NIK & JAY VS. THE AGENCY FOR SAFE COMMUNAL SINGING
As we all know, it began with the children's songs, when Frère Jacques and Itsy Bitsy Spider were summoned for gender correction.
But that sort of thing never stops at the nursery circle. After first Christianshavn and then Aarhus, the Agency for Safe Communal Singing has now reached Værløse.
And friends - this will not be pretty. Because the case grows with each decade it moves through. Gasolin's catalogue from the seventies was a preliminary investigation, Helmig's from the eighties and nineties an actual crime scene - but Nik & Jay's from the noughties is a full court case with appendices.
So put on your best intersectional Politiken Plus glasses, hold tight to my hand and follow along.
We'll start with "Shake Your Ass".
The committee had to hold a thirty-minute break after the title was read aloud. When the shock had subsided and everyone had breathed into paper bags, they continued under the explicit condition that if anything similar were to be read out again, it would be preceded by a trigger warning first.
The title is a direct imperative directed at another person's body part, issued without prior, continuously reaffirmed consent, without the subject being offered a safe space to decline in, and without any form of exit strategy for those bodies that do not identify with shaking as a form of expression.
There is no other way to say this - it is bodily diktat and choreographic coercion. It is the male gaze converted into a workplace hazard - and the body part is even in the definite form, YOUR ass, whereby ownership of her posterior is discursively transferred to the sender already in the title.
And as if the first version weren't enough, they for God's sake released "Shake Your Ass (Part 2)". Think about that. They serialised the violation. It can therefore no longer be regarded as a misstep - it is a franchise built on non-consensual hip movement.
"Girl (are you free tonight?)" is structurally worse.
First of all, she is not addressed by name but by category - "girl" - which is infantilising ageism and gender reduction in one and the same word. Second and this is worse - "are you FREE". As if she were a meeting room in Outlook!!? Her night is presumed by default to be available for his need structure, her time is framed as allocable resource in his economy of desire, and the entire question is posed in PARENTHESES, so even the inquiry about her autonomy is typographically marginalised. Woman as spare capacity in the cis-hetero-patriarchy's booking system. It literally says so in the title. With the parenthesis as evidence. Verdict - The song should be banned on radio.
"Hot" requires almost no case processing.
An entire human being reduced to an adjective from the food sector - gastronomic objectification, consumability logic, body capital made into edible asset.
She is granted no inner life, no subject position, no epistemic authority over her own narrative - she is hot, full stop. A human being converted into delicacy in the masculine gendered gaze's supermarket. And that all of Denmark adopted the word and used it for twenty years is not a mitigating circumstance. It is structural complicity. We are all indicted in this case - every single one of us who has ever said "hot" about another person, a summer day or a roast, because the boundary between the three is precisely the problem. So check your e-Boks. The payment slip is on its way, the fine is calculated according to the number of times you sang along, and interest is charged from 2004.
"Boing!" the committee initially refused to process at all. Several had to call a crisis psychologist, one had acute need for a sacral therapist who dabbed them with lavender water and held space while their chakras regained their alignment, and a single consultant had to be sent home for fourteen days of restitution in a shielded sensory environment.
An entire number built around a sound effect... and there is not a single person in the country who doubts which movement the sound describes..
A fellow human being's physique reduced to onomatopoeia - the body as soundscape and anatomy as sample.
It is auditory objectification, and it has even been made danceable, so the entire population could internalise the violation rhythmically. The case is referred to the language council with a trigger warning and an inquiry to the National Police, whether there is legal basis for issuing an arrest warrant with retroactive effect - not only against the two perpetrators, but against all DJs who have played the number after midnight, all dance floors that have laid floor to it, and in principle against the bass as an instrument. Interpol has been informed that the two main suspects remain at large and were most recently observed in Royal Arena in front of 16,000 co-conspirators who shouted along to the whole thing.
"Can You Hear Her Sing" sounds initially like progress - a woman with a voice, representation, visibility!
But deconstruct the construction - it's HIM asking if WE can hear HER!!??
Her voice never reaches the public directly - it is mediated, curated and offered by two male gatekeepers who have installed themselves as editorial filter between her and the world. It is tokenism with chorus. She delivers all the emotional labour, they own the distribution. She sings - they invoice. Tell me - who has the microphone in this soundscape, and who has the microphone RIGHTS?
And then... "One Day Left"...
Here real crisis arises in the committee, because it is about gratitude, presence and love of life, and for a brief moment it looks like a unanimous acquittal. Everyone nods and is about to smile - but then a consultant who has been on an extended course in false consciousness at RUC slowly rises -
"What would you do if you had one day left?... that's performance pressure right into the deathbed!??"
Even a person's last twenty-four hours are subjected to the optimisation imperative - the day must be maximised, curated and made meaningful. Undisguised productivity normativity and deathbed ableism against all those who have neither energy, functional level nor surplus to seize the day.
What about the right to use one's last day lying and staring at the ceiling without having to perform existential depth?
And then someone made the mistake of reading the actual lyrics aloud. Line by line. Because what is it exactly that the man does on his last day?
He starts by withdrawing money from his BUSINESS ACCOUNT - a privilege-blind class marker flex, because which of the rest of us has a business account to empty on our deathbed? Then he buys a car with rims in a size that requires its own environmental approval, lights a HUGE BONFIRE on the beach without either permission or particulate filter, then selects the city's MOST BEAUTIFUL woman - a superlative that implicitly ranks all other women in the city - for a final, unsolicited seduction project, pops the most expensive champagne he can find, with the credit card in pendulum swing as consumption feast's final salute, and then concludes the whole thing with a meal from an entirely different people's cuisine without so much as a declaration of origin.
It is not a last day. It is a complete catalogue of everything the last twenty years' critical theory has tried to eradicate, executed in twenty-four hours with the music - HIS own, naturally - at full volume.
But. And listen carefully now, because this is important.
Two lines in the lyrics were unanimously APPROVED.
At one point he parks the car right in the middle of the road and blocks all traffic. The committee rose spontaneously and applauded. Jazz hands applause of course. Recognised and acknowledged activist methodology, fully in accordance with current practice, expressed desire to include the line in the agency's own method catalogue.
And finally he leaves the party without telling anyone, with his phone switched off. Also approved. It is boundary-setting. It is digital self-care. It is, the committee concluded with moist eyes, the only moment in the entire catalogue where Nik & Jay have listened inward.
The song as a whole cannot be saved, however.
The committee instead recommends that one's last day be conducted as a complete, government-approved process - assisted exit in a soundproofed sensory environment, CO2-neutral cremation on certified biofuel and composting in a swan-labelled forest burial site with QR code instead of gravestone - so that one doesn't just die, but actively contributes to the green transition. It is the only last day that passes screening - the one where you are your own carbon footprint, removing yourself.
And then there is the big thing, the structural thing, what no individual case can capture.
Two boys from Værløse - VÆRLØSE!!? - one of the safest welfare suburbs in the history of humanity, have appropriated a musical form born in the Bronx's social ruins and carried it forward as if the S-train's ten-minute service in the wealthy suburban municipality were a street fight.
It is cultural extraction without declaration of origin, aesthetic MINING in other people's pain - privilege blindness with baggy trousers on.
And as if that weren't enough, they have appropriated themselves - Niclas and Jannik, two honourable Danish boy names, amputated and Americanised to NIK and JAY, because apparently even their own names weren't "fresh, free and fly" enough for the project.
It is internalised cultural imperialism with double platinum. They have colonised themselves and sold tickets to it.
And you bought them. Yes, YOU. The Agency for Safe Communal Singing is therefore currently considering an additional cultural tax for everyone who can be tracked as buyers - and you CAN be tracked, friends. Streaming history forgets nothing. Every single time you have heard "Boing!" after midnight, it's there, with timestamp, ready to be cross-referenced with your e-Boks. Work is underway on a model where the tax increases for each time you pressed repeat, and where documented singing along in a car - read via the phone's microphone - triggers a separate surcharge.
Amnesty can be obtained by voluntarily submitting your party playlist for review and reporting three friends who still listen to "Shake Your Ass (Part 2)".
😎😁
Phew. We got through. Reasonably unscathed I hope. You can let go of my hand now.
That's what they look like through the intersectional madness glasses you're hypnotised with every day. So let's take them off before anyone gets hurt.
And otherwise remind each other what it actually was they delivered?
They delivered joy. Pure, shameless, shouting-loud joy of life in a country that has otherwise made modesty, paving stones and levelled ugly municipal design into state religion.
Two childhood friends who stood up and said out loud that life was great, that the party was now, and that you were allowed to believe in yourself - and who made the Law of Jante look like what it is - A STRAITJACKET with a Danish flag on it. And when they then became adults, they wrote "One Day Left", and today it is sung at confirmations, graduation drives and funerals, because it says what Danes find hardest to say themselves -
That life is great, and that we love each other.
Two boys from Værløse got an entire people to sing about love of life.
Mark my words here and take them to the bank -
There is NO AGENCY - no matter if Pelle Dragsted raises taxes to 145% - that will ever deliver that.
😉
Happy Saturday evening 🇩🇰❤
