ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the production and dissemination of popular songs by the populist radical right Sweden Democrats (SD) so as to examine the party’s engagement with popular culture as a way of articulating populist cultural politics on the one hand, and rearticulating popular national culture in populist-nationalist terms on the other. Given that Jimmie Åkesson – the SD party leader – plays in a rock band, Bedårande Barn, the connection between populist party politics and cultures of populism becomes directly palpable. By analysing three specific songs as case studies, the chapter shows how the SD mainstream their political discourses by aesthetically and discursively ‘popifying’ radical nationalism and by performing what the author terms ‘heroic averageness’: the paradoxical articulation of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses in their cultural and musical expressions. As the author argues, through their performance of heroic averageness, the SD politicise the notion of commonness, elevating it into a heroic defence of national culture and a revolt against the ostensible cultural hegemony of a left-liberal establishment in Sweden’s ongoing culture wars.
