Episode 217 - Telltale Signs: Parsing the Ace of Base Nazi Rumours (Side A)
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Before we begin, this episode contains the discussion of some fairly charged and unpleasant topics, including some deplorable ideas and music. Please be aware in advance that this show features some isolated samples and we’ve added them into this episode because we’re discussing a difficult topic and we trust our audience to exercise their own discretion. Hopefully you find this to be an informative and a cautionary journey. Enjoy!
Depending on how online you were in the early 2010s, you may have come across the odd story here or there about how Ulf Ekberg, keyboardist of Ace of Base, was part of a Nazi punk band called Commit Suiside in the early 80s. This, by his own admission, was indeed true. He has since signified his regret for this dark period and, we’re sure, hoped that would be the end of it.
Only it wasn’t. Rumours of whether or not Ace of Base had actually secretly started out as some kind Aryan pop project have quietly bubbled away across the internet since then. There’s been numerous articles on it, some defending the idea and some rubbishing it, but no real definitive conclusion has been reached.
Before we undertook this episode we reached out to the band for their comment, mostly because we wanted to give them the right to a fair response before we took a deep dive into this topic. Sadly, we heard nothing back, but we’ve done our best to keep things as fair as we could in this and next week’s episode.
In part one we’ll go over the basics of the Nazi controversy surrounding Ace of Base, Ulf’s response to it, and the overall history of the band themselves.
We also talk about Swedish pop, the country itself, Nazi punk and the darkness of that entire scene.
We hope you enjoy this episode. We had fun doing it, even if going down the rabbit hole itself was a bit grim.
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