Pam, you said:
are there any popular songs about how great your country is? Your region?
I said that there isn't anything like that in Sweden. But I was too hasty. Because there is indeed one region that gets more tributes and more declarations of love than you can believe, and that is our capital, Stockholm.
You just can't imagine how fixated on Stockholm my country is. All the important media are located in Stockholm. All national news is seen and reported from a Stockholm point of view. All really popular shows are either
very much from Stockholm, or else they are quaint or laughable hobo shows. When you turn on the radio, you may hear the person announcing the next show say something like this:
And today is a stunningly beautiful day here in Stockholm... and now it's time for our next show, "Eat well" with Per Naroskin... Sweden's biggest national radio channel and its most important public service channel loves making programmes about Stockholm. A few years ago they made a whole series of twenty parts or something, called "Has something ever happened in this particular part of Stockholm?" And then they delved into the history of a particular street in Stockholm. You'd think that they might have made programmes about Swedish towns that don't get a lot of attention, but goodness, no! That way they would have to leave Stockholm, wouldn't they?
About fifteen years or so Stockholm was named the "capital of culture of Europe" by the European Union. That wasn't such a big deal, because the EU bestows this honor on one European city or another every year, but this time it was Stockholm's turn. And Swedish media went crazy. Every day the TV channels had "Stockholm culture live" transmissions, and one channel introduced their Stockholm show like this:
"The center of the world must be
somewhere... perhaps it is in Stockholm, the Capital of Culture of all of Europe!"
So, do the Stockholm people sing songs about themselves? Oh yes, you bet! Do you know the American song, Walking My Baby Back Home? Well, that song was translated into Swedish in the 1960s and in Swedish it became a song about a woman singing about how much she loved Stockholm, and how nice it was to walk through Stockholm hand in hand with her boyfriend!
Monica Zetterlund sings about walking through Stockholm The video clip shows Stockholm in the 1960s.
The grandfather of all tributes to Stockholm is a song by 18th century Swedish songwriter and entertainer, Carl Michael Bellman. The Youtube clip I found isn't very good at all. Usually this song is sung with a lot more enthusiasm and many more instruments backing the singer up.
Stolta stad (Proud city) The song that Swedish media love to play in the summer is "Stockholm i mitt hjärta" (Stockholm in my heart), which is the opening and closing song of each week's TV-transmitted sing-a-long from Stockholm:
Stockholm i mitt hjärta (Stockholm in my heart) All this showering of love on Stockholm means that it is relatively hard to love Sweden in Sweden. Those who live in Stockholm much prefer Stockholm to Sweden. Stockholm is seen as a gleaming jewel of a city, and the rest of Sweden is hobo land. Recently a reporter in Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's most prestigious daily (and Stockholm-based, of course) mocked Göteborg, Sweden's second biggest city, for investing in a very big ferris wheel to attract tourists. As if Göteborg could ever be be anything more than a hobo town, ferris wheel or not!
(Oh, and our Crown Princess Victoria just got married. After the wedding, the national Swedish media - that is, the Stockholm-based media - nervously wondered if the wedding had given Stockholm as much international goodwill as everyone had been hoping for! Oh, and the wedding itself was called "the Stockholm royal love fest"!)
So the people of Stockholm love to sing songs about Stockholm, but they are much less interested in Sweden. The rest of Sweden find it hard to flaunt a lot of patriotism, because they, too, realize that those who lay down the rules of what is and isn't done in Sweden, the Stockholm media, will scoff at outward shows of patriotism. And they know, too, that Sweden is considered secondary to Stockholm, so if they sing about Sweden they will really acknowledge that they are only second-class Swedes, because they are not from Stockholm. So they may sing regional songs, flaunting their regional dialects, but they will sing about themselves and what they like to do rather than praise their region.
This is a song about Sweden. You can hear how melancholy it is. The Stockholm songs celebrate Stockholm, but this song about Sweden says that it is a melancholy thing to be living in Sweden.
This is a typical popular regional song, sung by Peps Persson. Peps Persson is from the southernmost part of Sweden, and he is a bit of a hobo, I guess. He lives in the countryside. In this song, he is singing that it is a beautiful day with lovely weather, and he is very happy about it. (The last one or two seconds of the clip shows a Stockholm girl saying something to a Stockholm guy about Peps Persson's song. The girl speaks in a snotty Stockholm dialect, while Peps Persson's regional dialect is very thick and broad.)
Ann
