Sound Tracks: Swedish Hip Hop

Every trip should have a soundtrack, so we've asked CJ Fahey with Nat Geo Music to select artists from their catalog whose songs will inspire you to get going.

 

Last week a friend took me to a party at the stunning Swedish Embassy in Washington, DC, so I've been feeling in a Swedish mood ever since. And considering its small population, Sweden has made a disproportionate contribution to global music. Most famous are guilty-pleasure groups like ABBA and Ace Of Base, but recently it seems that every other indie rock sensation comes from Sweden. And then there's Stockholm-based producer Max Martin who is responsible for massive hits by Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, and the Backstreet Boys. I took a course on Scandinavian literature in college and the professor suggested that Sweden owes its laudable artistic output to precisely the thing that would inspire me to do nothing: their long, dark winters.

One thing that all famous Swedish music groups have in common is that they sing in impeccable English. It makes sense for two reasons: it opens their music to a wider market and much of the music that inspires these rock and pop groups is sung in English. But the lack of internationally successful native language singers from Sweden is one of the things that makes me love so much the Swedish hip-hop group Snook.