FEATURE:
Saluting the Queens
PHOTO CREDIT: Azazel for Rolling Stone UK
I am going to include a great British D.J. I am celebrating and highlighting terrific women D.J. - so it will be timely including her. That will come in a week or so. Today, I want to include an inspiring artist that some might not know about. This feature is about the Swedish artist Loreen. Lorine Zineb Nora Talhaoui has represented her nation twice at the Eurovision Song Contest. She won it in 2012 and this year. For this year’s contest she performed the song, Tattoo. She is the second performer (after Johnny Logan), and the first and only woman, to have won the competition twice. Even though I am not a big Eurovision fan, I understand the importance and significance of her double win. Also, as an artist who has come out as bisexual, she is an icon and hugely important figure in the L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ community. A queen of the industry who has this distinct legacy already. I am going to come to some interviews with her from earlier this year. You can follow Loreen on Instagram. There will be those who want to see a third studio album from Loreen. Her second album, Ride, came out in 2017. An artist who is giving voice and strength to so many people, I felt compelled to include her for my Saluting the Queens feature. The Moroccan-Swedish icon is harnessing the power and importance of her Arab heritage. Representign Arabic women in music and around the world, Loreen is this extraordinary cultural figure! I am going to start with an interview from The Guardian. She spoke about human rights, finding purpose, and her life in Sweden:
“On that: she was born Lorine Zineb Nora Talhaoui in Stockholm and both her parents were first-generation immigrants from Morocco. Her mother arrived in Sweden at 14 with nothing, fleeing an arranged marriage. She met a man and had Loreen, the eldest of six, when she was 16. Loreen hares off briefly to tell me about her great-grandmother: “Her husband got killed in the war, she was beautiful, she was also very young. The family wanted her to remarry. She didn’t want this. So she dressed up as a man, took her two children and fled to Algeria.” At this point Loreen is using her hair to mimic a litham, the face covering of the nomadic men of north Africa. “She raised her children, still dressed up as a man. I have a picture of her with a gold tooth. The women in my family fought really hard to get me to where I’m at.
PHOTO CREDIT: Corinne Cumming 2023/Charli Ljung
Back to Stockholm, 1989: her mother now has six children and is still only 22, and Loreen’s parents split up. “I had to grow up pretty fast,” she says, “because we had to help each other out. We didn’t have any family in Sweden. There are so many things I didn’t understand because I was raised by a child myself. Still, today, I won’t know: is Christmas the 24th or the 23rd?” It was a hard scrabble and the family was very poor. There were upsides, though: “The beautiful thing when you’re raised by a young person is that it’s hard to be judgmental because nobody’s taught you how, you know? ‘That’s wrong’ or ‘that’s right’.”
When Loreen was 13, her mother married again: “He came in with this very weird energy. You’re raised by a single mother, this is a very powerful, determined woman. And then this big, soft, Swedish Santa Claus arrives. My mother was all about surviving. My stepfather was more like, ‘Maybe we should just calm down a little bit. Relax, enjoy the small moments, this connection, here. Everything doesn’t have to be a struggle.’ I think he taught us how to show love.” That was really not the direction I was expecting, from “very weird energy”.
IN THIS PHOTO: The moment that Loreen won the Eurovision Song Contest in Liverpool earlier this year/PHOTO CREDIT: Dominic Lipinski/Getty Images
One sibling is an artist, another a surgeon, another works in marketing, another has his own business. She makes a pretty indisputable points about migrants and refugees, grounded in first-hand experience. “You want to have a purpose as a person, you want to feel like you matter. You don’t want to sit around and not do anything. When we have our immigrants coming in to Sweden, we just make them sit there and wait. Let them have a purpose. Let them be a part of this society. This is really important. Otherwise there’s segregation. How do you build up a confidence, where people think, ‘I earned this. I did this’?”
Singing, in the bathroom and in church, was the only way Loreen found any moments to herself as a child. In the melee of five siblings, “it was a sanctuary, something I had for myself.” So when she took her voice to Swedish Idol in 2004, “it was so painful”, she remembers. “Somewhere I knew it was necessary, I guess – I didn’t even know how a microphone worked … I didn’t know what it was like to be judged, singing was so private. But that shock, what came out of it, I realised I needed to understand all of this. As a woman, you have to know your stuff. Otherwise people will come along and say, ‘Darling, we’ll fix this for you, you don’t have to worry.’ I want to be in control.” She’s still very much the self-taught maverick and doesn’t understand why people do vocal arpeggios before they go on stage. “If you were going boxing, you wouldn’t exercise for a couple of hours before,” she says. “Your body would say, ‘Come on, give me a break.’”
In 2005, she released her first single, The Snake, and presented a show on Swedish TV. “I wasn’t that good, I honestly sucked at it.” She then spent a number of years as a segment producer and director for reality TV shows before entering Melodifestivalen in 2011, a song contest almost as old as Eurovision, which determines Sweden’s entry. It does this quite effectively – they have now won seven times, to make them, jointly with Ireland, the contest’s most successful country. “I was shitless scared. But I did it, because I knew it was necessary. If you look at my performance [in Melodifestivalen], I was hiding. This is the subconscious mind: the big dress, the body language, people were like, ‘That’s very artistic’, which it was, but I was hiding. The moment I feel fear, I have to go in. Because I don’t want fear to control my life.”
To return to the politics of Eurovision, one thing it’s been incredibly good at is establishing international norms around LGBTQ+ visibility: from Paul Oscar, the first openly gay contestant in 1997, to Dana International, the first trans performer, who won in 1998, to Krista Siegfrids kissing her female backing singer on stage in 2013, there has long been a very clear message that nobody was going to hide to spare the feelings of bigots. Turkey, according to its broadcaster, no longer enters Eurovision because of its gay and transgender contestants. And while the Hungarian broadcaster hasn’t said as much openly, Hungary has been absent since 2020, which is coincidentally when Viktor Orbán intensified his open persecution of the LGBTQ+ community, instituting a ban on LGBTQ+ content in schools or kids’ TV the following year. Loreen came out as bisexual in 2017, although “the reason why people know about that”, she says, “is because a newspaper asked me a question, and I answered, ‘Love is where you find it.’ The journalist said, ‘So, you’re bisexual?’ And I said, ‘I guess I am, because love is where you find it. Love is love. It has not much to do with this [gestures towards to her pudenda] so much as this [clasps heart].’ She thinks she might subconsciously have been drawn to Eurovision because of the “acceptance, because I love the values of Eurovision. I love the fact that it doesn’t matter what background you have – as long as you come with love and respect, you’re allowed to be there”.
Let’s move onto a recent interview from Rolling Stone UK. They highlighted and saluted a wonderful and inspiring artist who comes from a family of warriors. Strong and powerful women who no doubt helped to shape and move her. It is a fascinating interview to read. Loreen is definitely an incredible strong artist and voice who is speaking to fans and giving them strength too:
“There is such a strong sense of purpose that ripples through everything Loreen does. When she competed in Azerbaijan back in 2012, a country marred by its questionable human rights record, she was the only entrant to meet local human rights activists. She told reporters: “Human rights are violated in Azerbaijan every day. One should not be silent about such things.” An Azerbaijan government spokesman responded critically, calling for the contest to not “be politicised”, and demanded the EBU (European Broadcasting Union) prevent such meetings. But Swedish diplomats stayed firmly on her side. They replied that the EBU, the Swedish broadcaster SVT and Loreen had not acted against the competition’s rules.
PHOTO CREDIT: Azazel for Rolling Stone UK
“What I experienced in Liverpool, I didn’t experience in Azerbaijan,” she explains. “The vibe was completely different. Azerbaijan was tense. The dictator [Ilham Aliyev, who’s been in power since 2003] was so annoyed by me [laughs].” She’s absolutely loving looking back and remembering how she upset the higher powers of the 2012 host country. Her whole delegation was put on an effective house arrest. “My security said, ‘We think you should stay in the hotel’, because [Aliyev] was very annoyed by me doing all these things. Me and my producer, we celebrated. All of us in the delegation just said, ‘Is he annoyed? Cheers!’” as she mimics clinking glasses.
Loreen is publicly bisexual, coming out in a TV interview in 2017. Eurovision and the LGBTQ+ community have strong ties, too. Previous LGBTQ+ contestants and winners such as trans star Dana International, drag queen Conchita Wurst and Duncan Laurence have all found success in the competition. She loves her queer fans dearly, too. The ‘Euphoria’ singer told TV host Renée Nyberg at the time: “Many people are so focused on sex, on sexuality. Love is so much more. I usually say ‘Love is where you find it’”. When asked to clarify whether this meant she identifies as bisexual, Loreen said she “quite simply” was.
PHOTO CREDIT: Azazel for Rolling Stone UK
Unsurprisingly, she has LGBTQ+ fans messaging her all the time. “I absolutely love that. Queer or not queer, I don’t see that, I just see us as people with certain attributes. That’s why I say these are my people. We have the same mindset. The thing is, if somebody asked me, ‘What is freedom, what is feeling free?’, that is just doing exactly what you feel like, expressing yourself exactly the way you want to express yourself. Clothe yourself the way you want to clothe yourself, talk the way you want to talk. Don’t care about what other people think. This is true freedom.”
She goes on passionately: “This community, we know what freedom is about and what that feels like. If you compare it to another community where there are rules and regulations… where someone says, you need to talk like this and be like this, that’s a f**king jail! I cannot do that. For me, when somebody says, ‘You are weird’ to me, that’s [them saying] that I’m free.”
There’s the underlying influence of strong women in abundance in her family, too. This sense of fight from within feels destined to have left a dramatic mark on Loreen’s trajectory before she was even born. Her parents are both Moroccan and moved to Sweden in their teens. While Loreen was born in Sweden, her Moroccan heritage is extremely important to her. It’s taken a while to appreciate her rich cultural history in its fullness, but it opens up the chance for the most incredible part of our interview.
“The women from my mother’s mother’s side, these are real warriors. Historically, the women from my tribe, they’re called Berber.” She explains that this word comes from ‘Barbarian’, and adds: “They were called Barbarians by the Egyptians because they were so aggressive. The women were so aggressive. Isn’t that interesting?” She smiles: “The women from my tribe, they weren’t so interested in monogamy, but being in a relationship. Historically, they went out to the village in search of a man. ‘You’re coming with me,’ right? They did whatever they wanted to do. Then they said, ‘Ta ta,’ and they raised their children by themselves. This whole concept of husband and wife was never a concept. They used these women in war, because they were like, ‘Ahhhhhh!’”
It’s not just the women in her family who provide inspiration, but “all women within the industry that stand their ground”, she tells me. “You can tell when women are standing their ground and not buying into that whole concept of what a woman’s supposed to be. I’m not saying that women aren’t supposed to be sexy. Grace Jones, for instance, she owns her sexuality. She can run around naked. She’s still doing it! There are so many, not even just in the industry. All women [inspire me] because they’re taking positions for the next generation, they’re balancing things up. It’s necessary and it’s inevitable. It’s going to happen. The shift is going to happen, and men will take a step back. The thing is, they’re longing for it, because they’re messing things up…”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Charli Ljung
I am going to end with an interview from Gay Times. The interview was published before Loreen won the Eurovision Song Contest for Sweden. She also discussed how the L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ community welcomed her after coming out as bisexual. Her story will no doubt resonate with fans of all genres. Not only an incredible artist who created Eurovision history, Loreen is a strong and influential woman who has a huge fanbase. Someone who, hopefully, will release some new music very soon (Is It Love came out recently, suggesting a new album might arrive). Who knows. Maybe a third Eurovision win in the future! Someone who is determined to make a mark and inspire fans around the world:
“Was Tattoo written for Eurovision or did it become that later?
It was a normal song because they hadn’t popped the question yet. Although I sensed that I was going to do something with this song. Not only me, but all of us in a way, but I didn’t know how. Then, [Eurovision producers] said, ‘Would you be interested to be in the competition?’ I’m like, ‘No! No, no, no.’ That was what happened, that was the instant reaction. You think you know what your path is going to be, but you don’t. You ask yourself, ‘Universe, what is going on? There is this match. Am I supposed to present it here?’ There’s a lot of questions going on. But, my navigation was that, whenever I said ‘No, we should do something else with this song’, the energy went low around me. Even in me. Whenever I said ‘maybe there’s a chance’ you could feel this high energy within and outside of yourself. That’s how I navigate it, ‘Maybe this is my path. Could it be that I’m going to do this again? Is it possible?’ Now look, I’m sitting here with you.
PHOTO CREDIT: Charli Ljung
I have to touch upon Euphoria because, like many other queer people, it is one of my favourite Eurovision entries ever. Why do you think LGBTQ+ people connect to it so much?
Wow. That is a good question. I think it’s because, like myself, we’re not afraid to feel because it’s a very cinematic, dramatic song. It does the work. It’s about existing. When you sing out loud like that, it’s like standing on top of a mountain. It’s also a feeling of freedom. It has a purpose. It does things to people, whether you will admit it or not. But in this community, we know this and we want this. We want to feel and we know it has a healing process because we let go of things. Sometimes, we limit ourselves. We do that and we don’t want that. We want the full spectrum. That is maybe one of the reasons why because it represents something within ourselves. I think all of us have it, but in this community we’re not afraid to feel it. This is my community. It is not a community. This is my space. This was the community that accepted me for who I am. I have been a seeker trying to find my home. ‘Where is my space?’ I came into this community and they were like, ‘Do you know what? We’re digging you. We like you just the way you are. We appreciate you. We know what you’re going through.’ Can you imagine? This is my home. It is ours”.
I am going to end there. A modern music queen whose past and heritage is unique and fascinating, her legacy and importance extends beyond Eurovision and the record she has set. Loreen is definitely empowering. You only need to read interviews and hear her speak to detect that passion and meaning. There are so many reasons why Loreen…
DESERVES a salute.