Among the biggest international hits of 1991 was ‘Sadeness’, a piece of music created in a studio in Spain by Michael Cretu, a German-based, Rumanian-born producer using samples from recordings of Gregorian chants. This followed the chart successes of dance records created in Belgium by Technotronic and Snap, in Italy (Black Box) and Sweden (Dr Alban).

Roxette is surely one of the most successful new Euro-bands to arrive in recent years. Sales of the 1988 album ‘Look Sharp’ are over 6 million units, while the 1991 album ‘Joyride’ has already surpassed that mark making it one of the biggest selling albums of the year around the world. Still Roxette has a long way to go before reaching the hundreds of millions its Swedish predecessor Abba sold over their twelve-year-long career. While Roxette are dressed for success into the nineties they most certainly learned their career moves from Abba. This is a topic we shall have cause to return to but first I would like to discuss the transnational music companies and their European strategies. Then I shall examine recent developments and changes in the Swedish market-place before returning to a concluding look at different career models of Swedish pop stars.

The diffusion of rock and popular music from the US and British mass entertainment industries since the 1950s has had a profound impact on the music traditions world-wide. Several generations of youth have been socialised to the musical accompaniment of rock and roll music of the 1950s, the ‘beat music’ of the 1960s, the so-called ‘psychedelic’ or ‘underground’ rock music of the 1970s, disco, punk and new wave music in the 1970s and 1980s. It has resulted in the transplantation of these ‘foreign’ styles into music cultures with small groups of fan communities for rock and roll, country and western, blues, punk, reggae and others which were previously unheard of there before their introduction. In addition, domestic traditions have been profoundly affected by the diffusion of these new music styles and have integrated some of their musical, technical and other components into their own repertoires. The Schlager music in the German-speaking countries has been one of the most prominent in this respect, adapting syncopated rhythm but modifying its harmonic attributes in order to maintain its own prominence and cultural legitimacy in the music culture. Even the volkstümliche or folk-like music, a commercialised genre of traditional folk music, has undergone changes as a result of the diffusion of the newer forms of popular music. A third type of impact upon music tradition is that of ‘transnational’ or ‘transcultural’ styles. When imported musical and cultural innovations are mixed with domestic styles and traditions, these new styles and conventions are ultimately created. These, in turn, form a primary thrust in the cultivation and development of innovations in musical traditions, which eventually evolve into changes in the cultural identity of the particular country.

Rock and pop music in the USSR and eastern Europe has become an area of increasing interest to both the western mass media and cultural studies since glasnost, perestroika, the collapse of the Eastern bloc Communist regimes and the constitution of new western-styled democratic governments. This is largely because rock music has represented probably the most widespread vehicle of youth rebellion, resistance and independence behind the Iron Curtain, both in terms of providing an enhanced political context for the often banned sounds of British and American rock, and in the development of home-grown musics built on western foundations but resonating within their own highly charged political contexts. As the East German critic Peter Wicke has claimed,

Because of the intrinsic characteristics of the circumstances within which rock music is produced and consumed, this cultural medium became, in the GDR, the most suitable vehicle for forms of cultural and political resistance that could not be controlled by the state. (Wicke 1991, p. 1)

Until the late 1970s rock music in Poland was hidden behind many different labels, such as ‘music of a young generation’, ‘youth music’ or ‘big beat’, usually meaning something, if not pejorative, at least suspicious. Having the flavour of a forbidden fruit, genuine rock functioned quite successfully, mostly through independent circulation, not only as a specific form of art, but, first of all, as a symbol of protest against an existing political and social order (it does not matter if we call it ‘communistic’ or ‘capitalistic’); it was a symbol of independence and freedom.

Years ago (no prizes for guessing how many years ago), when my friends and I were teenagers who literally lived on ‘She Loves You’ or ‘A Hard Day's Night’, I never thought that one day these songs would be more than my favourite music or that they would even inspire my attempts at academic research. Back in the 1960s, the very thought of studying rock music never crossed my mind – reflections on such a pleasant subject seemed too dry and dull. If I were a boy, I am sure I would have joined a group (apparently I was aware even then that rock was a boy's world. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why I never tried to touch the guitar) …

The relationship between ideology and popular culture has largely been discussed in the context of developed industrial societies, in which the ideologies that might be considered to have most bearing on society in general and popular culture in particular are capitalism and socialism in the context of specific nationalisms. On the Muslim peripheries of Europe, however, the situation may be different. The appearance of ‘Islamic’ motifs in Turkish popular music and the ambiguous but conspicuous attempts by a populist government in Turkey to control and co-opt this music over the last eight years suggests that Islam has also played a powerful role in shaping the experience of popular music in Turkey. The extent to which Islam constitutes an ideology distinct and separable from capitalism and socialism has been debated at length within and outside the Muslim world. It is clear that Islam has proved less of an obstacle to the development of capitalist economies than that of socialist economies (Rodinson 1977; Gellner 1981). It is also true that the collapse of world markets in the 1970s resulted in crises which reverberated throughout the Muslim world, in which a pristine and ‘traditional’ Islam has become a focus, in various ways, for resentment at the cultural and economic dependency of the Muslim upon the non-Muslim world. Islam projects itself now as a rival and ultimately superior alternative to the nationalist ideologies within which capitalist or socialist formations have been articulated. In Turkey, the dominant and competing discourses of nationalist Turkism on the one hand and Islam on the other have framed the terms in which Turkish social and political history has been seen in and outside Turkey. The popular music known as arabesk apparently defies both of these ideologies and provides a useful case-study of the way in which they operate ‘on the ground’, shaping the identities and strategies around which people organise their social existence.

I spent the summer of 1990 studying the work of disk jockeys involved in the ‘House’ club scene in London, Manchester and Belfast. What I was initially intrigued by was how a popular music genre could develop such a following, indeed, some notoriety, without the traditional trappings of ‘rock 'n' roll’ (‘star performers’, ‘groups’), and without a manifest ideological stance adopted in relation to mainstream lifestyles. I came to conclude that a shift of meanings had occurred in the activity of mass dancing to records during the late 1980s, a shift which has created a new and central role for disk jockeys.