Reykjavík Grapevine - 08.04.2005, Síða 33

It all began on an uneventful
morn. Last weekend of July,
Verslunarmannahelgin, 1999 and I
was working as a handy-man in an
afterschool in Starreklinte, Denmark.
My work there mostly revolved
around telling stoned teenagers, that
being stoned teenagers was wrong
and they’d never succeed in sports or
science if they kept getting stoned.
And the kids asked “What about
rock’n’roll?“ and I said “It’s a myth,
getting stoned makes you soft and it
rots your brain.” And that’s that.
That night I was sitting in the
school’s computer room mending
power cords, and thinking about
rock’n’roll when I got an email from
home: Ísafjörður, Iceland, a town of
three thousand people in the middle
of nowhere north-west Iceland.
My mother informed me that the
previous uneventful morn had been
a little less uneventful in the civilized
world, as Mick Jagger parked his
yacht in Skutulsfjörður and was
presently drinking beer where I
myself had passed out many a night
during my high school years. Mick
Jagger.
Rock’n’roll had landed in Ísafjörður,
and there wasn’t ever any turning
back. An ambitious experimental
salsa-punk band called Mamma
hestur soon metamorphosed into
the overdriven and fiery no-bullshit
rock’n’roll band The Nine-Elevens,
foreign porn producers began filming
in Djúpavík, and a little less than five
years after the coming of the Lord,
the Aldrei fór ég suður music festival
became reality.
I gradually moved back home,
of course, leaving behind broken
power cords for the increasingly
voracious power chords of the
Icelandic outback, and have been
a willing participant in an all-
embracing madness that maddens,
tires, invigorates, and pleases with
such machine-gun rapidity that you
can’t help feeling dizzy once in a
while. And I wonder, aren’t we a
little better for it? What I mean is,
napping is good and well, but it’s got
nothing on staying up.
It’s easy to make rock’n’roll look
like an excuse to get pissed, delve
into hysteria and spin out of control
– but it’s a little more than that. The
atmos of rock’n’roll is movement,
its credo “a little less conversation
and a little more action,” and
Icelanders are infamous bullshit
artists and paranoid slouches. It’s
been said that the biggest difference
between alcoholism and depression
in Iceland and Finland is that while
an Icelandic person is liable to start
threatening to commit suicide on the
first beer – rambling on for hours
about how life isn’t worth living,
how the hole can always get deeper
if you just make sure you never ever
stop digging, finally passing out in
the arms of some unknown person
suffering from similar afflictions – a
Finnish person will keep his or her
mouth shut until the morning when
they take a shotgun to their heads,
from the constant lack of getting
their kicks.
Getting pissed and yapping
constantly can be beneficial; hysteria
is a form of rock’n’roll that can save
lives; music and company paired
with beer and inane conversation is
a killer combination for happiness
– a little less conversation and a little
more action, please.
ÍSAFJÖRÐUR ROCK’N’ROLL
SUICIDE
Eirikur Norðdahl is a nihilist, a poet and a novelist—he is
the only writer we would ever allow to use “ROCK N ROLL
SUICIDE” in the title, or to quote Elvis… that’s how good he
is.
Westfjord
Wisdom
Hjálmar performing their too-short set at
the Aldrei fór ég suður festival.
Trabant redefine audience participation.
Reykjavík!
Festival organizer Mugison with band. 911 contemplate their stupid name.
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