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In one of his famed self-portraits, Omar Victor Diop, a Senegalese photographer and artist, wears a three-piece suit and an extravagant paisley bow tie, preparing to blow a yellow, plastic whistle. The elaborately staged photograph evokes the memory of Frederick Douglass, the one-time fugitive slave who in the 19th century rose to become a leading […] More
As fans from around the world spent money to witness the kick off of the star’s tour in Sweden, they may have caused the country’s inflation rate to stay higher than expected.In Europe’s relentless battle against inflation, another culprit has apparently emerged: Beyoncé.Last month, as the star kicked off her world tour in Stockholm, fans flocked from around the world to witness the shows, pushing up prices for hotel rooms. This could explain some of the reason Sweden’s inflation rate was higher than expected in May.Consumer prices in Sweden rose 9.7 percent last month from a year earlier, the country’s statistics agency, Statistics Sweden, said on Wednesday. The rate fell from the previous month’s 10.5 percent, but was slightly higher than economists had forecast.Michael Grahn, an economist at Danske Bank, said that the start of Beyoncé’s tour might have “colored” the inflation data. “How much is uncertain,” he wrote on Twitter, but it could be responsible for most of the 0.3 percentage point that restaurant and hotel prices added to the monthly increase in inflation.Restaurant and hotel prices rose 3.3 percent in May from the previous month, while prices for recreation and cultural activities and clothing also increased.Fans came from around the world to attend Beyoncé‘s sold-out shows. Their spending could explain some of the reason Sweden’s inflation rate was higher than expected in May.Felix Odell for The New York TimesBeyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour, her first solo tour since 2016, started on May 10 in Stockholm, with two nights at a 50,000-capacity arena. Fans from around the world took advantage of favorable exchange rates and flew in to buy tickets that were cheaper than in the United States or Britain, for example.Mr. Grahn said in an email that he wouldn’t blame Beyoncé for the high inflation number but “her performance and global demand to see her perform in Sweden apparently added a little to it.”He added that the weakness of Sweden’s currency, the krona, would have added to demand as well as cheaper ticket prices. “The main impact on inflation, however, came from the fact that all fans needed somewhere to stay,” he said, adding that fans took up rooms as far as 40 miles away. But the impact will only be short-lived, as prices revert this month.While this is a “very rare” effect, he said that Sweden had seen this kind of inflationary effect on hotel prices before from a 2017 soccer cup final, when foreign teams played in the country.“So it is not unheard-of, albeit unusual,” Mr. Grahn said.Carl Martensson, a statistician at Statistics Sweden, said that “Beyoncé probably had an effect on hotel prices in Stockholm the week she performed here.” But he added, “it should not have had any significant impact of Sweden’s inflation in May.” More
After winning the competition last year, Ukraine should have been this year’s host, but Britain stepped in to help the war-torn nation.The Eurovision Song Contest grand final, held in Liverpool, England, on Saturday, was meant to be Ukraine’s party.After Ukraine won last year’s edition of the beloved, campy singing competition, the country won the right to host this year’s spectacle. But with Russia’s invasion showing no sign of ending, the event was relocated to Liverpool. In the midst of a war, and with millions watching live, Ukraine’s entrant, Tvorchi, was among the favorites to win this year’s edition of the glamorous and, often, oddball event — a sign of the European public’s ongoing solidarity with Ukraine against Russia’s invasion.Instead, Sweden crashed the celebration. Around midnight in the M&S Bank Arena, Eurovision’s hosts announced that the pop singer Loreen had won with “Tattoo,” a dance track that grows in intensity with each verse.Mary Turner for The New York TimesLoreen was the bookmakers’ favorite for the competition, thanks to both her catchy track and Eurovision pedigree, having won once before, in 2012. Her victory means that Sweden, a Eurovision-obsessed nation, will host next year’s contest.Ukraine’s entry, the pop duo Tvorchi, finished in sixth place.Eurovision, which started in 1956 and is now onto its 67th edition, is the world’s most-watched cultural event. Each year, entrants representing countries across Europe and beyond face off, performing original songs in the hope of securing votes from watching viewers and juries.Britain’s public broadcaster, the BBC, which organized this year’s contest, promised it would host a party for Ukraine, and in Liverpool on Saturday, the war-torn country’s presence was inescapable. Eurovision fans walked the city carrying Ukrainian flags, and dozens of Ukrainian art installations could be seen in prominent locations around the city. Ukrainian fans inside the M&S Bank Arena, in Liverpool, England, where the grand final was held.Mary Turner for The New York TimesIn Kyiv on Saturday, the event offered a diversion from the battlefield. At the Squat 17b bar in the city, Eurovision fans gathered to watch the show, dedicating their first round of applause to the Ukrainian Army. Kyiv’s daily curfew starts at midnight, and the bar shut at 8:30 p.m. so that people could get home; fans could not watch the whole event there. Still, at one table, a group of friends sang along while they could.“It’s a piece of happiness,” said Olha Tarasenko, 24. Tarasenko said she remembered Ukraine’s victory at last year’s event. When Kalush Orchestra, a rap-folk group, triumphed, “I was crying, and felt like everything is possible,” she said. European solidarity with Ukraine was clear throughout Saturday’s spectacle in Liverpool. It opened with a video of Kalush Orchestra performing on a subway train in Kyiv, before the band appeared onstage to almost deafening cheers. The winners of the 2022 Eurovision, Kalush Orchestra, opened this year’s grand final in Liverpool.Mary Turner for The New York TimesLater in the broadcast, Julia Sanina, one of the evening’s TV hosts, went into the audience and spoke with displaced Ukrainians living in Britain who had been given heavily-discounted tickets to the final. And, in a special guest performance, Duncan Laurence, a Dutch pop star, gave a rousing rendition of Gerry and the Pacemakers’ “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” accompanied by a choir in Kyiv via video. “Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart,” the choir sang, “And you’ll never walk alone.”The show’s hosts and competitors were careful not to actually mention or criticize Russia, which last year was banned from participating in the contest because of its invasion of Ukraine. Eurovision is meant to be a nonpolitical event, and overt political statements are banned.On Friday, that rule stirred controversy in Britain after President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine asked to speak during the final, but was rebuffed. The European Broadcasting Union, which oversees Eurovision, said in a news release that “regrettably” an address by President Zelensky would have breached its rules.Shortly after the union’s decision, a spokesman for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain told reporters that Eurovision’s apolitical nature wasn’t a good enough excuse. “The values and freedoms that President Zelensky and the people of Ukraine are fighting for are not political, they’re fundamental,” the spokesman said, according to a report on the BBC.Still, the nonpolitical rule was stretched to breaking point on Saturday night, with several participants performing songs that hinted at Russia’s invasion. During Tvorchi’s performance of “Heart of Steel,” the band sang lyrics including: “Despite the pain, I continue my fight.”In Kyiv, people gathered at a bar to watch the Eurovision Song Contest as Ukrainian contestants’ songs from years past were played on a screen.Nicole Tung for The New York TimesOn Saturday night, even with Tvorchi’s sixth place finish, Ukrainian culture was on display right until the end of the spectacle. After Loreen accepted the Eurovision trophy, Julia Sanina, the Ukrainian TV host, appeared onstage to thank Liverpool for being “an amazing host on behalf of Ukraine.” She then quoted the slogan of this year’s contest: “We will always be united by music.” More
The election of a grand imam is the backdrop for this tense drama of innocence and corruption set at an esteemed Islamic university.“Cairo Conspiracy” was Sweden’s entry in this year’s Academy Awards race for best international feature, but it does not have a single word of Swedish in it, nor is it set anywhere near the Nordic country. The film (which did not receive an Oscar nomination) is a European coproduction written and directed by Tarik Saleh, a Swedish director whose father is Egyptian. It was shot largely in Turkey. And like Saleh’s 2017 film “The Nile Hilton Incident,” it takes aim at corruption in the title city.Adam (Tawfeek Barhom), a young man from a remote Egyptian province, receives the glad news that he’s won a scholarship to Al-Azhar University, an eminent, Islamic institution in Cairo. As Adam gets accustomed to campus life, the movie introduces another character, Colonel Ibrahim (Fares Fares). He’s tasked by a military committee with fixing the election for the university’s new grand imam. The ideal cleric’s interests should, naturally, align with the state’s.Ibrahim is a shaggy fellow, but he’s hardly avuncular. He uses students as informants. When his current pigeon, Zizo (Mehdi Dehbi), is exposed, Ibrahim tells him to find a “new angel.” Zizo tags Adam. He takes the freshman clubbing, and shares a forbidden smoke with him, telling him: “Your soul is still pure. But every second in this place will corrupt it.” Soon, Zizo is dead and Adam is betraying his fellow students and helping Ibrahim blackmail his teachers. In this cutthroat environment, Adam looks more and more like a lamb headed to slaughter.“Cairo Conspiracy” is a measured but unsparing portrait of corruption perpetrated by people who, across the board, are utterly confident of their own rectitude. Its denouement offers some mercy, but zero hope that the rot depicted can be corrected.Cairo ConspiracyNot rated. In Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters. More
The director of “Sabaya,” about Yazidi women who had been sexually enslaved by ISIS, says that he wasn’t present for a key scene and that he substituted footage.BAGHDAD — In a pivotal scene of the 2021 documentary “Sabaya,” two men rescue a young woman named Leila from a Syrian detention camp for the families of ISIS fighters, bundling her into a car and driving her to safety as shots are fired behind them.In interviews with BBC Radio and others, the film’s Iraqi-Swedish director, Hogir Hirori, recounted the tension of the rescue and the terror of the ride as they raced from Al Hol detention camp with the young woman, one of thousands of women and girls from Iraq’s Yazidi religious minority who had been sexually enslaved by ISIS.The dramatic scene helped the Swedish-government-funded film garner glowing reviews and awards, including best director for a foreign documentary at the Sundance Film Festival last year. But following an investigation by a Swedish magazine, Kvartal, Hirori has admitted that he was not there when Leila was freed, that he substituted another woman instead and that he lied to a BBC interviewer.The admissions follow findings by The New York Times last year that many of the traumatized women either did not initially consent to be in the film or refused but were included anyway. The director’s admissions have also renewed accusations that the documentary played down the coerced separation of mothers from their young children, born during enslavement by ISIS — and turned the very men responsible for that separation into heroes for rescuing them.While Yazidi women sexually enslaved by ISIS were welcomed back by their communities after ISIS was defeated, the children were not. Some women did not want the children, but for most, the forced separations have had serious repercussions, including suicide attempts.In a statement issued after the Kvartal investigation, Hirori acknowledged that he had depicted Leila’s escape “using a rescue scene of another woman which I participated in.” He said the woman who was presented as Leila, the main character, did not want to be filmed after the rescue and so he did not mention her in the documentary.Speaking in Swedish through an interpreter, he told BBC Radio last year, “It was important for me to film it as it was happening because that was the reality.” In the interview, one of several in which he expressed the same sentiment, he also spoke of the Yazidi women: “They aren’t just numbers, they are people just like you and me.”The BBC has removed the lengthy interview from its website after press queries. A BBC spokesperson said it was being reviewed. Hirori said in his statement that he regretted not telling the BBC the truth about the rescue scene.A timeline by Kvartal also showed that in three scenes that included news reports about the battle against ISIS and a Turkish invasion, audio was inserted from events that had occurred several months earlier or weeks later. In at least one of the scenes, the film’s hero reacts to news from the car radio that he could not have been hearing.Hirori and the film’s producer, Antonio Russo Merenda, a former Swedish Film Institute commissioner who has said he was heavily involved in the film’s editing, did not respond to requests for comment by The Times.In his statement following the Kvartal investigation, Hirori said that the film was not intended to be journalism and that Swedish documentary tradition allowed filmmakers “to express their own unique view of events.”Kristina Eriksson, a communications officer at the Swedish Film Institute, said, “We follow the debate about the role of documentaries and welcome the discussion, but nothing has emerged so far that gives us reason to act in relation to the film.” She declined to clarify whether the institute had procedures governing the veracity of documentary films it funded.The issue of forced separations is the single most contentious one among Yazidis. While the Yazidi Home Center featured in “Sabaya” was responsible for finding and caring for hundreds of Iraqi Yazidis freed from ISIS captivity, the organization, acting on instructions from Yazidi elders in Iraq, also arranged for the children to be taken from their mothers. Most were sent to an orphanage in northeastern Syria that the women were not allowed to visit once they returned to Iraq.Almost all the women were told that to go home after being rescued from Al Hol camp, they would have to give up their children. The women were also told, falsely, as was one of the woman in “Sabaya,” that the separation would be temporary.Hirori has said he did not have space in the film to address the issue. “My focus was in trying to document how these women and girls were saved and not to go into the whole giving up the children,” he said in an interview with The Times last year.Sherizaan Minwalla, a human rights lawyer based in Erbil, Iraq, who has worked extensively with Yazidi genocide survivors, said, “The film portrayed a false narrative of women with children being rescued when in fact they were hiding with their children to avoid being forcibly separated before returning to their families in Iraq.” Some of the women were so afraid they would be separated from their children that they chose to stay in the Syrian detention camp rather than be rescued.A limited number of freed Yazidi women have been reunited with their children. Because those mothers and their children face threats from the Yazidi community in Iraq, almost all have been relocated to other countries.“The director doesn’t need to show situations that are wholly invented falsehoods in the film to have it be a false portrayal,” said Jennifer Crystal Chien, director of Re-Present Media, a San Francisco nonprofit that advocates for storytelling from underrepresented communities. Omitting key information means the viewer can “draw the wrong conclusions,” she said.The documentary was rejected by the Human Rights Watch Film Festival last year because of concerns over consent by traumatized ISIS survivors, but it was shown at the Sundance Film Festival.Months after the release of “Sabaya,” the filmmakers obtained written consents but in languages most of the women do not understand. The agreements entitled the filmmakers to use their names, stories and all footage for any project, in perpetuity.“There are certain types of things that seem in some way exciting or dramatic or have a kind of heroic outcome,” Chien said. “These kind of things are very appealing to people who are making decisions about funding and programing even though they may not know anything about the actual situation in the region or whether the footage that’s being gotten could possibly be gotten with informed consent at all.”Sangar Khaleel More
The Swedish superstars — or digital versions of them, at least — performed on Thursday to 3,000 enthusiastic fans with the help of 140 animators, four body doubles and $175 million.LONDON — Ecstatic cheers bounced around a specially built 3,000-capacity hexagonal arena Thursday night as the members of Abba — one of pop music’s behemoths — slowly emerged from beneath the stage, their classic ’70s hairstyles leading the way, to play their first concert in over 40 years.As a synthesizer blared and lights pulsed, the singer Anni-Frid Lyngstad twirled her arms skyward, unveiling a huge cape decorated with gold and fire red feathers, while she sang the slow-burn disco of “The Visitors.” Benny Andersson, poised at his synth, grinned like he couldn’t believe he was onstage again. Bjorn Ulvaeus, the band’s guitarist, focused on his instrument. Agnetha Faltskog swirled her arms as if in a hippie trance, adding her voice to the chorus.Soon, Andersson took the mic. “I’m really Benny,” he said. “I just look very good for my age.”The specially built Abba Arena holds the technology required to bring the Abbatars to life.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesThe audience — some already out of their seats dancing, glasses of rosé prosecco in hand — laughed because the comment went straight to the heart of the event. The members of Abba onstage weren’t real; they were meticulous digital re-creations made to look like the group in its 1979 heyday. The real Abba — whose members are all at least 72 years old — was watching from the stands.Thursday’s concert was the world premiere of Abba Voyage, a 90-minute spectacular that runs in London seven times a week until at least December, with potential to extend until April 2026, when the permission for the Abba Arena expires, with the land being designated for housing.During the show, the digital avatars — known as Abbatars — performed a set of hits with the help of a 10-piece live band and an array of lights, lasers and special effects. For the Spanish-tinged “Chiquitita,” the group sang in front of a solar eclipse. For the stadium disco of “Summer Night City,” it appeared in pyramids made of dazzling light, with the rings of Saturn twirling in the background. The avatars also appeared as 30-foot-tall figures on huge screens at the sides of the stage, as if being filmed at a real concert. At points, they started appearing in dozens of places onstage as if in a manic music video.Baillie Walsh, the show’s director, said the event was meant to be “a sensory overload.”The project, which Walsh said pushed digital concerts beyond the hologram performances that have made headlines in the past, is the result of years of secretive work, protected by hundreds of nondisclosure agreements. That included five weeks filming the real Abba in motion capture suits in Sweden; four body doubles; endless debates over the set list; and 140 animators from Industrial Light & Magic (known as I.L.M.), a visual effects firm founded by George Lucas that normally works on Hollywood blockbusters.Svana Gisla and Andersson’s son Ludvig Andersson, the event’s producers, said in an interview last Friday that they had to deal with a host of problems during the eight years they worked to develop the show, including fund-raising challenges and malfunctioning toilets.“It’s been stressful,” Andersson said, looking exhausted and sucking a mango-flavored vape pen. “But, make no mistake,” he added, “nothing has been more enjoyable than this.”Alex Beers, a member of the band’s fan club, traveled from Amsterdam for the concert.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesCarla Bento flew in from Portugal just to stand outside the show.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesMerchandise for sale inside the arena included shirts, backpacks and a tea tray.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesThe idea started around 2014, Gisla said, when she was brought in to help make music videos for the band involving digital avatars, a process that was “a total nightmare,” she said. Around 2016, Simon Fuller, the producer behind the “Idol” franchise and the Spice Girls, suggested a show starring a 3-D version of the group “singing” while backed by a live band. (Fuller is no longer involved.)The group needed to get creative because Faltskog and Lyngstad had made it clear that they didn’t “want to go on the road,” Andersson told The New York Times in 2021. But the quartet did want to include fresh music in the show, so it reunited in secret to work up a few songs, which became something more: “Voyage,” Abba’s first new album in four decades, released last year.The team quickly realized that holograms were not up to scratch; nor were a host of other technologies. “We kissed a lot of frogs,” Gisla said. It was only when they met representatives of Industrial Light & Magic that she felt they had found a company capable of making “really convincing digital humans,” who could be “running, spinning, performing in floodlights.” The key, Ulvaeus said in a video interview, is “for them to emotionally connect with an audience.”During test shoots in fall 2019, the group’s male members “leapt in with no qualms,” Ben Morris, I.L.M.’s creative director, said. (The musicians’ biggest concern? Shaving off their beards. “I was scared what I would find underneath,” Ulvaeus said.) Lyngstad had just had hip surgery and was using a cane. “But we started playing some songs and she slowly slid off the stool, stood up and said, ‘Take my stick away,’” Morris recalled.The following spring, the band was filmed for five weeks by about 200 cameras in Sweden, as it repeatedly played its hits. The British ballet choreographer Wayne McGregor and four body doubles selected from hundreds of hopefuls looked on, with the intention of learning the band’s every movement, stance and expression so they could mimic its members, then extend their movements to develop the show’s final choreography.Steve Aplin, I.L.M.’s motion director for the event, said they went through “literally hundreds” of iterations of each avatar to get them right, and also modeled clothes designed by the stylist B. Akerlund. The hardest to achieve was Andersson, he added, since “his personality is the twinkle in his eye.”From left: Bjorn Ulvaeus, Agnetha Faltskog, Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Benny Andersson in their motion-capture suits.Baillie WalshWhile the Abbatars were being developed, the 10-piece band was being formed and Gisla was fund-raising (the final budget was 140 million pounds, or about $175 million, she said), developing an arena capable of handling all the technology and trying to keep the massive project under wraps. A moment of potential jeopardy came in December 2019, when the team submitted a planning application to the London authorities that had the word “Logo” on technical drawings of the building instead of “Abba,” in the hope no one would investigate further.When the coronavirus pandemic hit, a project that “already seemed ludicrous before Covid” became “doubly ludicrous” Gisla said, since she was asking backers to trust the idea that 3,000 people would want to dance next to each other in the near future. Materials for the arena’s sound insulation almost got stuck outside Britain when a ship jammed in the Suez Canal; the wood for the building’s facade was meant to come from Russia, but was sourced from Germany at increased expense after Russia invaded Ukraine.Asked what he had gone through while making the project, Walsh replied, “A nervous breakdown,” then laughed.Abba Voyage is not the only Abba-themed event in London; the long-running “Mamma Mia!” musical in the West End also regularly attracts boozy bachelorette and birthday parties. Gisla said that like a West End show, Abba Voyage would have to sell about 80 percent of its seats to make a profit. Tickets start at £31, or $38, although few of those cheap seats appear available for the initial run. Attendees pay more — starting at $67 — for a spot on a dance floor in front of the stage.Andersson, the producer, said he obviously hoped Abba Voyage would be a commercial success — as do the members of Abba, who are investors — but he insisted he was happy the team had simply “created something beautiful” after so much toil. Ulvaeus said he wouldn’t be surprised if some of the group’s contemporaries consider a similar undertaking: “If they ask me for advice, of course, I would say, ‘It takes a long time and it’s very expensive.’”The Abba Voyage show features a 10-piece live band and an array of lights, lasers and special effects.Johan PerssonBrenton and Brenda Pfeiffer, from Australia, sharing a kiss after the show.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesElla Vaday and Kitty Scott-Claus, competitors on “RuPaul’s Drag Race UK,” attending the opening-night show.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesAt Thursday’s premiere, the audience was split between invited celebrities in the stands (including Sweden’s king and queen) and members of Abba’s fan club on the dance floor, yet in both sections people hugged in joy at the sound of beloved songs, and danced and sang along. The fact that the band onstage wasn’t the flesh-and-blood originals didn’t seem to matter. For “Waterloo,” the Abbatars simply introduced a huge video of their 1974 Eurovision performance and danced their way offstage as the crowd cheered wildly.Jarvis Cocker of the band Pulp said he had been left in “a state of confusion” by the show. “I felt very emotional at certain times during that performance, which I’m calling a performance but it wasn’t — it was a projection,” he said. He added, “But I don’t know what it means for the future of mankind.” He suggested avatar shows featuring the Beatles and Elvis Presley wouldn’t be far behind.The fans outside were too overwhelmed to worry about the show’s implications for the live music industry. Teresa Harle, 55, a postal worker who attended with a friend and ran to the front of the arena to get the best view, said she found the avatars so convincing, she even waved at Faltskog when the show ended.“It was a once in a lifetime experience,” Harle said, “even though we’re coming again tomorrow, and Saturday.” More
Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherEinar, the Swedish rapper who in the last few years had become one of the most dominant performers in the country’s hip-hop scene, as well as a major pop figure, was shot and killed last October. The case remains unsolved.The crime shined a light on the intersection between Sweden’s rap industry and gangs, on rising gun violence in Sweden, and also government neglect of marginalized communities and neighborhoods.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the ripple effect of Einar’s murder, the evolution of hip-hop in Sweden and how the last three years have radically changed the country’s rap scene.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterPetter Hallen, a veteran rap journalist and D.J. who hosts a show on the Swedish public service radio station P3 Din GataAlex Marshall, The New York Times’s European culture reporterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More
When the Swedish songwriter Ellen Berg first heard a K-pop track, in 2013, her reaction was typical of many Western listeners: “What the hell is this?” she recalled thinking.Berg, 31, was studying at Musikmakarna — a songwriting academy about 330 miles north of Stockholm — and her class had been asked to write a Korean hit.To get the aspiring songwriters in the mood, the students listened to “I Got a Boy” by Girls’ Generation, a wildly popular K-pop girl group. “It’s one of the craziest K-pop songs ever,” Berg said recently by phone. The track includes raps, bursts of high-speed dance music and even a verse in the style of a rock ballad. “It’s really five different songs in one,” Berg said.The class was given a week to write something like it. “It didn’t go very well,” Berg said, with a laugh.BTS performing during the American Music Awards in November in Los Angeles.Kevin Winter/Getty Images For MrcEight years later, Berg has certainly improved her K-pop songwriting abilities: She is now one of dozens of Swedish musicians who make a living exclusively from writing tracks for the genre. She has contributed to a hit for the pop juggernaut BTS, as well as to wildly successful tracks by groups like Red Velvet and Itzy.While Swedes have long been go-to figures for American pop stars — with songwriters like Max Martin and Shellback producing or co-writing tracks for Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, the Weeknd and others — Swedish musicians are now becoming a force in K-pop, too.Berg is signed to EKKO, a Korea-based music publisher with studios in Stockholm, where Berg works alongside Moa Carlebecker, a sought-after K-pop songwriter better known by her stage name, Cazzi Opeia. The two musicians (who collaborate under the name Sunshine) also regularly write with another duo — Ludvig Evers and Jonatan Gusmark, who call themselves Moonshine — based in a studio next door. Seven other Swedish songwriters who work on K-pop tracks have studios in the same building.Berg, Carlebecker, Evers and Gusmark first worked together in 2017 on “Peek-a-Boo,” a Red Velvet track that Berg likened to an old “Scooby-Doo” episode or a trip to a haunted house. “Peek-a-Boo” has since been streamed more than 217 million times on YouTube.EKKO is not the only company pumping out K-pop in Stockholm. Cosmos, a publisher, has seven songwriters working full time on K-pop tracks, Peo Nylen, its creative director, said in an email. The Kennel, another songwriting company, employs 14 K-pop writers, said Iggy Strange-Dahl, one of its founders.K-pop may seem like a recent phenomenon to Western music fans who caught on with the rise of BTS, but Korean record labels have been seeking out European songwriters since the late 1990s in a bid for global success, said Michael Fuhr, a German academic who wrote a book about K-pop. “They had Max Martin productions in mind,” he said, adding that the first successful European K-pop writers were actually Finnish and Norwegian, not Swedish.Today, songwriters of many nationalities are trying to make K-pop hits, Fuhr said, attracted, in part, by the fact that Koreans still buy CDs, so there is a lot of money to be made. SM Entertainment, a Korean entertainment conglomerate, says on its website that it works with 864 songwriters worldwide, including 451 across Europe and 210 in North America.Fuhr said that many K-pop hits were written at songwriting “camps” organized by record labels or publishers who invite musicians from across the world. Over multiple days, songwriters work in teams to create new songs. (American pop songs are also commonly written this way.)Gusmark, left, and Evers working in the studio. They perform together as Moonshine.Felix Odell for The New York TimesCarlebecker said in a video interview that she became hooked on K-pop when she first heard it, in 2016. As a child, she loved the Spice Girls, she said — “I had all the posters, I had all the CDs” — so K-pop instantly felt familiar, with its multitude of girl and boy groups in which each member has a uniquely defined personality.She immediately grasped that K-pop tracks must have multiple sections so each group member has a chance to shine, she said, whether they want to rap, sing softly or belt out a chorus. Having so many sections provides a lot more opportunities to be creative than on a typical Western pop song, she added.“There are no rules in K-pop — you can have three hooks, one after each other, if you feel like it,” Carlebecker said. “You can be crazy and colorful, and that’s what appealed the most.”Carlebecker, who is covered neck-to-toe in tattoos — a look that would be unlikely on an actual K-pop star — said she knew only two words of Korean: “annyeonghaseyo” (hello) and “gamsahabnida” (thank you).But that didn’t get in the way of her songwriting, she said: Carlebecker writes in English, and then Korean songwriters add new lyrics to her melodies, often keeping in a few random English words to help the track stand out.In interviews, Berg and Carlebecker offered multiple theories to explain why Swedes produce such good K-pop tracks, including the country’s strong songwriting tradition and comprehensive music education system. Sweden is cold, Berg noted, which meant that there was often “nothing better to do” than stay in and work on music.For some Koreans, the reason is actually quite simple: Swedes write melodies that are so catchy, fans want to sing them at packed stadium shows and at their local karaoke bars.“Swedes seem to have an emotional understanding of us Koreans,” Michelle Cho, a Korean songwriter who also scouts foreign songwriters for Korean record labels, said in a telephone interview. “They write melodies that seem to really hit our emotions.”Whatever the reason, as K-pop booms, competition among songwriters around the world is becoming fierce. Evers, of Moonshine, said that a few years ago, some songwriters in Sweden used to look down on his work as “a bit lame,” as though he’d failed to land gigs with American or European musicians and now had to ply his trade in Asia. Now, Evers said, those same people were coming up to him in bars saying, “We should write K-pop sometime!”Thanks to his success, he added, he was starting to get a tiny insight into the life of a K-pop idol. K-pop fans regularly contacted Moonshine on social media to praise the duo for its work, Evers said, and a popular K-pop YouTube channel has interviewed him.Swedish K-pop writers are getting noticed in Sweden, too. In November, Carlebecker was named “international success of the year” at Sweden’s annual songwriting awards, beating Max Martin (and Moonshine). Articles about the songwriters have appeared in the country’s major newspapers, and Berg and Carlebecker have been interviewed for TV news.Still, Evers said, not everyone has grasped just how significant K-pop is becoming for Sweden’s music industry.“My grandma still doesn’t understand what I do for a living,” Evers said. “She doesn’t think it’s real.” More
For more than a decade, Anna von Hausswolff has been bringing the sound of pipe organs to rock fans. But Roman Catholic extremists have tried to stop her playing shows in churches.When Anna von Hausswolff, an acclaimed Swedish songwriter and organist, first heard that a conservative Roman Catholic website was calling her a satanist and demanding a concert boycott, she and her team laughed it off.“We thought it was hilarious,” von Hausswolff, 35, recalled in a recent interview. “The whole day we were laughing,”The site, Riposte Catholique, was firing its readers up ahead of a concert of von Hausswolff’s epic pipe organ music at a church in Nantes, a city in the west of France. Some of her fans were goths, the site said, and her songs were “more a black Mass than music for a church.” A music blogger had called her “the high priestess” of “satanic harmonies,” the site noted, and conservative Roman Catholic groups noticed that, on the track “Pills,” she sings, “I made love with the devil.”“We said, ‘This is such a great P.R. campaign,’” Von Hausswolff said. “I mean, ‘the High Priestess of satanic art.’ Wow!”But as soon as she arrived at the church in Nantes, the joking stopped. Outside were about 30 young men, most wearing black jackets and hoodies, protesting the show, Von Hausswolff said. The concert’s promoter told her that some men had just broken into the venue, trying to find her.Soon, there were 100 people blocking the church’s entrance. Von Hausswolff sat in the richly painted church, staring up at the organ that she’d hoped to play, listening to protesters chanting and banging on the doors outside as her fans shouted back at them.“There was a primal part of me that told me I was not safe,” she said. “I wanted to get out.” She canceled the show.In recent years, disagreements between conservatives and liberals over issues like gay marriage and abortion have become increasingly heated in parts of Europe. Von Hausswolff’s experience is an example of another tension point in the continent’s culture wars: In some countries, a small minority of Roman Catholics regularly protests art it considers blasphemous.Initially, when the campaign against her was just online, Anna von Hausswolff laughed off the accusations of Satanism. Ines Sebalj for The New York TimesCéline Béraud, an academic who studies the sociology of catholicism in France, said in a telephone interview that extremists had staged protests against artworks and plays in the country for the past 20 years. “It comes from a well organized minority who’re very good at getting attention in the media,” Béraud said.One of their regular targets is Hellfest, a rock music festival held every year close to Nantes. In 2015, a group of protesters broke into the site and set fire to some of the festival’s stage sets. Since then, protesters have regularly doused the festival site’s fields with holy water. Hellfest’s communications manager, Eric Perrin, said in an email that staff members recently found 50 gold pendants depicting the Virgin Mary scattered around the site. Since playing a real pipe organ in concert almost always means playing in church, von Hausswolff’s tour problems didn’t end when she left Nantes — even though some French bishops had issued statements of support. In Paris, she was scheduled to play the grand organ at St.-Eustache, a church widely considered a jewel of the French Renaissance, but after its priest was deluged with complaints, she instead performed a secret show at a Protestant church near the Arc de Triomphe.In December, protestors gathered outside a von Hausswolff concert in Brussels. “That was fine,” Von Hausswolff said. “They weren’t screaming or banging on doors.”Laurie Dieffembacq/Belga, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLater, in Brussels, about 100 people protested outside her show at a Dominican church, taking a more peaceful approach than their French counterparts and moving away from its doors when asked by police. At Nijmegen, the Netherlands, just two protesters appeared, standing quietly outside while holding signs with the message “Satan is not welcome.”Von Hausswolff is not someone you would expect to cause such a stir. She grew up in Gothenburg, Sweden, and said her childhood was “very creative.” (Her father, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, is a composer and performance artist.)As a teenager, she sang in a church choir, and dreamed of becoming a musician, but ended up training as an architect. Her music career only took off in 2009 when, age 23, she released a demo of piano songs called “Singing from the Grave” that quickly found a fan base in Sweden thanks to her soaring vocals. She was frequently compared to the English pop star Kate Bush.After an organ builder told her she could make beautiful pipe organ music, she gave it a go, she recalled, trying out the organ in Gothenburg’s vast Annedal Church. “When I reached the lowest note, I couldn’t believe my ears,” Von Hausswolff said. “I felt it through my whole body.”She’s since explored what the instrument can do across five albums, sometimes pairing it with a rock band and at other times performing solo. Her most recent, released this month, is a live album recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.Hans Davidsson, an organist who helps von Hausswolff probe the instrument’s capabilities, said that she “explores the organ with open ears, eyes and senses,” and had developed her “own musical language.” Her music was inspiring to many classical organists like him, he added. “It’s fortunate for us that she chose the organ,” he said.In the interview, von Hausswolff, who was wearing Christmas leggings covered in cartoon reindeer in Santa hats, denied she was a satanist. Von Hausswolff declined to say what her 2009 track “Pills” — in which she sings of satanic lovemaking — was about, since songs should be left open to interpretation, she said. But, she added, “If you’re asking me if I literally had sex with the devil, the answer is, ‘No.’”“I’m there to present my pipe organ art so that it hopefully can invoke deeper thought in people,” Von Hausswolff said of her work.Ines Sebalj for The New York TimesAs much as she was happy to joke about the accusations, the incidents last month had left a mark. She still felt scared by the French and Belgian protests, she said, and was also worried that churches might think twice about letting her play their organs, so as to avoid complaints.“I’m not a good Christian and never will be,” said von Hausswolff, adding that she saw herself as agnostic. “But I’m there to present my pipe organ art, so that it hopefully can invoke deeper thought in people.”She was already planning more church tours, she said. As long as she was welcome, she added, “I will go there, and I will play my music.” More
