Day 268 - Danes and Pop Music

When Emily and I started to consider a move to Denmark, my knowledge of the country was fairly limited. I knew about Lego. I knew about Søren Kierkegaard. I was pretty sure that Lars Ulrich was Danish.

That was about it.

So we did some research. One of the first things I learned was that the pop group Aqua was from Denmark. Yes, this Aqua.



Aqua is the most successful - in terms of record sales - Danish musical act of all time. Let that sink in. Aqua, the Danish equivilant to their Dutch cousins the Vengaboys, is the biggest selling musical act in Danish history.

I didn't think much of this at the time. I figured that it had more to do with the fact that Aqua is probably the only Danish band to successfully sell records in America and that aspect alone put them well ahead of some other more substantial Danish bands.

I've reached the conclusion that this probably isn't true.

Let's go back a bit here. My first clue was when Robbie Williams played Parken. A few people in my lab, around my age, had tickets and were super excited. It was a little weird that a 40-ish year old straight man with a family was pumped about going to a Robbie Williams concert, but different strokes for different folks.

Second clue. Novo Nordisk has a big summer party every year. I'm talking big. At some point we'll probably have an entire blog post detailing the event, but I'll just mention a few things about music here. While I was just chilling with my department, drinking some Danish beer, we got to talking about music. One of the older guys in my lab got to talking about pop music.

Basically, it came down to this. He likes to listen to music with great hooks and, in his opinion, pop music offers the best version of that. While we had this converation, Alphabeat hit the main stage.



People of all ages were very excited to listen to / watch Alphabeat. I mean, all ages. One of my coworkers, who has worked at Novo for 25 years, was right up up against the stage, rocking out to Alphabeat.

Final - and possibly most important - clue. This morning I rolled into the office, sat down with my cup of coffee, and started putting my day together. My coworkers - who are both older than I am - asked if I was going to see One Direction. What?

Here is the actual conversation.

Coworker 1 : Are you going to get tickets to see One Direction?

Me : Um, no.

Coworker 2 : Why not?!

Me : Um, because I'm not a 15 year old girl.

Coworker 2 : What do you mean by that?!

 I actually felt bad for hurting their feelings. I didn't even take the question seriously! How could I? I really thought that they were joking. I had to cover things up with, "Ah, it's not really my thing. I'm not really in to pop music".

Maybe it's not Europe / Denmark that's weird. Maybe I'm the weird one. Maybe I should buy tickets to see One Direction.