ONE DAY IN 1992, a demo tape addressed to Denniz PoP, a twenty-eight-year-old DJ, arrived at a Stockholm-based music company called SweMix.
So Californian-looking he could only be Swedish, Dag Krister Volle—Denniz PoP’s given name; friends called him Dagge—wore his long blond hair with plenty of volumizer, loosely parted in the middle, Jon Bon Jovi–style, a reminder that the New Jersey rocker had started his career as a hair dresser. When it hung down in his eyes, as it usually did, Denniz would blow upward, puffing aside hair strands with wheezy gouts of smoky breath; he always had a Marlboro Menthol going. “Maybe two hundred and fifty times a day he’d do that,” says Kristian Lundin, one of his later protégés, who Denniz called “Krille” (Dagge was big on nicknames). Denniz dressed like a teenager, in T-shirts and jeans, or in large green military-style trousers, and hoodies, everything worn loose. Seated in front of his Apple computer—he always had the latest Macs—his cigarette would stick straight up between the fingers of his right hand as he moved the mouse. He had a licentious-looking gap between his two front teeth that showed when he smiled. And he was always smiling.
SweMix was located in the soundproofed basement of a building on Kocksgatan street, in Södermalm. It was a collective of ten Swedish DJs led by René Hedemyr, who as JackMaster Fax spun records at Tramps, one of the city’s biggest discos. When they weren’t in the studio or working a club, most of them clerked at the Vinyl Mania record store in Vasagatan, close to the Stockholm train station. “They were all a bit cocky,” Jan Gradvall, a prominent Swedish music journalist, remembers. “I was always a little nervous when shopping there. A bit like High Fidelity but with dance music.” Apart from René and Denniz, the best known of the SweMix DJs was Sten Hallström, who goes by the name StoneBridge and is still active in Stockholm.
At Ritz, Stockholm’s premier dance club, Denniz was much in demand as a DJ. Unlike his SweMix colleagues, who spun house and acid house at the Bat Club—as Thursday nights at Ritz were called—Denniz loved funk and soul. Parliament-Funkadelic, Cameo; “anything with a funky bass line Denniz loved,” says Lundin. StoneBridge says, “I grew up with Chic and Nile Rodgers, but Denniz was never into disco; he was a bit younger than us.” In 1986, when Hedemyr showed up with a stack of house records he’d gotten from Stax in Chicago, Denniz didn’t like it; it threatened the funk and soul that was his true love. StoneBridge adds, “Denniz also hated jazz. It wasn’t simple enough. He liked chords you could play with three fingers. Whenever I would play my complicated jazzy chords, Denniz would make a face. That was the thing that drew him to pop—the simplicity of it.” Denniz much preferred the synth-pop bands coming out of London in the early ’80s—Depeche Mode, Human League, OMD. He also adored Def Leppard, especially the production work by superproducer Mutt Lange. As Jan Gradvall notes, “Def Leppard were used as a blueprint when they made their own Swedish pop/R&B-mashups.”
In 1987, Denniz was in the booth at Ritz one night in November, that month Stockholm descends into its long winter darkness, when on the club’s small stage, for the first time ever in Sweden, Public Enemy appeared, in their trademark military uniforms, followed by LL Cool J. Gradvall, who was also in the club that night (in later years virtually every significant music figure in Sweden would claim to have been in the club that night) recalls, “It was like seeing the light: visual proof that exciting music didn’t have to be played on guitars, bass, and drums, but with only a Technics 1200,” a high-fidelity turntable favored by DJs.
SweMix remixed US and UK hits for European audiences, working largely by hand. StoneBridge says, “The very first mixes were pure edits with added samples. Then, about 1987 we got various take-outs from the original mix session tapes. It could be drums and vocal or dubby parts, but still the original music. We still had very limited sampling time, but sometimes there were a cappellas on the vinyl and we simply synced them manually.”
“We sat and cut by hand, razor blades and stuff like that, and spliced the songs in real ’80s fashion,” Denniz said in an interview in the mid-’90s:
Nowadays we use digital, but when we first started it was tape that you’d measure. You took the tape in your hand and then you’d just listen. Tuk, tuk, tuk. OK there’s the first stroke. Then you’d manually fast forward until you found the second stroke, and mark the tape . . . then fold the tape in the middle and made a line where you ended up, which gave you a half rhythm or half stroke. Fold it one more time and you got one quarter. If you were really talented you could do one eighth. Then you’d take a bunch of different strokes, sounds or yells, and cut these incredibly small segments into different formats. Finally it turns into long segments of sounds —drrrr tuk tuk tuk tang-eeeee—typical ’80s hysterical sounds. . . . You’d sit with tape parts around your neck, meters and meters all with little notes jotted down on them, like, ‘kick backwards,’ and then you’d take a chance and cut them together with Scotch tape. If I were to do the same thing now, I’d do it on the computer. It’s a completely different thing.
Some of the mixes merely extended songs for dancers by adding instrumental sections and long drum breaks, like Tom Moulton’s pioneering disco remixes at the Sandpiper Club on Fire Island a decade earlier. But Denniz got far more creative than that, as in his remix of Soul II Soul’s track “Keep On Movin’,” which he combined with Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby,” creating a sort of proto-mashup. He slowed down the tempo of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” (without changing the key, which is hard to do), and he rearranged Philip Oakey’s and Susan Ann Sulley’s voices in Human League’s 1981 smash “Don’t You Want Me,” to create more of a dialogue between the man and the woman. He would often debut his sonic concoctions at Ritz, from where they would make their way around clubs in Sweden, then to Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy. Eventually, twelve-inch “white label” vinyl discs would be offered for sale, which was how SweMix made money.
Remixing was a lucrative and growing business, but that success had kindled larger ambitions in Denniz. Instead of merely remixing US and UK hits for Europeans, he dreamed about making his own hits. “In the end,” he said, “you have remade an original song so much that you’ve now made your own song and just added the vocals from the original. And that’s where the idea that, ‘Dammit now we can make our own song!’ came from.” He would regale his fellow SweMix DJs with his vision of the gold and platinum records from the UK and the United States that would one day decorate the walls of the studio, signaling Sweden’s global power in pop music. No one believed him.
THE ’80S WERE A good time to be in the record business. The post-disco doldrums were over, and the modern music “industry” was about to explode. In 1983, the president of PolyGram, Jan Timmer, introduced what he hoped would become the new platform for the sale of recorded music—the compact disc—at a recording-industry convention in Miami. On a CD, music takes the form of digital strings of ones and zeros, which are encoded on specially treated plastic disks. The high-tech allure of the CD would allow the industry to raise the cost of an album from $8.98 to $15.98 (even though CDs were soon cheaper to manufacture than vinyl records), and the record companies got to keep a larger share of money. The industry would even persuade artists not to raise royalty rates, arguing that the extra money was needed to market the new format to customers.
Sure enough, in spite of costing almost twice as much, CDs turned out to be extremely popular with record buyers. Fans who already owned music on vinyl dutifully replaced their records with CDs. By the early ’90s hit albums on CD were selling in far greater numbers than hit albums on vinyl had sold. CDs also turned out to be a brilliant way of repackaging a label’s catalogue—all the recordings that were no longer in production on vinyl. CDs spawned a generation of record executives whose skill was in putting together compilations of existing music rather than in discovering new artists. Through the stock market crash of 1987 and the recession of the early ’90s, the CD market grew steadily.
But these thin plastic disks, which brought so much treasure to record labels, were the seeds of their downfall. Because digitized songs had to be compatible both with CD players and computers (CDs would soon replace floppy disks as the standard storage medium), they weren’t copy-protected. Songs could be “ripped” from the labels’ CDs and “burned” onto blank CDs with home computers. Homemade CD compilations didn’t pose any greater threat to the music business than homemade tapes had. But when it became possible to compress these digitized song files into much smaller packets of bits known as MP3s, and share them over the Internet, the record business would face its extinction.
“GIMME SOME MO’ (Bass on Me)” is the first track to have “Denniz PoP” listed as the artist. PoP was a double entendre: an acronym for “Prince of Pick-ups,” which was a reference to his prowess with a stylus arm, and also a sardonic jibe at his colleagues’ rarefied musical tastes. “During that time ‘pop’ was almost like a swear word,” he said in a 1998 interview with Anders Löwstedt on Swedish Radio. “Everything was hip-hop and break, and you weren’t allowed to say ‘pop.’ It was no fun at all.” And Dagge was all about fun. So “I took ‘Denniz’ from the cartoon character”—Dennis the Menace, whose refusal to do anything that didn’t strike him as fun echoed Dagge’s spirit—“and then I just added Pop to that. And now I’ve had to live with it. Overseas they only call me “Denniz.” But here, ‘Ah, Mr. Pop!’ is what I get when I register at the hotel under that name.”
Denniz loved games almost as much as he loved music. Not just computer games, although he was certainly devoted to those, and would spend hours playing Broken Sword, an adventure game, and Marathon, an early first-person shooter, producing detailed walk-throughs for his buddies; gaming would become a big part of Cheiron culture. He also delighted in board games and practical jokes. One time, Denniz turned all the lights in the studio off, wrapped himself in toilet paper like a mummy, and spent three hours waiting for his best friend Anders Hannegård, whom he called “Snake,” to come downstairs so that he could scare him to death. His office looked like an Indiana Jones movie set. “Denniz was a guy who didn’t want to grow up,” observes Andreas Carlsson, a Swedish songwriter and producer who became a Cheiron “disciple.” “He was the Steven Spielberg of pop.” He got bored easily, and his friends invested a lot of energy in keeping him happy. Jeanette von der Burg, a Swedish backup singer who later worked for Denniz as a secretary, says, “You wanted so much to please him—everyone did.”
Each year Denniz would organize an elaborate annual scavenger hunt for colleagues and friends, hiding clues all over Stockholm. E-Type, one of the artists Denniz would eventually produce, remembered in the documentary The Cheiron Saga by Fredrik Eliasson on Swedish Radio, “We’d run around town like clowns, counting the number of wine bottles at the liquor stores, say, and driving cars too fast and ending up with speeding tickets, and there were boats, and we’d borrow things, and try to mess each other up. And then Dagge would sit there for hours trying to determine the winner.”
His parents, Anna and Jan Volle, were originally from Norway; eventually they settled in Tullinge, a suburb of Stockholm. His mother thought Dagge’s interest in collecting and playing records was “very much fun,” his older sister Ann-Katrin told documentarian Fredrik Eliasson. “But not my dad; he didn’t think it was good.” She added, “Because it wasn’t a real job. He thought that Dagge should become something real, like for example a civil engineer.” Curiously, although he was obsessed with music, Dagge wasn’t interested in learning an instrument, even though the Swedish educational system made it very easy to do so. Forced to pick up the recorder, he quit after three lessons. “It was really boring,” he said. “Really my only interest was to purchase the records, and sit at home playing them.”
He was far less engaged in the practical necessities of the day-to-day world. He ruined the engine in his Nissan Micra by letting the oil run dry. (“Was I supposed to put oil in it?” he innocently asked.) His best friend Snake said, “If he had a nice car and you commented on how cool it was, and asked him about the horsepower, he’d be like, ‘I have no idea.’ He’d stop the car just to open up the hood to check if it had a six- or eight-cylinder engine.”
Although his music eventually made him extraordinarily rich, Denniz never cared about the money. At one point in the mid-’90s his bank called him up and said, “Mr. Volle, are you aware that you have ten million dollars sitting in an ordinary checking account?” He had no idea. His business partner, Tom Talomaa, handled the financial side of things, leaving Denniz free to dream up new sounds, and new ways to have fun.
But in spite of his devotion to fun—or perhaps this was the reason for it—Denniz also had a morbid fixation on the idea that he wouldn’t live very long. He couldn’t imagine himself being old—he literally couldn’t conjure up a mental picture of what he would look like. When Snake’s father died of cancer in 1991, Denniz became convinced that he’d die of cancer too.
Denniz frequently visited a fortune-teller named Emmy. She told him he was “an angel” who was put on Earth to do great things. But she also saw something else. She didn’t tell him what it was, except to say, “You have a third eye, but you have chosen to keep it closed.”
PRIOR TO DENNIZ POP, hit songs in the United States and the UK, the world’s two largest music markets, had come almost exclusively from American and British songwriters and producers, along with the occasional Aussie. New directions in popular music often combined American and British elements. A new beat would emerge in the States from black music and make its way to the UK, where the heavy rhythmic grooves would be sweetened with progressive European melodies. Then the music would return to the States and mainstream chart success. It was a global conversation about African and European culture, transacted in song.
This ping-ponging of musical styles across the Atlantic had been going on at least since the early ’60s, when British musicians discovered the blues. In the late 1980s, around the time this story begins, it was occurring in the dance-driven genre known as house, which had come from Chicago and Detroit and crossed the Atlantic to become a fixture in British clubs and raves. But in the United States it remained a mostly underground phenomenon. You had to go to clubs to hear it.
On the rare occasions when a hit came from outside the English-speaking world, the group that sang it was likely to be from Sweden. Sweden has one of the highest percentages of English-speakers of any non-English-speaking country, and with only 9.5 million people in the whole country, Swedish performers have a long tradition of singing in English, in the hope of reaching a wider audience. Blue Swede had scored a number-one hit in April 1974 with the 1968 B. J. Thomas song “Hooked on a Feeling,” to which they added the ooga-chaka ooga-chaka refrain from Jonathan Martin’s 1971 version of the song. ABBA had created a series of top-ten hits in the second half of the ’70s, and the rock duo Roxette was just beginning their US chart success in the late ’80s; they would achieve no fewer than four Billboard number ones.
But those were performing acts. Denniz’s vision was entirely different: a factory of Swedish writers and producers who would create hits for British and American artists. Andreas Carlsson says, “That idea seemed absurd, because Sweden was very disconnected from the international music market at that time. The profession of songwriting wasn’t even invented yet in Sweden.”
Denniz wasn’t sure what these Swedish-made hit records should sound like, but he knew that somehow they had to meld the beat-driven music that people danced to inside the clubs with the pop music people listened to on the radio. The music would combine the hard-hitting breakbeats and bass lines of reggae and hip-hop with the singsongy melodies that the Swedes have such a gift for, and the big choruses of ’80s hits like “Beat It,” “Livin’ on a Prayer,” and “The Final Countdown” by Sweden’s own, the hair band Europe. The trick was to come up with a melody that worked with the beat, not against it. In the United States, melody was kept at arm’s length by the DJs who were the producers of house music, because in the clubs, whenever a strong melody came over the speakers, the dancing stopped. But in Sweden, it was different. As Jan Gradvall observes, “In discos in small towns all over Sweden in the ’80s, people danced to the biggest hit song rather than the funkiest songs or best mixes. When the chorus came around, that’s when the dance floor boiled. Those kind of choruses, not unlike those of songs sung in hockey arenas or soccer stadiums, have always been loved in Sweden. So when Denniz PoP and the others DJed at these places, they realized the importance of BIG choruses.”
DENNIZ POP WASN’T A musician in the usual sense of the word. He didn’t play an instrument, he couldn’t sing, and he didn’t write music. He was a pop pioneer in a whole new way of making music—electronically programmed sounds, tracks, and beats. He mixed machine-generated sounds with samples of existing music. He was a prototype of a new kind of producer, one that would change the way songs are made, and how they sound. By the early ’90s he was making tracks exclusively on the computer, using an early version of Logic Pro, the music-production software that is native to the Mac.
Machine-made music has been a part of the pop world since the mid-’70s, with Kraftwerk’s Autobahn (1974), a twenty-minute track created with electronic drums, a Minimoog, a Fasiva organ, and an ARP Odyssey synthesizer. Kraftwerk’s predecessors in electronic music weren’t musicians at all; they were avant-garde German visual artists such as Conrad Schnitzler, who were interested in “noise sounds”—steam shovels, jack hammers, trains, birdsongs—and were as far removed from pop music as you could get. (Schnitzler commented in the film Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution, “I was never liking melodies, because a melody is like a worm in your head. You hear this melody and the whole day it rattles in your head.”) Their work inspired Karlheinz Stockhausen, a German composer, to create electronic compositions, such as his Prozession (1967) for live performance. Kraftwerk carried Stockhausen’s methods into the pop realm, adding costumes and cool stage effects. They created electronic tracks that had simple, repetitive, major-chord melodies, and some them became hits: first “Autobahn,” and then “Trans-Europe Express” (1977). Live, the band presented their songs as a manifesto for the music of the future, and they really did seem revolutionary. The guys looked more like technicians than musicians, with their short hair and dress shirts and ties, standing expressionless before their song machines, fiddling with dials and pushing buttons. Their work inspired the British synth-pop bands, as well as Devo and Talking Heads in the United States. But when Kraftwerk pushed their sound further into the realm of pop, with “The Model,” (1978), the hit from the album Man Machine, their core fans were turned off, branding them sellouts.
Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” the 1977 disco hit made by the Munich-based Italian producer Giorgio Moroder, is the other seminal work of electronic pop. The track is a complex tapestry of rhythm patterns and swooshy synth sounds, joined to a sinuous Moog-made bass line. Summer’s icy vocals suit the chilly ambience of German electronic music—that synth-made landscape of urban alienation. “I Feel Love” was unloved by mainstream rock fans and pop-culture highbrows, but whereas Kraftwerk would remain a rarefied interest of the relative few, Moroder’s sound was the music of the future—almost forty years later, Daft Punk’s Grammy-winning album Random Access Memories would feature his work. And the future was on the dance floor.
By the early ’80s, drum machines and controllers made it possible to create beats by drumming with your fingers on keypads, also known as beat boxes. The Roland TR-808, the first programmable drum machine, provided the reverb-drenched bass line of early hip-hop. Hip-hop producers as well as house music DJs could sample preexisting sounds from records, program their drum machines to play them, loop rhythmic sequences, and thus build up richly layered tracks. Libraries of pre-recorded samples gradually became available to those who didn’t want to dig through crates of old records looking for their own sounds. There were bass samples, piano samples, string samples—any instrumental or vocal sound could be sampled, and if you wanted to record the ticking of your radiator, that could be a sample too. The fact that the sounds and samples were often used without permission added outlaw glamour to the producers, many of whom were Jamaicans and African Americans living in New York City. One of the greatest of them, Afrika Bambaataa, sampled Kraftwerk (without permission) in his 1982 song “Planet Rock” combining the melody of “Trans-Europe Express” with the rhythm of Kraftwerk’s song “Numbers,” and those 808 beats. His Kraftwerk mashup birthed hip-hop.
Other song-making machines arrived—Roland and Prophet polyphonic synths, the Linn drum machine, Fairlight and Synclavier samplers. The “MIDI” interface between a keyboard and the computer, created in 1983, allowed producers to see the notes played on keyboards rendered graphically on a computer screen. A producer could play a little keyboard riff and then swap in any number of other sounds or instruments, cut and paste bits of music anywhere inside the composition, and change the tempo, pitch, and the timing of the beats through a technique called quantization to eliminate imperfections. Synthesizers and filters distorted sounds into unearthly warbles and trills; compressors squeezed the loud and soft sounds within a track into a dynamic midrange, making the quietest whisper as powerful as a booming drum.
Taken all together, these tools transformed the role of producers like Denniz PoP from musicians’ midwives into musical masterminds. Ever since Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, and George Martin began working their studio magic in the mid-’60s, the producer’s job had been growing beyond mere fidelity in recording—from creating records that reproduced the sound of the musicians playing in the studio to full creative partnership. Around the time SweMix started, producers like Denniz could do away with the musicians altogether. Everything could be made “inside the box.”
When Swedish journalists interviewed the increasingly well-known Denniz PoP, they always expressed doubt about electronically made songs. Wasn’t it cheating, if you didn’t actually play an instrument? In a documentary that appeared on Swedish national television (STV) in 1997, Denniz told a reporter, “It’s easy to say producing this music is equal to pushing a button in the studio. But that’s like saying writing a novel is a simple push of a button on your typewriter.” Denniz liked to say that no matter how technically adept you were at programming, sometimes you just had to “let art win.”
But the reporter was still skeptical. “So tell me,” she asked, “do you start with ‘cool beats’ from your computer?”
“Yeah first you lay down ‘cool beats’ and they just come out of nowhere,” Denniz replied sarcastically. “No work done, of course. That’s what people seem to think, they just pop out from somewhere. Then you add some ‘fancy leads’ and bring in a cool rap artist and a cool chick.”
No matter how successful Denniz became, this critique would continue to dog him: programming music required less skill than playing it.