[ad_1]
The Jakob Hellman myth could well have been shattered by the flat light of TV4.
But instead, the eager, skewed energy of the artist is about the only thing that makes “Much Better” interesting right now.
He left the music business thirty years ago. Still, something special happens with “Much Better” as soon as Jakob Hellman intervenes. Little Tove Styrke, who wasn’t even born when the album “… and the big sea” was released, immediately begins to act protective of the tall man, and Markus Krunegård almost whispers his questions. It is like feeling a breeze over calm waters.
Jakob Hellman has a special aura that no record company or television producer in the world can perfect. But the fact that he only released a single super-acclaimed album and then disappeared has, of course, greatly contributed to the myth.
So I have been a bit concerned about how wise it really is for such an artist to return to one of the broader entertainment formats in Sweden. Don’t you kill everything then? Do you remove the edge of artistic perfection that exists when releasing a single ingenious work? Yes, of course it does in a sense. At the same time, the myth remains intact because Hellman gives us no real answer.
In reality, it is so ambivalent and contradictory that the lack of a direct message has something liberating. At one point he was arrogant and wanted to throw a record. In the other he did not want to and it was his friends who took it forward. Hellman clearly still has a special relationship with the truth. Maybe it doesn’t really matter, when it comes to authenticity.
Suddenly, Markus Krunegård’s ambitions to go crazy on stage feel like acting. However, when Hellman starts walking in the middle of the song, I get really worried. What is he doing now? What are you going to invent? After all, the man has an intact punk feeling inside him, and he can’t even understand the concept of “idol”.
Why would young artists care what grown-ups think? He wonders, to which Tove Styrke seems as if her world has been turned upside down.
In a concept like “Much better”, Jakob Hellman is so wrong that he is right. It has its own sentence structure of loose ends and dead ends. Sometimes when he has to socialize nicely, he appears as a robot simulating humanity. I write it with love, because with Hellman it is as if I constantly radiate the anxiety and insecurity that we all carry inside.
He has been absent for three decades and worked primarily in nursing homes. And then go back and beat the seasoned colleagues. Of course you move.
