Cracked’s Adam Tod Brown takes us through the evidence that cheesy 1990s Scandinavian pop band Ace of Base are obviously, totally a Nazi band.
The article is rambling and quite mad, but it all breaks down something like this:
• At least one of them was unambiguously involved in Neo-Nazism and Nazi bands before Ace of Base.
• “Ace of Base” supposedly refers to an impregnable Nazi fortress named “Base of Aces.”
• The song “All That She Wants” is about a lazy girl having babies to get more welfare money from the state, a common right-wing nightmare image. P.S. she’s wearing Star of David jewelry in the video.
• The title track from the album “Happy Nation” (renamed “The Sign” in the U.S.) is about how the Nation will be Happy because “on the wings of the eagle, with God’s help…”
Happy nation living in a happy nation
Where people understand
And dream of the perfect man…Ideas by man and only that will last
And over time we’ve turned to the past
That no man’s fit to rule the world alone
A man will die but not his ideas
Come on.
Not mentioned in the article, but relevant:
• The song “I Saw The Sign.” The title sounds like it’s a metaphor for an event or condition leading to personal understanding, but guys, it’s literally about floating steel-gray Ankh-Cross things floating around in space, blinding Ace of Base with the truth.
When u see it u will open ur eyes.
At BBS, Mindysan speculates that between the members of the band is a spectrum of irony and sincerity:
But Ace of Base is different – Rice, DIJ and Laibach are all playing with fascist imagery with varying degrees of sincerity, I think (with Laibach on one end and Boyd Rice on the other) – the guy from AofB is claiming he rejected white power ideology and is now reformed, but the article is claiming that the message is the same and the guy is a serious crypto-fascist.
Lets assume for a moment that all this is indeed either intentional crypto-fascism, crafted to get away with as much as possible in plain sight, or in-jokes along similar lines. The problem with such old-timey subtlety: first, it turns into mere innuendo when people think they’ve figured it out, and second, it all ends up disemboweled by the internet anyway, where all possible meanings are drawn out like entrails. Whatever context the artist depended upon to provide the intended meaning is long gone.
That said, when I was a 13 year-old kid in England, we knew Ace of Base were “Nazis” years before the Internet clued us in. Pretty sure we figured it out with those giant spiky iron Ankhs, to be honest.