Archive for August, 2009

Swedish hip hop act ‘America’s newest pop sensation’: Colbert

Miscellaneous: August 4th, 2009 by DL

Last week an unlikely trio of Swedes showed up on the Colbert Report, the popular mock current affairs program on Comedy Central that lampoons the numerous right-wing blowhards who populate other US broadcast outlets.

The three natives of Luleå in northern Sweden make up the “swing-hip-hop-jazz” band Movits (yes, there actually are Swedish swing-hip-hop’jazz acts).

All three donned nearly identical hairdos and oversized Buddy Holly-esque glasses as they took questions from Colbert about the challenges of living in a “socialist state”�.

They then performed (in Swedish) their single Fel Det av Gården (‘Wrong part of the garden’).

The episode is set to air in Sweden on tonight, but in the week since the show’s broadcast in the US, the men of Movits, which Colbert claims he discovered on the news aggregator website reddit.com, have seen themselves catapulted from virtual obscurity into the pop culture spotlight.

Later in the week, Colbert erupted into a self-congratulatory fit on a follow up episode, claiming that he was solely responsible for the band’s meteoric rise on the Amazon sales list – from 93,400 to number 75.

And he probably was.