— by Jennifer Vineyard
Pop music has been one of Scandinavia's greatest exports since the days of ABBA: Where would Britney be without Swedish producer extraordinaire Max Martin? But fizzy, sugary, guilty-pleasure pop isn't exactly the coolest genre of music on the block.
So along comes Anne Lilia Bergen-Strand — a Norwegian DJ-turned-pop singer who goes by Annie — with melodies and beats that are just smart enough for hipsters to embrace without irony. The hipper-than-thou Web site PitchforkMedia.com even rated her song "Heartbeat" its #1 single of 2004.
Part of Annie's appeal is that she's not your typical pop diva. She keeps her beats natural and relaxed, and she doesn't really dance in her videos (although it doesn’t hurt that she's very pretty). She's not even accustomed to performing: She played her first gig as a singer in January, and her airy vocals are frequently overpowered by her heavily layered beats in a live setting. But she has a tastemaker's sensibility when it comes to selecting those beats, a skill she honed during her days as a DJ.
"I don't really consider myself a proper DJ," Annie said. "On the technical side, I'm not very good. But I just love music, I love to play music, I love to make people dance."
When Annie DJs — using vinyl, of course: "It looks better, doesn't it?" — she'll mix up Blondie and M.I.A. with old New York disco and the Clash. And the electro-funk thumps she uses in her own songs (which she co-writes) echo her love for the '80s, with bits of early Madonna and Bananarama bubbling up — she resurrects vintage sounds, like Human League's "Fascination" and Madonna's "Everybody," and recasts them as perky chill-outs.
And although her voice is light as a feather, her lyrics can bite. " 'Chewing Gum' is about men who think they are much better than they are," she said. "They think they are chocolate, but they are chewing gum."
Still, many of the songs on her debut LP, Anniemal, suggest a sort of yearning, which could reflect the romance she shared with producer Tore Andreas Krokness (also known as DJ Erot). The two had been living together and began collaborating almost by accident.
"I was recording at home, and my boyfriend was sitting downstairs, and he was a bit confused — he was working on something and didn't know what to do," she recalled. "So I brought a Madonna album downstairs and I was listening to 'Everybody,' and I said, 'Maybe you should use this to get inspired?' So he sampled 'Everybody' and I just started to sing on top of it — we did it for fun."
That song became "Greatest Hit," Annie's first single, which was released in 1999. The tune became an underground club hit in Norway and England, and "people were talking about it so much I started getting record offers," Annie said. Before she could take advantage of the situation, Krokness — who had a heart disorder — became sick and was hospitalized for months, later dying at the age of 23. "It was a difficult process, because we had a record deal and we were going to start to do an album, and then he got really sick," Annie said. She said it was "about half a year" after his death before she could write again.
When she did, she teamed up with English mash-up master Richard X and members of Norwegian groups Op:l Bastards and Röyksopp for the songs on Anniemal. But she dismisses the touch of melancholy in tunes like "Heartbeat" and "My Best Friend," insisting that she's keeping things upbeat. "For me, it's really easy to write depressive songs," she said, "and that's why I never do that. I try to do songs that are a bit happier and a bit more complicated. I think there are too many songwriters writing sad, depressive songs, and I find it really boring, listening to music where people are just complaining. People should stop whining!
"Right now I'm doing pop — kind of electronic pop music, with a twist of disco. But maybe the next album will be more like a country album," she laughed. "You never know!"
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