There are reports in London that street music is dying out and in Brussels the number of musicians has halved in just a few years. In Sweden there are no official statistics, but in Stockholm the pan flute musicians in the city have long since disappeared, rebel Robban has been banished from Slussen and the organ aunt in Plattan is dead.
The only one I can think of is the mustachioed uncle playing the zither on the subway. When you least expect it, he gets on, grabs the strings a little and then just as quickly gets off at the next station – and you wonder if it wasn’t all just a dream.
“The forest has its songs and the mountain its songs, but the street also has its melodies,” write August Strindberg and Claes Lundin about street musicians in the 1882 book “Old Stockholm.” I miss these street melodies, that’s what I notice. Not necessarily because of the Rebel Band’s clever covers of Elvis, but more because they anchored me in the city. For Stockholmers, they were common points of reference that held strangers together. They made Stockholm feel like something more than the geographical surface I live on. The city was enchanted by her presence and felt like my city.
Today they are long gone legends. I even miss the harmonica man, the German Horst, who stood with a loudspeaker pressed to his ear while making music. A horrified Karl Ove Knausgård describes his unusual technique in the second volume of Min Kamp: “No, he didn’t play, he just blew as much as he could into the harmonica and at the same time turned his upper body jerkily back and forth. His hair was long, his face was ravaged.”
Busking was legalized in Sweden in 1970 after British busker Don Partridge was prosecuted for staging a public concert without a permit. Thanks to an appeal to the government, Partridge was eventually acquitted in the Court of Appeal, prompting Torbjörn Fälldin to sign the law change allowing buskers to perform on Sweden’s streets and squares without permission.
Despite the ban, Kufic street musicians always shaped the cityscape of Stockholm, if August Strindberg is to be believed. Local eccentric “Filiochrome,” probably the 19th century’s answer to the bagpiper, is one of them. He used to stand “wild, red-faced and drunk” in front of the Hasselbacken restaurant on Djurgården and play a screaming violin to the horror-mixed delight of the audience.
Sometimes an invigorated wholesaler would knock over a coin and catch it in his mouth. It has enough to do with the matter – that in an increasingly cashless Sweden there are no longer any coins to throw to buskers.
I recently drove into the city in search of street music to support my thesis with empirical evidence. I got off at Medborgarplatsen, no one there. Maybe not that strange, but in the old town, if at all, it is, right? No, Stortorget was as quiet as it was after the Stockholm massacre. A street preacher stood on Plattan and announced that all religions in which God did not die were false religions, but there were no street musicians there either.
And yes, it has to be said that in February and five degrees cold there are not optimal conditions for an inventory of street musicians. But even the heated Sergelgån echoed empty. For two days my only musical find was a Roma playing the accordion in front of Åhléns on Drottninggatan.
People in the audience become indifferent extras in the film in which you are both the director and the leading actor
In 2004, audiologist Michael Bull wrote an article about the then-new iPod. By surveying iPod users, he found that many use the technology to aesthetically design their environment according to their personal taste with the help of suitable music. People in the audience become indifferent extras in the film in which you are both the director and the main actor. But if you were to speak to a stranger, that illusion would be broken, and the same would be true if, God forbid, you were spoken to.
Today the music is accompanied by fast clips and I don’t feel like Tarkovsky when I scroll Tiktok. Still, the analogy holds. Outdoors it’s all about keeping going, but when you’re stuck on the subway and the person in front pulls out a guitar and starts playing “Blowin’ in the Wind,” it feels like an attack. I’m forced to step out of my digital tailored bubble and suddenly find myself claimed by a complete stranger.
The fact that it is perceived as a nuisance is the reason why, in 2016, SL banned live music in its premises in addition to begging, and the guards kicked out Rebel-Robban. If you still feel the slightest discomfort, for example if a zither-playing uncle comes in, a chat with SL’s “security center” is enough to have him quickly removed.
Sure, Strindberg and his co-authors describe how the police in Stockholm chased away positivists in the 19th century, but back then it was the noise that bothered people, not the impression that their existence was an invasion of privacy per se.
The lack of cash may not be as big a problem as rotting public space. The urban Westerner wants to oppose at all costs what is the essence of the city: the crowd of deviant strangers who, however difficult, try to live together. How are we supposed to deal with a “wild, red-nosed and drunk” busker when we hardly dare to pay at the manned checkout in Hemköp, roll our eyes as soon as we see a beggar and ask our food couriers from distant countries to leave the pizza on the doorstep so we don’t have to look them in the eye? Then, of course, street music is experienced as “psychological torture,” to quote a British judge. If the (un)sound is banned, the individuals find peace – at the price that the city loses even a little of its soul.
But Tiktok troubadour William Sundman Sääf has found his audience. He recently went viral by posting clips of himself singing Swedish songs on the Stockholm subway. I like his clips. He sings well and the clips tickle with their limitlessness. The security forces sometimes drive him away and his project feels like a kind of rebellion against the development I have described in this text.
Still, I hope I never have to listen to him on the real subway. I probably would have stared at my phone in a panic, pretended nothing had happened, and changed trains at the next station. Then I took my phone and calmly watched his Tiktok clips.
Read more texts by Isak Grondahl in DN Culture.
