Reading some articles about Robyn I saw on Friday night, I stumbled on an site mentioning the pop Swedish band Ace of Base as an influence but also as ‘our favorite 90s Nazi sympathizers’. It kind of arose my curiosity and a Swedish video on youtube showing a picture of Ulf Ekberg making the Nazi salute is one of the first thing that I got. There is a weird Reggae song in Swedish with it, never seen Hitler as a Reggae lover, but these people are very confused.
Ace of Base had a huge success, their album ‘The Sign’ (1993) is among the top 100 bestselling albums of all time listed by the RIAA, and have influenced many very successful artists such as lady Gaga who said in an interview she had a lot of 90s influences when writing ‘The Fame Monster’, Ace of base being one of them.
The band whose first line-up consisted of Jonas “Joker” Berggren, Ulf “Buddha” Ekberg, and sisters Malin “Linn” Berggren and Jenny Berggren, had a song called Happy Nation’ whose some lyrics could take a weird meaning now that I know this:
‘Happy nation living in a happy nation/where the people understand/and dream of the perfect man/a situation leading to sweet salvation/for the people for the good/for mankind brotherhood’
Ulf Ekberg acknowledged his involvement with the Swedish Nationalist party and issued an apology. I have checked a few pages about this party, and although I don’t read Swedish, they are evidently into Nazi ideology with even a picture of the swastika.
But Ulf has now turned his life around and all is forgiven since they are about to release a new album in 2011.