ABSTRACT
With a forty-year professional career behind him, Ulf Lundell occupies a position in contemporary Swedish cultural life as something close to a national, if not uncontroversial icon. This chapter explores some aspects of Lundell's songs that might deserve more attention. It argues that Lundell's biggest hit "Oppna landskap", which was received as a song about Swedishness, is at least as much about self-reconstruction. The chapter discusses Lundell's love songs, especially the album Den vassa eggen, highlighting a conflict between two kinds of masculinity: on the one hand, a Bohemian masculinity that Lundell inherited from 1960s counterculture; on the other hand, the traditional working-class masculinity that he had grown up with. It focuses on a displacement from self towards community as the artist/class traveller turns back to his roots in some political songs of the 1990s.
