“Everybody Wanna Move Like Us!”

From 2019 through 2021, the Swedish public elected three consecutive Afro-Swedish artists with gospel songs to represent Sweden in the Eurovision Song Contest: John Lundvik with his song “Too Late For Love”; The Mamas with their song “Move”; and Tusse with his song “Voices.” While these globally mediated representations of Afro-Sweden reflected both the increasing popularity of gospel music in Sweden and the nation’s multiracial landscape, they also mirrored an ongoing cultural resistance movement against the rise of assimilationist, anti-migrant, and colorblind politics in Sweden. Through musical analysis, fan and critical reception, and accounts from the artists themselves, this article examines how these artists drew from Black American musical styles and aesthetics, specifically gospel music, in their attempts to represent Afro-Swedishness while ultimately serving Sweden’s colorblind agenda. These three artists’ consecutive performances in the contest can indeed be understood as meaningful specters of representation that ostensibly resist assimilationist racial politics in Sweden. However, their participation on behalf of a nation that continually marginalizes them, based on centuries-old constructs of Swedish white supremacy, placed the political meaning of their participation into question. The author interrogates the longstanding expectation that Eurovision songs by Black artists must adhere to palatable modes of sonic Blackness in order to achieve success. This article thus reveals that while these Afro-Swedish artists were indeed representatives of a progressive and multicultural Swedish people, they inadvertently served an increasingly conservative state’s soft power play amid a moment of reckoning with the nation’s racial politics.