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Land of the lustA Camp’s Nina Persson equates
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With Nina Persson’s other band, the Cardigans, on hiatus, she, her husband Nathan Larson and Niclas Frisk finally followed up on their 2001 eponymous debut, trading Americana for musical influences ranging from orchestral pop to new wave. Conceptually, it was seeing the impact of colonization in South Africa on a recent trip that inspired A Camp’s Colonia. “I’m not at all outdoorsy,” says Persson, recalling the harsh Namibian desert, site of her first camping trip—as it turns out, A Camp is named after an American brand of maple syrup. “I’m a stupid Western person who had very weird preconceptions about Africa, but what I met was something absolutely different and really amazing.” As a Swede, Persson had little exposure to colonial culture, despite the country’s relatively benign rule of St. Barts island. However, she now resides in a country where empire is still in effect. “The U.S., more than any nation, is still a colonizer at heart,” she says, reflecting on the conflicted A Camp song “My America.” “It’s like this really attractive, sexy, hot rock star that’s also a homewrecker that goes berserk on you,” she says, drawing parallels between lust and colonization. “It’s a greedy drive. You do things that you wouldn’t normally do when you’re horny, like a colonizer. You’re thinking, ‘That looks good, I want it, I’m gonna take it.’ It’s sort of the same primitive brain process.” Persson stays at arm’s length from America by choosing a work visa arrangement over full citizenship (and by living in New York City, as opposed to Mobile, Alabama), but that didn’t stop her from working for the Obama campaign last fall, driving voters in Cleveland to the polls on election day. “I was raised in a completely communist hippie home in Sweden, and here I am,” she says. “My mom would have pulled her hair out when I was a kid if she thought I’d end up here—she does pull her hair out, actually. But even with my background, I think it’s fantastic here. It’s almost cartoonish—I totally fell for the American dream.” WITH GENTLEMAN REG AT CLUB |
