Now that both the children's songbook and Gasolin have come under review, it's only fair that the "Agency for Safe Communal Singing's" revisionist examination also reaches Aarhus.
And let's just say it as it is - Thomas Helmig isn't getting through a screening.
Not even close.
The man's song catalogue is a walking crime scene.
And I want it on record that this hurts me. Because without the album Vejen Væk it's doubtful I would even have survived what my own vulnerable teenage heart dealt me when the first unhappy infatuations hit. I can put it on today and feel how it still works within seconds - some tracks melt me into a sentimental puddle that feels far too much and beyond everything - while others bring me into a state like a catatonic patient - petrified in time in the middle of the kitchen, seventeen years old again. That's how deep they sit.
And only shaking my whole body like a dog helps me back to reality - "oh right, I'm not 17. I'm 52. Pheeew.. yeah, ok I survived.. everything's fine!" 😅
But rules are rules, friends - and no one gets a free pass on this side. Just as no one and nothing has gotten a free pass from the madness of the last ten-fifteen years.
Priceless paintings that have hung peacefully for centuries get sprayed with tomato soup. Traffic is blocked by glued hands while ambulances queue behind the conscience. Statues that have stood still since the Swedish wars are torn down because they suddenly stood in the way. Words that have meant the same thing for generations are called in for conversation and come home changed. Children's books and films are rewritten and scrubbed clean and warned against while the authors rotate in their graves, patriotic songs become debate programmes, and even the Christmas lunch has been in consultation.
NOTHING was allowed to stand. Everything had to go through the Machine. So why on earth should the King of Aarhus get off now that we're turning things around?
Put on your woke intersectional glasses and follow me deep into its dark heart.
Let's start with - "It's me standing out here knocking".
A man seeks out a private address unannounced in the darkness of night and carries out persistent, rhythmic noise violation of the shared sound space, while he centres his own presence - "it's ME" - as if his identity in itself constitutes an access-granting argument.
No prior, informed, continuously reconfirmed consent has been obtained, no agenda for the visit has been sent in advance, and the entire situation is framed solely from his perspective - we never hear how the door experiences it.
It must be rewritten to "It's a person you have previously confirmed acquaintance with, who has submitted an enquiry and is waiting at a respectful distance from the property".
That might be difficult to set to rhythm and rhyme - but the music is actually secondary in all of this. You can probably understand that.
And wait just a moment.
A man standing outside in the dark, knocking infernally and claiming loudly that he belongs inside?
That sounds like Sikandar!!?? When he's not sleeping in his fake flat, that is. The darkness is authentic enough anyway, since the municipality has turned off the electricity in there.
On to "Now that you've burned me off".
Here it starts to get a bit uncomfortable. A woman exercises her unconditional right to change her mind - and he expropriates her no and makes it his work!
She carries the entire narrative, it's her decision that drives every single verse, and yet it's him who has the definitional power, gets all the royalties and access to the public space, while she's left behind as an unpaid co-creator of her own exclusion.
It's narrative extraction. Epistemic violence on Giro 413. She's never received so much as a consultation deadline or a bent fiver for her contribution!
"Malaga" is a chapter in itself.
An entire Spanish coastal town reduced to a therapeutic backdrop for a Northern European man's inner process - the sun, the heat and the local population exist solely as resources he can draw on in his self-realisation. It's the colonial gaze in charter format, emotional extractivism with homeward journey in economy class, and not a single Malagan is granted subject status let alone a line on the entire release.
It should therefore be reissued with local voices, a foreword from the Andalusia region and a solidarity declaration that other people's hometowns are not a treatment facility.
Then there's "Dear machine" from 1987, and here unrest actually arises in the Agency's committee.
A man initiating an emotionally charged relationship with a machine forty years before AI girlfriends - that's transgressive, norm-breaking, post-humanist pioneer work, and for a moment they consider acquitting him as ahead of his time. Right up until someone points out the power asymmetry, OF COURSE!
He can switch her off.
The relationship is asymmetrical right down to the socket, there is NO mechanical consent, and he speaks TO her, but never WITH her. From visionary to Incel tech-bro in a single meeting. The case is dropped as "complex".
"100 days" with Medina is if possible more serious than it sounds.
The man puts numbers on grief. He quantifies another person's absence and keeps accounts of his own longing, day by day, as if heartache were a KPI. It's the datafication of emotional space, self-surveillance made into a hit list, and added to that comes the structural imbalance of the featuring economy - WHO ended up with ownership of the narrative, and who stood in parentheses on the cover?
And then the World Cup song. "All of Denmark up to stand".
Yes, you almost don't know where to begin. "All of Denmark" is an essentialist national construction that makes invisible anyone who doesn't identify with the collective - and here even King Frederik didn't escape unscathed from his "that which is greater", where Kings in this country have simply said God for a thousand years - and "up to stand" is unveiled ableism that excludes the country's both voluntary and involuntary sitting citizens from the national celebration, and the whole thing is written for eleven MEN in identical clothes chasing one ball under one flag - more monocultural, cisheteronormative, competition-based masculinity simply cannot be pressed into three and a half minutes.
The committee rewrites it to "Selected parts of Denmark in self-chosen positions", and hereafter several balls are chased in the text, so no single ball bears the entire pressure alone.
What remains then is only "Stupid Man" - the man who voluntarily diagnosed himself twenty-five years before it became legally required.... One would actually think it would therefore get off. But no. Because he says it in English, he says it about himself, and he uses three and a half minutes of the public sound space on HIS feelings about HIS stupidity. He mansplains his own toxicity all over the rest of us.
Even his apology takes up too much space.
And then there's the name. HELMIG. The man is literally called "whole me" as a surname. The entire self-centredness is in the passport. No rewriting can save that, friends. There must be a name change - or else the next album cover must either be a completely black square, or a picture where he kneels with lowered gaze before the spirit of the times' most recently designated altar.
That's how he looks through the glasses.
So let's quickly take them off again together before we get infected by whatever that is...
You can hear it too, can't you, Denmark?
We're on the wrong track. So far from reality no one can take it seriously anymore. And we need to find our way back. Together.
We can't help those who want to remain standing out here, that's their choice. But all the rest of us need to move on.
Because out here in reality there stands a real Human Being who like so few has delivered a frequency to the Danes that has held them together - inside the same Story, decade after decade, as a fixed point you could set your heart by, whether it was broken, newly in love or just on the way home down the motorway in darkness. It's a gift we'll never be able to repay him.
And every single time he knocks, an entire country still opens up.
Keep doing it.
This is The Way.
Or Christianity - as we say where I come from.
And this doesn't just apply to Helmig. It applies to all the creating people we have left - the artists, the songwriters, those who build businesses from nothing, those who tell the stories about us. About you. The stories we live inside through an entire life, often without discovering it, until a song suddenly stands in the kitchen with us and is seventeen years old.
Without them there's nothing left - other than politicians moving pieces around on a board, and media making money from you getting worked up about it.
It's the task in any healthy culture that wishes to survive - and it's ancient. To support the few who genuinely create in it. Those who draw, build and tell. Those who make the upward movement that lifts all of us - that gives hope, meaning and faith in each other and in tomorrow.
A culture that instead puts its creators under revision and its revisors on the throne has reversed gravity.
If we lose that, we lose everything.
Happy weekend ❤️🔥🪽
…
Oh right. Sorry.
The Agency sent this along to me.
VEJEN VÆK (cover)
Evidence A: The man in the foreground, in focus, with the name in capitals above his head. The woman in the background, out of focus, unnamed, placed in the shadow of his hair - a hair that in itself occupies approximately forty percent of the image area. Added to that, he has quite obviously stolen her makeup, yet another uncredited female contribution to the work.
The Agency didn't even need to open the record. The album is renamed "A Non-Directional Movement Toward A Self-Chosen Elsewhere (at own pace, without destination coercion)", the woman is credited as co-creator, moved forward in the image plane and granted her own sharpness.
😁🤷🏼♂️
