La Dolce Vita

The Melody Festival is a Swedish music contest organized annually by the public service network SVT. It's also the most important commercial event for the Swedish music industry, which thus lives in a strange kind of symbiosis with SVT. For instance, the official album from each year's event is issued by M & L Records. Unsurprisingly, most performers in the contest are signed by...surprise...Mariann and Lionheart, the two companies behind M & L.

As an unregenerate Swedish socialist, I love every minute of this arrangement, ha ha. Big Labour Government meets Big Business, and sweet music ensues...

2004 was a good year in the history of this mega-event, with the usual bewildering mixture of very different genres. There's the straight disco of E-Type, the drag act of After Dark, the tango of Petra Nielsen and the incomprehensible come-back of Baccara (in a Swedish contest?).

Some songs are very narrowly Swedish, such as "C'est la vie", some kind of Grey Panther pop featuring three female singers very much pass their prime. We loved every minute of it, come on, Siw Malmkvist is cult! A more forgotten classic is "Trendy Discoteque", performed by Pay TV with unforgettable lines such as "We think the poor are boring / they can't afford to party / at the trendy discoteque". Yes, it was parody. Sweden still had a Social Democratic government in 2004. Today, who knows?

But yes, a few songs were embarrassing, I mean can anyone please stop Sandra Dahlberg from singing about her home town Klimpfjäll (population 100)? In my honest opinion, the winning song "Det gör ont" featuring super-vamp Lena Philipsson and her famous microphone, was equally embarrassing. But then, I never really liked Lena Ph. And then there's Nina & Kim, who tried to pull a bad girl act in nurse uniforms. Geezus. Incidentally, E-Type made a fool out of himself with his parting words "I'm leaving. I'm so tired of all these homosexuals". Since there's an entire gay subculture around the Melody Festival, this didn't come across very well, LOL.

It's difficult to rate an album containing 32 very different tracks, but in the end, I actually award this CD...four stars. In sharp contrast to Mr. E-Type, I'm not tired of all these "homosexuals"...