonderful world we would have.  Because when we go around being scared about losing face in front of each other, then so many of the beautiful things about us disappear.  So I thought, I'm going to fucking well write a song that declares war on that fear.  A song that inspires myself and other people, to dare to be a little bit more ridiculous; to dare to lose face a little bit in front of each other; and that song wasn't just going to be a song, it was going to be a manifest.  It would be a weapon that destroys the fear and the shame that makes our life boring from time-to-time.  I am so proud that it was that song that was our breakthrough.  Because that song that I wrote thirteen years ago on Sturegatan in Rörsjöstaden, it doesn't just sum up everything that we stood for then.  It sums up everything we have stood for through all these years as a band.  And it sums up everything that we will always stand for, regardless of whether we are here or not.

So if you feel like beautiful idiots tonight.  If you are ready to escape the fear and shame, and let the beauty inside of you bloom, sing now with me. . . It takes a fool to remain sane.

Professor Frans Gregersen

Frans plays smart and wise because he is, but he is also humble and has the indelible gift of the teacher that constantly seeks to help and inspire, sometimes with only a few words.  The other mark of the teacher is also his: he has the ability to make things that are complex appear simple and enticing, without them loosing the intricacy that they may or may not have.  He also has a wicked wit, so, in short he takes all things seriously, but none too much.

I've just emerged from a five day course on linguistic research traditions (quite a Danish focus, and if one saw Per Stig Möller's field questions from an international press gallery in the wake of the Mohammed cartoons, one would know that Danes are formidable linguists).  Frans speaks in the now.  He maneuvers the debate, but there is always room for comments and new ideas.  Frans isn't afraid of new ideas and it is possibly this fearlessness that qualifies him most as a professor.

At another occasion he lectured on Copenhagen, the city/country town and the transformations that ensued after the re-building of the citadel in the seventeenth century.  It was riveting.  Of course, there is the exhaustive publication list in top tier journals, the regular academic laudations and membership and leadership in the pertinent scientific and research bodies.  Many others have acknowledged that Frans is a competent polymath and an encyclopaedic mind. 

After a week with him, are there any negative character traits that I can point to, apart from Frans' occasional sporting of the socks and sandals: emphatic no.  His article God og dårlig eklekticisme (good and bad eclecticism) has changed my life, forever.

Outrespective

It came to me first when I was in the backseat of Baz's car.  Ben put Tarantulla on as an interlude to the tomfoolery.  We were on a wildman weekend in Scotland.  We climbed a 900 metro peak in Cairn Gorm national park, had a swim in Loch Ness in the raw, and drank deeply of the whisky flagon.

But it was in the backseat of the Ford Focus that I realized that Faithless' Outrespective was a classic,  especially Tarantulla and We come one.  My fist listening of these was in a living room in London.  Before I moved to London I thought that dance music was for junkies and poofs.  In London dance music emanates from every car and every open window.  But this isn't dance music per se: there's something more destabilised about it.  Like the photo on the front cover the album echoes the riots in Göteborg and the civil disobedience and terror of a new century.

These songs, like great dramatic opera, meld into biting and comings of one.  Like the fado sung in Gerd Nygaardshaug's Mengeles Zoo, or any fado sung for that matter, a 'hyllning', that remarkable Swedish word that encompasses both tribute and glorifying song, to things that make you want to cry because for the few minutes that they last, you live.

Then I took over as navigator from Ben and found myself in the front seat and trying to steer the music choices on a wildman weekend towards Outrespective and these two songs.  A navigators life is never easy.