FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

You'll Never Be Interesting or Funny Or Cool Again So Accept It and Start Listening to Swedish House Mafia Instead

Our writer grows up and learns to love a stadium sized EDM act with all his heart and soul.

Defending the Indefensible is a semi-regular series which sees us trying to find merit in the abject, the terrible, and the deathly dull. We don't believe that there's such a thing as "guilty pleasure", so this series sets out to prove that even the most shocking and schlocky corners of dance music can find a home in somebody's heart.

There comes a point in life, usually around your early 20s, where you realise that you're never going to be that attractive or that funny or that interesting or that cool. So you give up. You stop going out as much as you used to. You don't check out new music as often as you once did. You catch yourself reading articles about the Great British Bake Off on Friday nights. You're more likely to think about Civilisation 4 than Virgo Four. You give up on life.

Advertisement

When you give up on the dreams that youth promises us all, you start doing funny things. You start eyeing up coats in Burtons. You pick up the free magazine in the Co-Op and seriously consider grabbing one of their new butter chicken pizzas. You eat yoghurt for breakfast and soup for dinner. You own a pair of walking boots. You and your other newly-past it mates now sit silently in pubs. You've given up on life

It feels great. Honestly. It feels spectacular. Once you free yourself from the pressures of cool, you're able to be the man — or woman — you were destined to be. Which is basically your father. Or mother. The only difference between you and the elders is that you've been inexorably shaped by a different series of cultural touch-points. Dad's got punk. Mum's got new romanticism. You've got…well, that's it. We're a rudderless generation without anything to show for our existence other than a nice new phone and a backbreaking sum of debt. Regardless of that, though, you are your father's son or your mother's daughter or your father's daughter and your mother's son, and the sooner you embrace it, the better. You know how I embraced it? I fucked off the 12"s and got into Swedish House Mafia.

Swedish House Mafia, for those of you who've been stuck under an avalanche of Surgeon records for the last few years, are a genuine supergroup, comprising of Axwell, Steve Angello, and Sebastian Ingrosso. They made — for sadly they disbanded in 2013, leaving us with only two studio albums and two live albums — the kind of trashy, big room, EDM inflected, pomp and circumstance dance music that's so utterly generic that it doesn't fit into any category than that most nebulous term of all, "dance music." This is, and was, and always will be, dance music for people who like the idea of dance music but don't actually like dance music.

Advertisement

Read more: Defending the Indefensible: Blog house was secretly brilliant

Or maybe it's the other way round. Perhaps, just perhaps, Swedish House Mafia's guileless blasts of aural blatt are actually as close to a platonic ideal of dance music as we can get. Perhaps, just perhaps, the people who loved, and still love, the Swedish House Mafia, love dance music more than they love the idea of it. Perhaps, just perhaps, the Swedish House Mafia were, and still are, as valid as Frankie Knuckles or Spencer Kincy or Green Velvet or Dave Clarke or Kenny Bobien. Imagine that.

In embracing Swedish House Mafia, I have embraced the concept of the terminally uncool. Coolness, as a way of thinking about the world, and more specifically, as a means of judging the merits of something, be it a record or a film or a human being or a car or a new chocolate bar, is inherently flawed. The only things in the world that are actually cool, and always will be, are XL white t-shirts and signet rings. Everything else is wank. Chasing cool is youth's ultimate folly. Accept mediocrity now and you'll have a nicer, if quieter, life. You can thank your uncle Josh, later, by the way.

Terminal uncoolness differs from the merely uncool. Terminal uncoolness, that is the object or subject, that's so radically uncool that it's coolness is never questioned because even considering questioning it would be like asking the Pope if he was Catholic or something as trite and obvious as that tritely obvious example of asking a really trite and obvious question. Swedish House Mafia are as terminally uncool as Status Quo or Brendon Fraser. The terminally uncool often intersects nicely with the perpetually sincere. And that is why I let them into my life.

Advertisement

Like most people I was initially horrified by the sheer, unabashed brashness of SHM classics like "One" and "Don't You Worry Child". I thought of them as loutish and uncouth, as big swinging dicks dipped in neon paint slapping themselves onto a canvas in front of the booth in a terrifying Vegas club ripped straight from my darkest nightmares. I convinced myself that I hated them, because I liked real dance music and Swedish House Mafia weren't real dance music and real dancing music loving me couldn't worship at the altar of false dance.

Read more: Defending the Indefensible: I love crusties, electronic music's most maligned group

There I was, last year, in a garden centre, idly walking up and down the aisles, picking up petunias and thumbing a thanksgiving cactus and it happened. I heard "Miami 2 Ibiza" wafting softly out of a radio as I hot footed it through the greenhouses. I was hooked. I rushed home, planted my tubers in double quick time, put my new fish in their tank, and watched the entirety of the George Gently DVD I'd picked up for a very reasonable price at 32x speed and then downloaded all the Swedish House Mafia I could get my hands on.

I was enamoured and I devoured everything I could in the most passive way possible, which is the only way an act as attention seeking as Swedish House Mafia can actually be consumed. I let their pounding blare bleed into my daily commute. I washed up to their stadium sized EDM anthems. I mumbled along to them while sorting out sock drawers and flicking through Screwfix Direct catalogues.

Advertisement

They became part of my new life that was stable and secure and free of the pitfalls of irony and distance. They were closer than close. I sat and did jigsaws and thought about ISAs. I had changed and I had changed for the better.

There I sat, with ready meal for one and a copy of the Radio Times, there I sat, alone, suddenly old, suddenly free of the stress and pressure of life, there I sat with just myself and the Swedish House Mafia for company. I stood, one evening, I stood and I began to sing. I began to sing loudly and with pride. I began my new life's hymn. I found myself weeping. I found myself singing. I found myself weeping.

Upon a hill across a blue lake,
That's where I had my first heartbreak.
I still remember how it all changed.

My father said,
"Don't you worry, don't you worry, child.
See heaven's got a plan for you.
Don't you worry, don't you worry now."
Yeah!

Heaven's got a plan for you, too.

Follow Josh on Twitter