‘Rocking the establishment’: Subculture,authenticity and the populist radical right in Sweden

Abstract

This article uses the recent rise of populist radical right discourses in society as a cultural and political phenomenon to explore the role of popular music in constructing these discourses, with a focus on the Sweden Democrats (SD) and musician Peter Jezewski. By examining Jezewski’s direct collaborations with the SD and his song ‘My Land’, the article uncovers how popular music culture participates in the construction of populist discourses of ‘the people’ in nativist terms. The article contends that certain subcultural styles in popular music resonate strongly with populist discourses of a ‘silenced majority’ in need of a strong populist leader and as such contribute to the construction of the ‘people’ versus ‘elite’ antagonism beyond the political realm. The case study of Jezewski’s song and music video emphasises how nostalgic rock culture enables populist articulations by aligning with populist radical right anti-establishment, preservationist−nativist discourses and the performative construction of ‘the people’. Drawing on cultural studies resources, the article hence investigates the practices that bring ‘a people’ into existence through cultural tropes and mechanisms to better comprehend the links between articulations of populism, popular culture and subcultural performances of counter-hegemonic resistance.

While most Scandinavian countries have had strong populist radical right movements, Sweden was long considered an exception to this trend. This changed, however, when the populist radical right-wing party the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna, SD) entered the Swedish parliament for the first time in 2010. They have since firmly established themselves as part of the Swedish political landscape, and became the second largest party in the 2022 national elections, after which they agreed to support a right-wing conservative government led by the Moderate Party. The rapid growth of the SD from a small, radical, fringe party of right-wing nationalists with roots in the Swedish neo-Nazi scene of the 1980s and early 1990s, to one of the most influential political forces in the country over little more than a decade is, however, not only a political phenomenon, but also a cultural one. In this article, I want to focus on one particular case study to examine the ways in which populist radical right discourses are articulated culturally, namely, through popular music. Through music and media discourse analyses, participant observations at concerts and party events held both offline (2019–2020) and online (during the COVID-19 crisis, 2020–2021), and content analyses of ‘behind the scenes’-style video blogs from the SD’s 2018 election campaign, I will focus on the relatively well-known Swedish popular musician Peter Jezewski, one of the very few public figures who has openly associated with the SD.

I will begin with a brief overview of the theoretical framework of populism in relation to popular culture and music in particular, touching specifically on the contemporary socio-cultural context in Sweden. I will then introduce Peter Jezewski and his direct collaborations with the SD, before analysing one case study in more depth, Jezewski’s 2018 song (and accompanying music video) ‘My Land’. I will show how populist radical right politics in Sweden have come to be expressed in the form of popular music, and, specifically, how certain subcultural styles are articulated as populist discourses that constitute ‘the people’ in nativist terms. As such, this article will draw on concepts from the field of cultural studies such as subculture, style and cultural hegemony, and reveal how several foundational discourses in popular music culture – including rock authenticity, the (male) performer as rebellious underdog, and music as a potential source of empowerment for its audience – resonate strongly with populist discourses of the (national) people as a supposedly silent majority in need of a strong populist leader. By doing so, I hope to demonstrate how the populist radical right draws on subcultural style and the construction of authenticity in rock music as a means of connecting what Oliver Marchart (2012) has described as the breach between the micropolitical discourse of subculture and macropolitical questions of challenging the hegemonic formation as political strategy. Mindful of Moran and Littler’s (2020) call for a ‘critical populist’ stance that involves ‘analysing the set of practices that call into being “a people” through a range of cultural tropes and mechanisms’ (p. 865), this article will mobilise cultural studies resources to better understand the connections between articulations of populism, popular culture and subcultural performances of counter-hegemonic resistance.

Populist discourses, subculture as resistance and the SD

Populism is a contested phenomenon. Some describe it in ideational terms, arguing that populism ‘constitutes a “thin” or “thin-cantered” ideology’ (Mudde, 2019: 30). Others, meanwhile, highlight its strategic character as a form of mobilisation. Kurt Weyland (2001), for instance, considers populism to be a ‘political strategy through which a personalistic leader seeks or exercises government power based on direct, unmediated, uninstitutionalized support from large numbers of mostly unorganized followers’ (p. 14). In this article, however, I will primarily follow the discursive-performative approach to populism proposed by Ernesto Laclau (2005), Benjamin Moffitt (2016), Pierre Ostiguy (2017), Stavrakakis and Katsambekis (2014) and Ruth Wodak (2015), among others. This strand of thinking understands populism primarily as a discourse that pits a people against an elite, and as a style and ‘particular type of language that has significant effects on how politics (and political identity) is structured and operates’ (Moffitt, 2020: 22, emphasis in original). Indeed, as Laclau highlights, the people and the elite are not sociologically stable, pre-existing categories; the performative character of populism lies precisely in constructing them. Following this line of argument, therefore, the question to ask is not ‘Who are the people?’ (with an attendant focus on voter demographics, etc.), but rather ‘How are the people constructed?’ (Moffitt, 2020: 23). Given this approach, I will show how popular music culture participates in constructing populist discourses of the people versus the elite in the context of contemporary Sweden, and in relation to the SD in particular. Whereas political identities are considered to be performative rather than pre-existing, populist actors need to painstakingly construct the populist subject of the people as the antagonistic counterpart of the elite (Moffitt, 2020: 23). As I will show in my analysis, populist actors include not only politicians active in what Chantal Mouffe (2005) calls ‘politics’ (the empirical realm of institutionally organised, ‘conventional politics’) (8), but also popular musicians engaging in the realm of ‘the political’: societal and cultural discourses ‘understood as a space of contestation and agonistic engagement’ (Wilson and Swyngedouw, 2022: 6) that ‘require us to make a choice between conflicting alternatives’ (Mouffe, 2005: 10)–hence the symbolic spaces where hegemony is negotiated.

One particular framework that can help us to understand how political actors – both politicians and musicians – appeal to those that they aim to performatively construct as the people is Pierre Ostiguy’s (2017) socio-cultural approach, particularly his conceptualisation of populism as a ‘flaunting of the low’ (p. 76). As a performative concept in Ostiguy’s (2017) framework, populism means that populists claim to represent (and hence constitute) the people as allegedly damaged, silenced, or ‘swept under the rug’ for having ‘inappropriately’ made themselves present in the public sphere (p. 76). This inappropriate behaviour refers to populism’s transgressive character and its disregard for the ways in which supposedly proper politics is conducted, instead creating scandals by using a different kind of (popular) vernacular. This may involve dressing and behaving like ‘one of the people’ (instead of elitist politicians who represent only the establishment), and breaking cultural codes through the aforementioned flaunting of the low by appearing brash, loud or even ugly (Ostiguy, 2017: 76–78). As such, populist actors present themselves as ordinary and local, inhabitants of a ‘here’ which is often defined nationally, as captured in Paul Taggart’s notion of ‘the heartland’ (Taggart, 2000): The populist’s imagined community and territory portrays a homogeneous identity that is allegedly authentic and incorruptible (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017: 19).

Taggart’s concept of the heartland also points to the close connection between populism and nationalism (or, more precisely, nativism ¹ ) in contemporary radical right populism, particularly in the so-called West. While populism and nationalism both appeal to a certain image of the people, the two should not be conflated, as they ‘put forward distinct characterizations of “the people,” and ultimately target different enemies’ (Moffitt, 2020: 31). Populism functions on a vertical scale of ‘up/down’, and antagonistically pits the low of the people against the supposedly corrupt political and cultural elites on high. Nationalism and nativism, meanwhile, function on a horizontal logic of ‘in/out’ (De Cleen and Stavrakakis, 2017: 308). As Stavrakakis (2005) has noted, the link between populism and nationalism is ‘an unstable construct, a contingent, historically determined articulation’ (p. 246). Nevertheless, in the politics of radical right populists, the people are usually constructed as both low and national: ‘Populists claim to speak for the people-as-underdog, however, they only refer to (what they consider to be) members of the nation and exclude all others’ (De Cleen, 2017: 349).

In the case of Sweden’s populist radical right, and the SD in particular, we do indeed see the discourses of populism and nativism converge. The SD are a self-described nationalist party, and, although they do not use the term populist to describe themselves, they do combine the three ideological elements that represent the core of radical right populism as identified by Cas Mudde (2007): nativism, authoritarianism and populism (p. 33), with nativism being the central feature (p. 26). As such, the SD articulate their conception of the people both implicitly, as the suppressed underdog, and explicitly, as an essentially national group. All elements considered to be non-Swedish (in terms of behaviour, culture, values, religion and race, for instance) are either to be assimilated to Swedish standards or excluded from Swedish society and the nation-state. Accordingly, and typically for the populist radical right, strict migration policies are at the top of the SD’s political agenda, and their anti-immigrant discourse both intensified and gained increasing traction following the so-called migration crisis of 2015 (Ericson, 2018). This ‘mass immigration’ (a loaded term invented and successfully introduced into public discourse by the SD), made possible and facilitated by political elites (referring to the social democratic government at the time in particular), is supposed to have led to a consistent undermining of Swedish identity and values which, according to the SD’s xenophobic and racist arguments, are on the verge of extinction. The aim of the populist radical right in Sweden, then, is to save Swedish national identity and culture from obliteration.

While populism is often considered to be based on personalist leadership (Weyland, 2017) and the ostensible expression of an authentic people as a locally or nationally rooted underdog, discourses around rock music are often marked by the prominent figure of the rebellious musician who represents a counterculture opposed to the establishment. In fact, cultural studies and popular music studies have a long tradition of celebrating (musical) subcultures, such as rock ‘n’ roll or punk, as subversive. In their seminal study of youth subcultures in post-war Britain, John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson and Brian Roberts highlighted how working-class youth subcultures such as the Teddy Boys, Mods and Rockers formed stylistic groups ‘through dress, activities, leisure pursuits and life-style’ in order to ‘project a different cultural response or “solution” to the problems posed for them by their material and social class position and experience’ (Clarke et al., 2006: 8). Through their culture ² and ways of life as performative means of producing themselves as a group, subcultures as cultural configurations were understood as empowering and challenging dominant culture by ‘enter[ing] into struggle with it, seek[ing] to modify, negotiate, resist or even overthrow its reign – its hegemony’ (Clarke et al., 2006: 6, emphasis in original). Similarly, in his analysis of 1960s motorbike boys, Paul Willis (2014) concludes that through a particular lifestyle, the subculture brought about concrete and dynamic transformations of its particular cultural fields, and was therefore of ‘profound political and critical importance’ (p. 226). These acts of resistance to dominant culture – which, for Clarke, Hall, Willis, et al., are closely linked to class struggle – play out primarily in symbolic and cultural arenas. But how can the concept of subculture help us better understand the connection between the populist radical right and musical styles?

For a subculture to create and adopt certain styles or ‘symbolic objects and not others’ (Clarke, 2006: 150), it is important for the relevant group to ‘be able to recognise itself in the more or less repressed potential meanings of particular symbolic objects. This requires the object in question to have the ‘objective possibility’ of reflecting the particular values and concerns of the group as one among a range of potential meanings that it could hold’ (Clarke, 2006: 150, emphasis in original). Clarke (2006) goes on to argue that ‘[t]he selection of the objects through which the style is generated is then a matter of the homologies between the group’s self-consciousness and the possible meanings of the available objects’ (p. 150). This, according to Willis, was best exemplified by the music of the working class Teddy Boys:

though in a formal sense early Rock’n’Roll and “West Coast Rock” have the potential to carry and express different meanings, there is a clear homology or fit between the intense activism, physicality, externalisation of attitudes in behaviour, taboo on introspection, and love of speed and machines of [. . .] “Motor-bike Boys” and the early Rock’n’Roll music to which they were exclusively attached. (Clarke, 2006: 151)

In their performative self-realisation and constitution through stylistic means, as well as creative re-articulation of the dominant culture, subcultures such as rock’n’roll and punk (Hebdige, 2002) in this sense become almost heroic in their inventive responses to individual and collective challenges and resistance to hegemonies.

Here, of course, we may encounter a well-known critique of classic subcultural theory, which laments the fact that such forms of heroic resistance and cultural protest ultimately remain limited to the symbolic and micro-political realm. Proponents of this position contend that such subcultures lack real political power, and can therefore only fail to effectively alter the circumstances that they emerged in response to, let alone bring about macro-political changes to the hegemonic culture (Marchart, 2012). However, it is important to remember that scholars like Hebdige, Clark and Hall were very conscious of the potential limitations of subcultural resistance through style: Hebdige not only self-reflectively admitted to a ‘kind of romanticism’ (Hebdige, 2002: 138) of his study but also highlights trying to avoid locating ‘some obscure revolutionary potential’ in the subcultures he studied (Hebdige, 2002: 138). Similarly, Clarke, Hall, Jefferson and Roberts acknowledge that the ritualised and stylized forms of resistance of the working-class youth were primarily ‘attempts at a solution’ to their problematic experience, yet remained a ‘resolution which, because pitched largely at the symbolic level, was fated to fail’ (Clarke et al., 2006: 35; emphasis in original). They recognise that the problematic of a subordinate class experience can be negotiated and resisted, but it cannot be resolved at the level of the symbolic or by the means of style (Clarke et al., 2006: 35; emphasis in original). Nonetheless, keeping these limitations in mind, yet remembering that hegemony operates through culture and not just in the field of politics (Laclau, 1991), that it is culture that (collective) identity is most comprehensively shaped by (McRobbie, 2005), and that populism must be understood as a cultural phenomenon as much as a political one (Dunkel and Schiller, forthcoming), renewed attention to the subversive potential and role of subcultural style in its populist articulation is imperative. In the Swedish context, for instance, the SD’s chief ideologue Mattias Karlsson has highlighted the centrality of culture to the party’s radical right project: culture, he argues, affects everything: ‘It affects how we think, how we feel, how the economy works, how we behave towards each other, how safe we can be, what our identity is and what we are loyal to’ (Sveriges Television AB, 2021). As such, the SD considers culture to be paramount, since in their view, culture ‘influences politics more than the other way around’ (Sveriges Television AB, 2021; cf. also Schiller, forthcoming). The ‘heroic’ transformation of the cultural field by subcultures, as Willis describes it, is therefore not unlike the socio-cultural revolution that Ostiguy (2017) identifies as a central aim of populism (p. 36). And although primarily focussed on working-class style, the cultural studies approach to subcultures developed by Clarke, Hall, Willis, Hebdige and others, clearly illuminates some central features of populist culture (Dunkel and Schiller, forthcoming).

Without wanting to overemphasise the homology of certain subcultural (musical) styles with populist discourses, I do think that it is worth returning to Clarke’s question about why and how contemporary populist cultures may recognise themselves in certain subcultural styles, and how tropes such as heroism, rebellion and resistance to dominant culture in association with masculinity and the lowness of certain class-related styles can become re-articulated in populist terms. In relation to popular music and populism in particular, such subversive tropes are often articulated in terms of what has been described as (rock) authenticity (Auslander, 1998): the notion of rock music being essentially anti-establishment (unlike pop) (Moore, 2002), and authentic music being an unmediated, non-corporate, direct expression of an artist’s thoughts and feelings. This latter point is often connected to terms and concepts such as integrity, honesty, sincerity, credibility, genuineness and truthfulness (Weisethaunet and Lindberg, 2010: 465). Lawrence Grossberg describes rock authenticity as the ‘ability to articulate private but common desires, feelings and experiences into a shared public language. It demands that the performer have a real relation to his or her audience’ (Grossberg, 1992: 207). This mode is categorised as ‘first person authenticity’ by Allan Moore, and arises when an artist succeeds in conveying the impression that their ‘utterance is one of integrity, that it represents an attempt to communicate in an unmediated form with an audience’ (Moore, 2002: 214). These romantic ideals, though always fabricated, collectively constructed and attributed to – rather than inscribed in – a performance (Moore, 2002; Peterson, 1997), do resonate with the ideal of the populist leader as a heroic warrior who expresses his (for they are often men) personal convictions in the name of the people, claiming to represent personal but shared experiences truthfully, directly and without mediation in a way that challenges the establishment (Way, 2016). In particular, claiming to speak for, and thereby constructing, the people corresponds with two other functions of authentication in popular music as described by Moore: along with the perceived unmediated expression of personal experience, music can also convey ‘the impression of accurately representing the ideas of another, embedded within a tradition of performance’ (Moore, 2002: 218, my emphasis). This ‘third person authenticity’, in Moore’s terms, draws especially on the genre conventions of performance aesthetics, and the (imagined) histories or (invented) traditions of musical styles (Barker and Taylor, 2007). Here, signifiers such as the singer’s accent or expression, clothing style and gestures, instruments, or stage settings function as markers of authenticity, referring to the (ostensible) representation of a certain group in, for instance, folk or country music. Finally, and importantly, music can also evoke what Moore labels ‘second person authenticity’, in which artists emphasise less their personal experience or connection with style conventions, but rather persuade the listener that their ‘experience of life is being validated, that the music is “telling it like it is” for them’ (Moore, 2002: 220). Moore links this mode directly to subcultural theory, as it emphasises the (collective) identification with certain musical styles and the potential of music to articulate for its listeners a place of belonging. Second person authenticity can offer (subordinate) groups an affirmation of their cultural identity in the face of accelerating social change by validating their experiences and world-views. Consequently, music can authenticate (collective) identities and the (mutual) recognition between artists and audiences as genuine, unmediated and natural in several ways.

Against this backdrop, it seems hardly surprising that populists have been making ample use of – and participating in – popular music cultures, ranging from writing campaign songs, through symbolic endorsements of specific genres, artists or aesthetics, to their own involvement as musicians (Dunkel and Schiller, 2022). In what follows, I will therefore highlight the connections between populism as it pertains to Mouffe’s concept of politics – that is, institutional and conventional forms of governance – and populism as cultural expression, as it pertains to Mouffe’s realm of the political – that is, discursive social and cultural forms of contestation. To do this, I will analyse the ways in which populist discourses in Sweden articulate nativism and traditionalism together with the notions of subversive subcultural styles and rock authenticity, by focussing on the Swedish musician and performer Peter Jezewski as a populist actor.

Populist articulations of subcultural style: Peter Jezewski

Peter Jezewski, born in 1957, has been a relatively well-known musician and singer in Sweden since the late 1970s, due to the success of his rockabilly band The Boppers, whose hits include the albums Number 1 (1978) and Keep On Boppin’ (1979), and the single ‘Jeannie’s Coming Back’ (1991). After disagreements within the band, however, Jezewski left the group to pursue a (less successful) solo career, and has played in several other bands, including Peter and the Chiefs and The Silhouettes. Although The Boppers briefly reunited in the early 2000s, recent decades have seen Jezewski primarily touring small to mid-sized venues across Sweden, either solo or with a range of different musical projects. Locations have included smaller local venues and fairly remote rural communities beyond the usual urban centres of Stockholm, Uppsala, Gothenburg, and Malmö. As exemplified by his show ‘Be Bop a Luba’ which he has been touring for several years, and his new project ‘Still Rockin’’, Jezewski’s act is, generally speaking, a tribute to rock’n’roll and rockabilly culture.

Jezewski’s music and star image, then, are primarily based on nostalgic rock’n’roll, rockabilly, doo-wop and – to some degree – country- and folk-inspired songs that reproduce a 1950s and 1960s sound. Stylistically, he cultivates an image of himself as a hypermasculine rock ‘n’ roll rebel, often dressed in a white shirt and leather vest or jacket, golden necklaces, jeans or leather pants, sunglasses and his trademark: a greaser haircut with sideburns. In promotional pictures he is often seen with vintage American cars or motorbikes, adopting a wide-legged stance and brandishing a guitar. As such, Jezewski not only aligns himself with retro culture and nostalgic retromania (Reynolds, 2011) in his revivalist and tribute-oriented oeuvre and performances, but is also associated with what is known as raggare or raggarkulturen in Sweden. ³ This is a subculture whose origins reach back to the 1950s and which is heavily inspired by white US greaser and rockabilly culture. Its idols include Elvis Presley, Bill Haley and James Dean, and one of its primary obsessions is hot rod cars (Dahlén, 2017). Historically, raggare were seen to pose a problem in society, causing moral panics due to their alcohol consumption, car races, loose moral values and lack of interest in ‘productivity’ (O’Dell, 2001). Contemporary raggare celebrate 1950s popular culture from the United States, particularly the southern states (and are not averse to the confederate flag, with its racist connotations), along with big vintage American cars, rockabilly music and fashion. The subculture emphasises masculinity (the word ‘raggare’ refers to picking up girls) and a culture of ‘hardness’. Raggare has working-class origins and is primarily associated with small towns in rural Sweden as well as conservatism, not least in terms of gender roles, especially regarding masculinity. As far as public perception is concerned, the raggare with which Jezewski is associated are therefore traditionally looked down upon. With their rural roots, hyperbolic retro aesthetic, and often low levels of education and social status, they come close to a Swedish equivalent of the ‘rednecks’ or ‘white trash’ of the rural south in the United States.

In 2016, the national media reported that Peter Jezewski had performed at the SDs annual Summer Festival (Svensson, 2016a). This led to a wave of criticism and the cancellation of his shows by several venues (Sundell and Palm, 2016), who did not want to be associated with a performer who was happy to unequivocally express support for populist radical right politics. When asked about his performance at the SD’s festival, Jezewski explained why he had not hesitated to accept the invitation to play: ‘Regardless of one’s opinion, I find that everyone has a right to good music [. . .]. Everyone has the right to hear rock’n’roll’ (Svensson, 2016a). ⁴ He went on to express his sympathies for ‘large parts’ of the politics of the SD, and immediately stressed the fact that he expected repercussions in public perception for this disclosure:

I am not sure if I will get shit for this, but this is a democratically elected party that is represented in national parliament – this is not a terror group we’re talking about. It’s just about playing. [. . .] I sympathize with them, and I expect some kind of punch in the face, but I get beaten so much anyway. (Svensson, 2016a)

Even in the face of expected repercussions, Jezewski made a point of expressing his politics:

‘I don’t want to be secretive about this, I stand by this. Then I know that many in culture and media don’t like that, but those who won’t come listen to me because of this would not come anyway, I think. (Svensson, 2016a)

Finally, he praised the SD’s stance on law and order – ‘I think their crime policy is also good’, and calls for longer and more severe penalties: ‘[Y]es, one gets away with pretty much everything these days, as far as I can see. I think that should be reconsidered’ (Svensson, 2016a). In this interview, Jezewski deploys several populist tropes, including an appeal for more authoritarian politics, but most notably the notion that both the SD and himself are (rebellious) underdogs in a cultural and media landscape dominated by the elite – an official discourse that would misrepresent him and his likeminded fellows and sweep them ‘under the rug’ (Ostiguy, 2017: 39). Despite all possible consequences, and supposedly with no outright political intentions, he nevertheless takes a stand by providing nostalgic rock’n’roll to his populist radical right-wing audience.

When Jezewski’s statements did indeed lead to repercussions, including a number of cancelled gigs, he was quick to position himself as a victim of censorship in a state that would not allow free speech: ‘In the first place I react to the attack on free speech and democracy, in the second for my fans that I highly value [“är rädd om”], and third, for economic reasons. But above all it is appalling [“otäckt”] that I cannot perform apolitical music, rock’n’roll’ (Sundell and Palm, 2016). In a would-be heroic gesture of refusing to apologise for his performances or for his audience, Jezewski concludes: ‘I have played in prisons and no one cared. But now it is as if I had played for a terrorist organization’ (Sundell and Palm, 2016). Due to the consequences that came as a result of his overt political position, Jezewski feels impelled to ‘warn all artist colleagues’ against ‘[telling] people where you stand politically’, as he ‘is being punished for his views’ (Svensson, 2016b). In his reaction to the wholly unsurprising – and arguably intended – scandal, Jezewksi therefore evokes further populist tropes, including that he speaks for the silent majority that censorship in Sweden has muzzled, as he presents himself (and his fans) as innocent victims of a repressive and undemocratic regime.

In the context of this public media controversy, the Gustaf Fröding Hotel in Karlstad – which had notably cancelled Jezewski’s concert – received bomb threats (Berntsson, 2016) and eventually apologised to Jezewski, and had the performance take place as planned after all (Tronarp, 2016). Meanwhile, the leader of the SD, Jimmie Åkesson, wrote in support of Jezewski on Facebook: ‘Let us show that we together are a strong power that can make a difference! We’ll lift him to the top of the charts’, followed by a link to Jezewski’s song ‘Jeannie’s Coming Back’ on iTunes (Lindahl, 2016). With this post, Åkesson had ‘shown his power’ (Virtanen, 2019), as one newspaper put it, as a few hours later, the song did indeed reach the top of the Swedish iTunes charts, above artists such as Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake. Worried about further implications, the same journalist concludes:

It is discomforting [“otäckt”] to think about what Jimmie Åkesson will tell the fanatics to do next time. It is worrying to think about what SD’s leadership secretly tells its internet soldiers to do right now. In a best case scenario they continue to engage with good old 50s rock. (Virtanen, 2019)

While his reputation was publicly disputed, Jezewski’s popularity in populist radical right circles increased after the scandal of his performance, and he began collaborating more closely with the SD. In 2018, he released their official election song together with the party leader’s band Bedårande Barn (Schiller, forthcoming). The song, ‘Varje Liten Del’ (‘Every Little Part’) (2018), is a poppy anthem to a fallen Sweden that must be reconstructed and returned to its former glory under the leadership of the SD. That same year, Jezewski himself stood as a candidate for the SD in the national elections: ‘I have reached a slightly greater age and find that many only make a fist in their pocket, but don’t do anything besides bitching [“gnälla”] at others. I find that it is time to contribute to society as much as possible’ (Skovdahl, 2018). He went on to justify the move:

I find that respect for the elderly has disappeared. After all, it is them who have built this country. I care about the elderly and the SD is the party that does the most. I find that there is much to cherish/preserve/defend [“värna om”] and the SD is the party that best represents my views. (Skovdahl, 2018)

In the course of the 2018 election campaign for the national parliament, Jezewski toured with the SD, playing at election events in town squares across the country. ⁵

Jezewski’s emphasis on caring for the elderly not only goes hand in hand with the SD’s attempt to broaden their political agenda from a focus on migration policies towards national healthcare at the time, ⁶ it also ties in with the party’s emphasis on ‘Safety and Tradition’ ( ‘Trygghet och Tradition’), the SD’s official slogan. National safety and tradition became a focal point after the Stockholm terror attack of April 2017: a hijacked truck was deliberately driven into the country’s most crowded shopping street, killing five people and injuring many more. The driver was a 39-year-old asylum seeker and Uzbek citizen, whose asylum application had been rejected and who had ties to ISIS. The terror attack caused local and national shock, followed by collective mourning and a mass demonstration in honour of the victims, as well as a tightening of immigration laws. In the wake of this traumatic national event – which, of course, fuelled the populist radical right narrative according to which immigration brings with it increases in crime and attacks on Swedish culture and values – Peter Jezewski (2018) released a new single called ‘My Land’, an emotional high point during his performances at the SD’s campaign events in 2018. In what follows, I will discuss the ways in which this song is paradigmatic of the Swedish populist radical right. I will examine how the music, lyrics and video articulate populist nativism sonically, linguistically and visually, to construct a Swedish people in antagonistic contradistinction to various Others: on the vertical scale, to an imagined elite, and on the horizontal, to the non-native and foreign.

‘My Land’ as populist ode to the Swedish heartland

As Jezewski announced at one of his performances for the SD during the 2018 election campaign, he wrote ‘My Land’ in direct response to the terror attack in Stockholm, and ‘the lyrics and melody just came to [him]’ as if by divine inspiration (Northbreeze 01, 2018). The folk-like ballad, echoing Woody Guthrie’s (1945) seminal ‘This Land Is Your Land’, is an ode to Sweden, opening with the line: ‘I love my land/I love my people’. The song continues: ‘I love the way we live our lives/it’s in my heart it’s in my soul/[. . .] This is my land, this is my life, this is my home’. Jezewski even addresses this ‘home’ and land in the second person singular, making the song a love song to Sweden itself. The lyrics declare that ‘you’ have provided freedom, and that ‘we’ are born to be free, together, ‘up from the hill, down to the sea’. An imagined community (Anderson, 1991) is depicted in romantic, national terms and located in a specific geography; the category of ‘my people’ is presented as natural and given. Addressing this people, the singer implores: ‘Don’t let us make no more mistakes’. Here the song tacitly refers to the lax migration policies that the radical right claim led to the Stockholm terror attack, and as such, the words function as a form of dog whistle politics: they convey an implicit message designed to (only) be picked up by certain audiences who recognise the anti-immigrant undertone (Haney-López, 2015). Similarly, throughout the song, Jezweski deploys common populist radical right categories like a (national) ‘people’, and shared culture, while his emphasis on their ‘natural’ character and especially an implicit allusion to heritage, ancestry and birthright at least hint at, or afford, interpretations of even more extreme forms of nationalism:

The following chorus is an outright call to action: to ‘stand up and rise’ for ‘this is our land’. The populist trope of “us, a national people” is affirmed, to the detriment of those excluded from this community. Thanks are given to the ‘fathers’ who ‘built up the land’, a (biological) legacy that, in the logic of the song, must be defended against foreign intrusion. The ‘national way of life’ is subsequently supported through love for ‘our flag’ and ‘our wisdom’, always ‘doing the best as we can’ [sic]. This nationally rooted and supposedly wise community is (by implication) racially bound: ‘it’s in our blood/it’s in our veins’. This resonates with the fascist ideology of blood and soil, which brought together racism and the romantic nationalism of the late 19th century. The racially defined national body, associated with an idealised rural nature and agricultural harmony (as counterweights to urban life), is depicted in the official video with a strong emphasis on the majesty of Swedish nature (sea, lakes, hills) and idyllic depictions of pre-modern farming (a bare-chested man manually collecting crops to provide for his family). The lyrics go on to state that ‘we treat the people all the same/no matter what the sex you got’ [sic], hence implicitly suggesting that the Other (immigrants, and Islam in particular) is not as tolerant and free as this ‘we’, but instead oppressive and reactionary. The music video meanwhile presents a heterosexual (white) ideal of family values in its visual celebration of ‘our land’.

The heteronormative character of this idealised national home is further emphasised by the lyrics in the bridge: ‘All of those women, gave birth to the men/Our fathers and mothers are equal and the same’. Although presented as a progressive, non-discriminatory celebration of equality, this verse idealises women as primarily domestic figures, the mothers of the men. This image of womanhood as equated with motherhood again recalls the völkisch of Nazi Germany, the nationalist blood-and-soil rhetoric, in which women were duty-bound to bear children for the Führer. In the video, these lyrics are accompanied by images of a happy couple in wedding attire kissing in the idealised Swedish forest, over which is superimposed the image of a stylised foetus in the womb, indicating the future of the nation as rooted in this sacred heterosexual love. The destiny of (heterosexual) men, on the other hand, was to build and defend the country as workers, farmers and soldiers. This is implied in Jezewski’s chorus: ‘Stand up and rise/That we been given/our fathers’ living/built up this land’ [sic]. Although linguistically nebulous, the song credits the ‘fathers’ with ‘building this land’, which now needs to be defended against non-native elements, foreign influxes and threats.

The song’s opening cello chords and flute melody evoke a folky, earnest musical setting that connotes rootedness and tradition. For its part, the video opens with images of nature: water glittering in the sun. Jezewski is shown walking through woods with his acoustic guitar (the proverbial poor man’s guitar, connoting directness and sincere expression); a man with a message, seen in a low-angle shot against the blue sky, to make the hero of this narrative seem strong and powerful. The song’s authentic and personal character is further underpinned by photographs of Jezewski’s childhood and rock’n’roll youth; the staging of sincerity and unmediated expression alludes to rock authenticity, which is further bolstered by Jezewski’s untrained voice. Throughout the video we see various Swedish landscapes (lakes, mountains, fields, sunsets, rivers, birds in majestic flight against the horizon), and Jezewski performing in rural settings (by the water, on a boat, in the forest, outside an old wood cabin). These shots of a ‘natural’ Sweden and ‘authentic’ Jezewski are frequently intercut with nostalgic images of rural Swedish life in the pre-modern past and the Swedish flag waving dramatically in the wind. Two young, blond children are shown laughing in a field and picking daisies, and another loving heterosexual couple is superimposed with the Swedish symbol for fertility, the Midsommarstång, ⁷ with the national flag prominent in the picture, again portraying the nation as a national (and natural) body. Musically, the traditional gender hierarchy is bolstered by a female choir backing Jezewski’s narrative, produced with a lot of echo and vibrato to sound larger and emphasise the pathos of the message. Formally, the song is conventional, with no surprises or dissonance, though with a strong emphasis on the chorus, which is repeated four times, underlining the participatory character of the song with the invitation to ‘stand up and rise’. Finally, in line with his image as an authentic masculine rocker, Jezewski is shown driving a classic American hot rod with his wife in the passenger seat and, at the end, riding a motorbike along a coastal highway, alone into the sunset. These images tie in with the mythos of working-class masculinity, independence, rebelliousness and the freedom of 1950s-inspired rock culture.

The song ends with the emotional refrain ‘It is my life/it’s in my heart/this is my home’, with ‘home’ dramatically accented. The emphasis on belonging and community as nationally rooted and culturally bound is affirmed by the video, which affectively appeals to a Swedish community, based on what Paul Taggart calls the populist notion of ‘the heartland’: an idealised conception of the community which populists serve (Taggart, 2004: 274), based on an ideal ‘territory of the imagination’ (Taggart, 2000: 3), constructed from a sense of a better past. The heartland, which in populist conceptions is populated by ‘the people’, is constructed by looking inward and backwards, as archetypally performed by Jezewski. Taggart (2004) describes the heartland not as rationally conceptualised but emotionally felt; it is ‘an ideal constructed retrospectively from the past – the heartland is in essence a past-derived vision projected onto the present as that which has been lost’ (274). As such, ‘My Land’ exemplifies the populist notion of the heartland creating ‘a world that embodies the collective ways and wisdom of the people who construct it, usually with reference to [an idealized version of] what has gone before’ (Taggart, 2000: 3). ‘My Land’ celebrates a national community and belonging, connected to an idealised Swedish nature and the heartland as the home of ‘us, the people’. This home and national way of life are implicitly presented as threatened by the non-native Other, notably (Islamic) immigrants, while the song articulates populist nostalgia for simpler times, the romanticised ideal of a national past, and the glorification of tradition and heteronormative blood-and-soil preservationism. These supposedly natural elements – the circle of life and the nation as inherited though blood ties – are, however, in dire need of defending, with Jezewski posing as simultaneously the sentimental troubadour and machismo rebel, who dares to speak up despite social censorship and the suppression of free speech.

Conclusion

While ‘My Land’ is populist in style as it appeals to and constructs ‘a people’, (as opposed to an implied elite and an ‘other’), it mobilises the ideal of a heartland, it evokes a sense of crisis and it celebrates a ‘flaunting of the low’, albeit in a rather moderate manner, without presenting itself as overtly transgressive. However, this populism is articulated with not only nativism typical for the radical right, but the allusions to (national) supremacy, national romanticism and blood heredity that implicitly point to a racially defined national body, also tie in with a more extreme far-right rhetoric and ideology. Simultaneously, the song’s music and video formally express a non-antagonistic, supposedly inclusive and apolitical character. The comments left by viewers on YouTube, however, unanimously pick up on Jezewski’s dog whistle politics. Listeners are quick to connect ‘My Land’ to the politics of the SD, and to reiterate populist radical right discourses ⁸ : ‘I feel a little hope thanks to Peter’, one comment says; ‘We must stand up and fight for our country. We have slept for too long. Time to wake up and show what we’re made of, if we want to keep our country Swedish’. Others also refer to the SD: ‘Yes Go SD, good song’, and note that they first encountered the song at an SD event, where they ‘felt shivers in my whole body’ when they heard it; ‘thank you’. Appreciating Jezewski’s rebellious stance, they celebrate his resolve: ‘Peter has backbone. He won’t be stopped by the left. He stood up for his country and his convictions. Congratulations to SD for having this man on their tour’. Some comments invoke the populist notion of a ‘politically correct cultural hegemony’ that censors and suppresses the silent majority: ‘PC banned on national radio’; ‘Never mind [“skit i”] the other pc idiots. [. . .] We raggare and SD people will support you. Sweden is our land’; and ‘ROCK ON’. In their reception of the song, therefore, Jezewski’s audience not only picks up on its populist radical right-wing message and direct connection with the politics of the SD but also makes this connection in explicit reference to rock culture and the raggare subculture, finding their own lived experience represented and validated.

Returning to the question of why populist cultures create and adopt certain styles or symbolic objects, we can identify a number of ways in which raggarkultur and nostalgic rock culture afford populist articulations. As musicologist Christopher Ballantine (2020) asserts in relation to Pierre Bourdieu, genres and styles are more than mere systems of classification; they also have hidden consequences: ‘Smuggled along with them are life-worlds and ideologies relating to value, but also to social pragmatics such as race, class, and gender’ (260). In Jezewski’s articulation of rock culture, we can see how notions of authenticity, rebellious white masculinity, and nostalgic retro style can tie in with discourses favoured by the populist radical right, such as those that centre around anti-establishment, preservationist and nativist themes, as well as the performative construction of the people as rooted in the heartland. Jezewski therefore effectively combines Moore’s three processes of authentication in popular music. First, he emphasises the ‘unmediated and genuine’ nature of his personal experience (first person authenticity); second, his audience recognises itself, its values and struggles, in his performance (second person authenticity); and third, ‘My Land’ draws on the performance traditions and authenticity markers of folk, country and raggare, representing a particular populist radical right notion of the people (third person authenticity).

The fact that Jezewski adopts a US-inspired subcultural style to perform his populist celebration of Swedish nativism may seem paradoxical at first sight. However, Jezewski stylistically places himself in the tradition of white working-class underdogs as he draws on the oppositional legacy of raggare culture: arriving in Sweden after the Second World War, American cars such as the Cadillac quickly became markers of modernity and power as status symbols for the upper and subsequently middle classes (O’Dell, 1997). However, when from the late 1950s onwards the working-class youth began to appropriate used American cars to close the symbolic gap between the middle class and themselves, the meaning of these vehicles as cultural symbols changed, and they incrementally came to signify lower status and improper behaviour (causing moral panics among the middle class) (Bjurström, 1997). American cars, waving the American flag, and a stylistic embrace of an imagined Americanness were therefore no longer signs of a straightforward approval of Americanisation, but rather came to mark a subcultural celebration of oppositional working-class identity that stood against elitist middle-class youth (Bjurström, 1997). As such, raggarkultur’s subcultural style – with its emphasis on nostalgia, white working-class culture, rural affiliation, and the celebration of the low – resonates with the SD’s populist narrative of an identification with the underdog, and of the common folk against the elite (though it is worth noting the paradoxical character of the SD’s celebration of an essential Swedish culture and heartland, which are de facto always already a result of transnational cultural processes). In fact, by rearticulating an initially symbolic and oblique stylistic resistance, the Jezewski case study shows how the populist radical right (re-)politicises everyday culture and subcultural styles on a micro-level, while at the same time ostensibly de-politicising its radical populist message through popular culture to achieve hegemonic change in the macropolitical field.

In his seminal work on Thatcherite Populism, Stuart Hall (1988) contends that ‘the only way of genuinely contesting a hegemonic form of politics is to develop a counter-hegemonic strategy’ (p. 11). As we have seen, one of the ways in which the struggle for hegemony is taking place is through subverting and playing with style in the cultural sphere, although this has not led to the kind of constitution of the people for which Hall was hoping. Jezewski and the Swedish populist radical right’s performance of the (subcultural) low as an expression of oppositional values that are supposedly excluded from public discourse points to the importance of understanding populism not only as a political phenomenon in the realm of what Mouffe referred to as institutionalised ‘politics’. The populist radical right’s resistance through style reminds us that populism also functions politically ⁹ as a cultural struggle that ties in with people’s lived experiences, tastes and culture, symbolic affiliations, and shared values – or what Hebdige (2002) has described as ‘sign communities’ – as well as social practices and everyday ways of life. While cultural studies has taught us that the cultural is political, contemporary radical right populism reminds us that the political is also cultural.