Welcome

Well there's not much here yet.  But this is where I hope to be able to post thoughts from my brain on one of my favourite bands, Roxette.  Although they are the second most successful Swedish band after ABBA, it's surprising how many people know a lot of their songs but aren't familiar with who actually sung them.

People often ask me why I like such a band.  Some people I think regard them as a shallow pop group who were around in the late 80s and 90s, and played radio-friendly hits but miserably failed to generate any classics.  But ironically, I feel that it is their "shallowness" and perhaps their overall averageness which makes them so unique and enjoyable.

I was once told be a friend of mine that to succeed in life means to "be average at anything".  I pondered this with shady eyebrows at first thinking "but hang on, why can't I be good at something?"  He said "Oh, you misunderstand.  Being average at EVERYTHING is a very hard to do.  It's a fine art".  That got me thinking.  And I think this is the art that Roxette has mastered.  Their songs are just so average, that that is what makes them stand out.

In the late nineties during my teens I was an FM radio junkie.  Songs on the radio at the time were generally fairly bland, with some exceptions, but nonetheless there was something about them, be it their quirky catchiness or their lazy hopeless attempt to live up to the past, that appealled to me, and still does.  Well, of course I grew out of that radio phase long ago and have learned to appreciate more classical stuff.  But for me, Roxette is the one band that sums up everything about postmodern pop music, and does it so well, that regrettably I have to say I kinda like it.

Right from the first few bars of one of their first hits The Look, you can tell the sound is sooooo totally average and bland it makes you sick.  And I love it.  In fact, the songwriter confesses that most of the lyrics in the verses to that song were just created "off the cuff" and not really thought about very well.  But it fit the current pop music trend at the time like a glove, and was #1 in some 25 countries.

Dressed For Success is one of the finer female vocal performances I've heard in my time.  Dangerous follows largely from The Look in terms of its perfected art of average blandness, and when it comes to the instrumental break you can see a delightfully obvious attempt to capture a classic rock melodic performance.  But when it comes to Listen To Your Heart, that's where my desires melt even further still.

Listen To Your Heart is juicy, it's... oh, it's luscious.  I used to play this song 50 times over and over cause I couldn't believe how well they had nailed it.  The FM rock sound at the time.  It was absolutely perfect, flawless.  So flawless that some of the critics rejected it due to it being too obvious.  But obvious-ness was just another one of Roxette's skills at creating masterpieces.

Eight hit albums, with a further being released this month.  Seventeen top ten hits in their home country, and four #1 hits in the US.  A world tour underway as we speak, they are still very much alive.  The lead singer, Marie Fredriksson, miraculously recovered from a brain tumor in 2002 which she was said to have had only a 5% chance of survival.  So the unlikely has very much become reality.

However, in spite of their success (and this is not unlike my similar feelings on ABBA) I actually think I would find them rather boring people.  However, perhaps it is this boring-ness that is what more enables them to make such average, bland and scrumptious music.