Swedish Synth-pop for the End of the World
Notes on heartbreak, indie-electronica, and climate catastrophe
The air is burning today, or smells like it must be. I cannot see the fire, though I have before, which is why I am frightened when I don my mask, but not sad. It doesn’t seem to be a productive emotion anymore—sadness for the earth’s demise, for the destruction of homes (those of my friends, those of my family). I am scared and upset, but I don’t have space for sadness. Or know what shape it would take. The phrase climate grief comes to mind, as grief is somehow beyond sadness. A feeling which overwhelms and yet often fades to latency. I am grieving all the time—a state of being, rather than a transitory or contained emotional moment, the experience of being sad. I put in my earbuds, which is always the first thing I do when I leave the house. Especially in the autumn, when I find it hard to breathe. I pick the song I pick and start walking. I am not sad, I am listening.
My music taste is defined by habit rather than preference. What makes a song good isn’t necessarily genre or content, but its capacity to fit into my rigorous listening routine: for about a month at a time, I play one song, and one song only, on repeat. Over and over again. Few songs hold up — most become unlistenable or annoying after a few goes. And of those select tracks that do withstand more than a handful of consecutive plays, hardly any can offer me the versatility I demand. I’ll be playing it all the time; widespread appeal is important, as is emotional breadth.
I’ve had a handful of these songs come and go over the years, but one stands up against the nonstop-listening-test like no other. “Coconut Kiss” by Niki & The Dove is the soundtrack to all my seasons, and all my tasks. My breakups and my triumphs. My bad days and my dance parties, alone or, more usually, in the kitchen of my giant communal home while cleaning up after dinner, friends and peripheral acquaintances alike all writhing on the half-mopped floor to the synth-pop anthem of our dreams. Maybe the dream is just mine, but Swedish duo Malin Dahlström and Gustaf Karlöf make me feel otherwise. Often compared to Stevie Nicks, Dahlström’s voice is powerful but a little eerie, high-pitched and slightly crooning with a disco-y pace and flirtation. She looks a bit disheveled in her YouTube videos, usually in a mismatched, colorful outfit with an excitingly poofy sleeve and wrapped in head-to-toe beads. Karlöf does the electronic stuff behind her, mostly on keyboard, occasionally on guitar. He’s surprisingly clean-cut in a standard white button down and skinny jeans, blond hair bobbing with each touch of the synthesizer.
I won’t pretend to know much about this band — I don’t. I haven’t even really engaged with the rest of their 2016 album beyond its genius title, Everybody’s Heart Is Broken Now. Which is true, right? I walk outside and the air is full of ash this October. In Sweden, the home of our thin, blond, angular, and otherwise Swedish-looking Swedish-pair, similar realities have settled in. In early 2018, a glacier on Kebnekaise mountain melted in a single summer. The glacier had been, for many years, Sweden’s highest point; this is no small distinction, given that the country falls within the Arctic Circle. The hike to the top takes ten to fifteen hours. And people do it: flocking from around the world to scale the mountain, to feel very cold. I suppose they could still try this, to climb the glacier. But the degree of its melting has merited a permanent dethroning of Kebnekaise from tallest peak to just another mountain, covered in ice and dripping down through an increasingly slushy glacial valley.
Maybe “Coconut Kiss” isn’t the perfect climate disaster ballad; an actual Coconut Kiss is, after all, a rum-based beverage most often drunk by tourists after hopping off a gas-guzzling carbon-dioxide emitting jet to lie bikini-clad on a tropical shore somewhere the IMF economically ravaged in the ’70s. But it’s hard to turn away from the possibility it offers for a collective, though necessarily individual, mourning. The first stanza:
I am a loner
And I paid my dues
And I don’t depend on nothing
Or no one
I am a loner
All confused
Waiting for that rainy day
While I spend my time
Walking in the sunshine
A lack of things to depend upon, confusion, loneliness, confusion, enjoying the sunshine, confusion. Sounds like global warming to me. Even if it isn’t. One look at the music video for Coconut Kiss reveals the ridiculousness of this already thin thesis: a man and woman (presumably exes) are each dragged from their respective apartments by their dogs in the night (sleep-walking-the-dog?) to find each other (as they are led to one another, by their dogs) in the middle of a Stockholm park where they (while still asleep) make-out, bodies tangled together by their pets’ leashes. The couple doesn’t know any of this, of course, as they are sleeping. And dreaming of a tropical shore, where they kiss their former lover under the coconut trees. Here, a coconut kiss is neither a cocktail nor a farewell-salute to the islands subsumed by rising sea levels. A coconut kiss is, a kiss among coconuts? A bit literal. But in any case, the image certainly gestures away from a reading which centers some kind of explicit environmental investment.
The song is not about climate crisis, then, but maybe everything is? The little clues (sunshine, rain, confusion, loneliness) which might, in a different epoch, be otherwise interpreted, relentlessly signal catastrophe. Can natural images exist without indexing ecological collapse in the age of the Anthropocene? I think about this with regards to poetry quite often. Are now all poems which invoke wildlife ecopoetry? Has the designation expanded itself in response to the altered psyche of our culture; has the form become a vessel which may hold rather than a tool to delimit? The mountains near my childhood home have been on fire for almost a year now. How can I see anything else when such images appear — nature as a reminder of violence. Disaster as a feeling, a way of reading, as much as it is a global condition.
We experience this, for the most part, alone. Each in our own way. Ways which are always (of course) enabled and structured by class, gender, race, sensibilities. The qualities which may protect us from some of this harm and confusion, or pull us closer to it. Alongside the untiring inequality of affective experience, however, is the increasing globalism of our current moment: the planet is hurtling towards an uninhabitable state, and we all, in a truly worldly sense, are being forced to feel the crushing heartbreak of our doom together, perhaps for the very first time. There isn’t a clear exit; it is not certain that anyone will, at the end of it all, remain untouched.
And yet, the paradox of climate uninhabitableness remains: I’m still here, living. It’s both a monstrous privilege, and limbo. Whether at a flashy Eurodance club in Stockholm full of stringy white twenty-somethings or in a Bay Area neighborhood saturated with smoke, we still feel. We act, and are actionable: we’re wearing our respirator masks and evacuating our homes. We’re worrying about statist violence and being hypocrites and trying to pay rent, we’re RSVPing interested to local protests and packing our earthquake kits and crying over overpriced drinks with our ex-girlfriend’s ex-girlfriend about similar sustained trauma and counting how many days then months we’ve gone without intimacy and going to work and getting a screen-time headache and naming the future child we would have if we believed conception was ethical in late capitalism and we’re phoning loved ones in Southern California as they drive out of Los Angeles, past the Getty Fire and up the five and they have not decided where they are headed, as they have not been told for how long, or in what shape, they must stay gone.
We’re going through shit. Breakups and divorces, marriages and births, hangovers and dog walks. And dancing? Oh yeah. That too. Dahlström and Karlöf’s joint lyricism is objectively sad, parsed by the loneliness inherent in this landscape, but the upbeat electro-rhythm of the track demands that you do nothing short of full-on bop. A treated steel drum opens the song, a perfectly staggered rhythm with enough time between each beat to compose your next move. An arm over the head, a popped hip, or, on one of my more energetic days, some nondescript undulations on the floor, head thrown back, knees splayed on the linoleum. Smiling at my sometimes real and sometimes imagined onlookers.
Heartache, and the defensiveness that comes with such a violation — be it carried out by the corporations warming our planet to its premature end, or a first love who stopped feeling the same way — seems to be at the root of everything. In the world of Niki & The Dove, the answer to this hurt and betrayal isn’t redemption, but something more removed, even cynical: Swinging in my palm tree / Cause I love coconuts / I’m drinking Coconut Kiss / And you don’t get to know me / You don’t get to know me…
I love that impulse; it’s not that the mystical and heartbreaking “you” doesn’t know me, or shouldn’t know me, but rather that they aren’t allowed to. You don’t get the privilege.
This week I’m listening to the refrain on the bus. I’m on my way to swap trauma with a potential new friend I found on Tinder. This is not a date; we quickly realize over our digital exchange that we have a very serious mutual ex. Hence the trauma swapping, which is a phrase that gets a lot of flak. As if some level of performance is necessary to meet someone on the basis of pain alone. Which is maybe true, if counterintuitive: You don’t get to know me. At least not in the important ways — the deep stuff is sometimes easier to share than the lighter parts, those things about myself which I feel to be sweet, or attractive. If you decide to like me, this could last. And what good is that when nothing will, if things meant to stay are already gone? The glacier, the subject of my break up.
I know. It’s so small of me to link this together. The planet spiraling with my loneliness. I wonder if she’ll think I’m overly paranoid, walking up to the bar with my mask on.
And anyway, this negating stance, total withdrawal from the world, isn’t one the song necessarily holds as wise. Hey you, waiting for that blow / For that big fat fall / When mama’s gonna get a wakeup call? We can go about our days dancing and mixing drinks, living in the past as to avoid the present, denying impending doom our time or attention. But the “big fat fall” is coming, one way or another. Your past heartbreak will catch up with you in a way which can no longer be relegated to the form of retrospective story. The fate of our careening planet is catching up as well, never as future imminence, but rather, a present condition. We can’t dance our way out of this one! Dahlström seems to exclaim, clad in her psychedelic face paint, oversized sunglasses, an appropriative chain or two. Her crimped hair streams down her chest among the endless strings of multicolored beads. But we’re probably going to anyway.
The choice isn’t really an empowering one, but it’s still a choice. Perhaps these coping mechanisms are shitty, but at least they’re nearby. Within some easy reach. As everything goes up in flames, we retain a little say in how the end plays out, sipping our syrupy, boozy punch in what may be the last palm tree on earth. Go put on your nice face, now / Go put on a nice face.
Even at the end of life-as-we-know-it, Niki & The Dove puts a sleepy, warm haze over all of our sadness and worry. I like to / watch the world / The world is looking good today / It’s almost like I’m sleeping / I pull my head back to the sun whispers Dahlström in her intimate drawl. There’s still some pleasure in watching, which might be a terrible thing to say. But it feels true when she sings it, and truer still when I hear it for the hundredth time, on the kitchen floor clutching my mop, now a mic, or too close to another body on the five o’clock commuter train somewhere under the bay.
An excerpt of this piece previously appeared on the Zyzzyva blog.
