I stood there, in the Coffee Collective in Nørrebro, Copenhagen and watched this tall blonde bearded barista pour boiling water into a glass kettle. Picking apart green tea leaves and stuffing them into the metal steeper. I hate standing and watching people — I never know whether to make a depressing effort at small talk (something, apparently, the Danes never do) or completely avert my eyes. I acted as if there was something fascinating I had to stare at on the floor. I shifted from foot to foot and tried to incorporate my body into how uncomfortable my brain felt. The barista handed me my tea, so lightly steeped it was practically clear, and I walked back to my table in the corner.
I was waiting on Nikoline, a 20-something Danish female rapper whom I had seen live at a poetry event a few days prior. She swung open the white painted doors of the Coffee Collective and frowned at the fact that I chose to sit in the corner of the cafe. She had long curly brown hair that she draped exclusively on the left side of her head. It hung down past her waist and added an elusiveness to her already provocative aura. We moved to the front of the cafe, she sat on the windowsill — her legs stretched out in front of her.
I smiled and shook her hand and acted like I totally knew how to interview a gorgeous Danish rapper who loved to make euphemisms about male genitalia and the political despair of Scandinavian countries.
“Denmark is five million people and a lot of them are pretty privileged. So, for a long time, the Danish rap scene has been kind of boring. You know, rapping about babes and drugs or whatever. There has been no criticism of society or social issues,” she said.
Nikoline is a left-wing social activist who thinks that the Danish government isn’t making enough of an impact. She believes that “Bernie Sanders would have been the best president since Lincoln.”
She fidgeted with her feet — crossing and uncrossing her legs. She was wearing brogues, a leather dress shoe often featuring decorative perforations, originating in Ireland, they used to be made using untanned hide. These shoes contrasted recklessly with her white t-shirt, she wasn’t wearing a bra and jeans.
“Denmark is so left wing. It’s very: ‘lets just smoke some pot and fuck anyone who thinks different’.”
She showed me her new music video, “Flertallet Er Dumme” (“The Majority are Stupid), that has just been released.
“You need to see this,” she said.
The opening scene was Nikoline standing in the middle of a Danish square with an AK-47 in her hand. A gun that is officially known as the “Kalashnikov”, a selective-fire gas-operated 7.62×39 mm assault rifle, forged in the midst of the Soviet Union by Mikhail Kalashnikov. A gun you can’t own in Denmark, you can’t own any guns in Denmark. She said she borrowed it from a radio-show host. Nikoline’s beautiful but also emanates an “I don’t give a fuck” kind of bad-assness that’s hard to capture in text. Her olive skin and bright lipstick, her mouth always stuck in a sort of sexual stink-face of rebellion. Flashes of political protests appear on the screen in between lines of rap in Danish that although I can’t understand I can hear the earnestness in the rhythm of her voice.
“I don’t think anyone in Denmark has half the balls I do,” she said.
Scenes of her at a shooting range clutching an Uzi, a weapon that’s in the family of Israeli open-bolt, blowback-operated submachine guns. She hung photos of Danish politicians and filled their faces with bullet holes. Smirking at the camera in her red lipstick — waving around her middle and index finger in rhythm to her lyrics.
Nikoline is studying physics at university in Copenhagen. A fact that I was perplexed by. This girl has a song called “Ketchup” about having sex on her period. One line being, “I want you to dip your sausage in my ketchup and fill me up with mayo,” yet, she is also a budding physicist? She writes all her own lyrics, makes all the beats on her tracks, and also has time for Sir Isaac Newton and his many laws that I unknowingly yet somehow reluctantly abide by.
I asked her where she got the footage of the political protests. She said that it was real, not staged, from a few weeks ago when there were tons of protests in Denmark. I tried to act like I knew what she was talking about but I have no knowledge of the resistance movements in Scandinavia. Images of police in full kevlar, riot gear — ballistic shields used for protection from shrapnel, thrown projectiles, and various weapons like a Molotov cocktail. Ballistic shields are something I couldn’t imagine being necessary in the perfect little country of Denmark until it was shoved in my face.
