Not Nordic enough? ‘Nordic cool’ as a Janus-headed strategy for artistic inclusion and expulsion

For decades, the label ‘Nordic cool’ has been used as a conceptualized, strategic marketing tool and as a branding concept. The chapter provides a critical account of how the term has been used in relation to popular music in the early twenty-first century, and with which purposes. This will be done by investigating the term ‘Nordic cool’ understood as a Janus-faced concept for artistic inclusion and expulsion, since it at the same time decides both which artists and products are considered suitable for being labelled ‘cool’ and which are not.