hey mjp!
Being the guy who runs this place doesn't entitle You to highjack this thread either!
So, who's the coolest singer/songwriter in Denmark?
Anybody? Bukfan?
I would say Kim Larsen. He's very popular despite his lyrics not always being mainstream. He's know as "The Danish national bard". Him and his rock band "Gasolin'" and their 10 albums were extremely popular in the 70's. Then he went solo and still continue giving concerts and releasing albums to this day.
Many of his lyrics and personal opinions are very anti-establishment. A quote from Wikipedia:
"Larsen has many times voiced his opposition to the established society and instead advocated the right to be different from the mainstream: The album and movie
Midt om natten revolves around this subject as does the album
231045-0637. The title for this last album is Kim Larsens social security number which is strictly personal. Larsen was against the big database of every citizen, implied by this title.
As a heavy smoker, he paid in August 2008 an advertising campaign which showed the text "Tillykke med rygeforbudet - Gesundheit macht frei !!!". The first sentence means "Congratulations on the smoking ban" in Danish, the second sentence means "health makes free" in German. Whilst smoking bans are allegedly not made to protect smokers, but non-smokers, Kim Larsen constructed a connection between smoking bans and such
Nazi phrases as
Arbeit macht frei."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Larsen
You can no doubt find many of his songs on Youtube, but you miss a lot when you don't speak the language. However, this video here of the song "Midt Om Natten" ("In The Middle Of The Night"), one of his most popular songs, shows what he's singing about by using clips from the Kim Larsen movie of the same name, "Midt om natten" ("In The Middle Of The Night"). It's about how the police turned up in the middle of the night to remove a bunch of hippie-squatters from the area they had occupied. It clearly has parallels to Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen which have been a hippie-squatter area since 1971 and which has often been in danger of being closed down by the authorities. The tune is very "catchy" and I've translated the lyrics as best I could so you know what he's singing about:
The cops came before we expected them
in the middle of the night
So, me and my baby were at it again
in the middle of the night
They threw tear gas through the windows
So, that the tears rolled down into the living rooms
Oh yes
in the middle of the night
The next thing that happened, I dare not think about
in the middle of the night
a guy we called "Spacey" went right into the blue
in the middle of the night
He hit the street from the fourth floor
it wasn't our fault, he was just raving mad
said the cops
in the middle of the night
in the middle of the night
they let us out when it was about three o'clock
in the middle of the night
they said go on home, but we asked, where's that
in the middle of the night
Now, I'm looking forward to becoming an old man
then I'll probably get a room with electricity and water
and the cops will hardly visit me
again
in the middle of the night
in the middle of the night.
in the middle of the night.
[This video is unavailable.]
Kim Larsen "Midt Om Natten" album cover (1983), and a recent photo of him: