Danish Dynomite

"Den her er for mine boys, og for mine ladies, aiight?
Det her er Nik og Jay, det er Danish dynomite"
-Nik og Jay, "Det Vi Gør"

The amazing hiphop duo Nik and Jay is my new obsession. They're one of those bands whose music is so ridiculous and terrible that it's actually enjoyable. They think they're gangstas (see pic), but apparently don't realize that it's just not possible to be a gangsta if you're also Danish and white. It's also hard to rap in Danish, because the pronunciation isn't precise enough for good rhymes -- or maybe that makes it easier?? I guess in a sense you could say everything in Danish rhymes with everything else, since all the words have the same kind of in-the-throat vowel and swallowed consonants at the end -- at least it sounds that way to me. Their videos (for example, this one for the song "Boing") look like SNL spoofs of hip hop videos, but apparently they're made in all seriousness.

Their lyrics are pretty much all really stupid, (ie, their biggest hit from when I was a student here, Lækker, consists mainly of the word "delicious" repeated. They also make a clever double entendre using the number 6 (seks) and the word sex. Nicely done, boys.) However, I do like that in a lot of their songs they use the phrase "f*** Janteloven" -- Janteloven being, as you may know (but definitely would if you were Danish), the philosophical doctrine that nobody is better than anyone else, and which can be summarized in the following 10 rules:

1. Don't think that you are special.
2. Don't think that you are of the same standing as us.
3. Don't think that you are smarter than us.
4. Don't fancy yourself as being better than us.
5. Don't think that you know more than us.
6. Don't think that you are more important than us.
7. Don't think that you are good at anything.
8. Don't laugh at us.
9. Don't think that anyone cares about you.
10. Don't think that you can teach us anything.
(Thanks, Wikipedia)

While egalitarianism is good, I suppose, this is a kind of disheartening way of phrasing it. I don't think it's really stressed that much to kids anymore, but I can imagine it would have been a rather bleak paradigm to grow up with. Kind of opposite to the "everyone is special, everyone is valuable" messages that American kids are given all the time.

Anyway, so the general idea behind "fuck Janteloven" is that yes, Nik and Jay are better than the rest of us, which is a common enough theme in certain music genres -- but I think it's cute that they reference an relatively obscure (to most of the world) philosophical concept to make this point.

Hopefully they'll play in Tivoli or something this summer so I can see them live -- actually, it's entirely possible I've passed them in the street; I probably wouldn't recognize them in normal clothes...

Footnote: To be fair to the Danes, nobody really likes Nik and Jay -- they're generally the subject of mockery. Nevertheless, when one of their songs comes on in a bar, everyone seems to mysteriously know all the words...