Popcorn Noises

Jens Lekman - “Waiting for Kirsten”

In Gothenburg we don’t have VIP lines
In Gothenburg we don’t make a fuss about who you are […]
The VIP lines are not to the clubs,
but to healthcare, apartments, and jobs.
Hey buddy can I borrow five grand?
‘Cause my dad’s in chemo and they wanna take him off his plan.

What are these lines doing here, smack in the middle of Jens Lekman telling a charming story about drunkenly tracking down Kirsten Dunst when she comes to his hometown to shoot a movie or something? There’s more than enough story here (Lekman’s narratives have been getting wordier lately) to carry a catchy, thoughtful song about celebrity sightings. Notice how his motivation for trying to find her is the fact that she dropped his name in an interview for the local paper. There’s an essay to be written about this: the glamorous American movie star being hip enough to know about the hometown indie songwriter, and he feeling a mixture of jittery fanboy-ism and a kind of professional obligation to somehow meet her and, I dunno, network in return? (Or maybe just try to make out with her?)

So what’s with the detour into Sweden’s semi-socialized healthcare system? The contrast between Dunst’s stardom, which demands special treatment wherever she goes, with the humbleness of the unassuming Scandinavian city seems ripe for a sort of update on country music themes, i.e. ‘we don’t have VIP lines around here because VIPs don’t deign to come here, we’re all just regular folks.’ But that’s not it. Lekman’s taking the opportunity to lightly chastise Dunst’s celebrity entitlement, using Gothenburg as a metaphor for equality (“You’re not worth less and you’re not worth any more”). The cruel irony is how inequalities still find their way into both the medical and cultural systems. The second verse contains the above aside about borrowing money to try to get around the healthcare bureaucracy, while the rest of the song finds Lekman and his friends talking excitedly about Kirsten, where she’s been, where she’s staying, etc., making the fuss about her that he just claimed they don’t. Even as Gothenburg the city doesn’t concede to special treatment, it seems the people of Gothenburg do.

This is presumably what’s gnawing at the back of Lekman’s mind as he drinks beer after beer in the streets. Dunst dropping his name confers a modicum of specialness upon him, a echo of her own stardom that he receives by proxy. Of course the hotel wouldn’t let just any drunk fan leave a note for her at the front desk (written in borrowed lipstick, no less), but he’s Jens-freaking-Lekman. Kirsten knows who he is, so he’s one of her special kind of people, right? Thus the receptionist turning him away—she doesn’t know or care who he is—is a hard but welcome slap back to reality. There’s no VIP line in Gothenburg for Jens Lekman either.