So hip hop on drugs and crime took over the leaderboards

"But the question that the one / Brother who of us gets burned?"

So the artist Rozh rapped in the song "Dragged to trouble". Shortly after it was released in the summer of 2019, the 23-year-old rapper was shot to death outside his home in Blackeberg, west Stockholm

In December, shortly before Christmas, a photographer was shot in another rapper's music video recording on Ingarö, outside Stockholm.

Two of the biggest rappers in Swedish hip hop at the moment, with millions of gigs on Youtube, were arrested for murder in two separate cases at the end of 2019.

The events, and the fact that the gangster wave in hip-hop is topping the charts in Sweden right now, has caused the issue of rap to romanticize crime - or just depict the unmasked reality in the suburbs - has re-entered the hot air.

- I think the last generation rapper, had some kind of faith and hope that political change was possible. For today's young rappers, the perspective is only as far as the hand goes, says music journalist Petter Hallén.

He is one of the people behind the leading hip-hop podcast What It Takes to be Rap, and believes that the view of both violence and society as a whole has changed in Swedish hip-hop since the Latin Kings and the genre's breakthrough in the early 1990s.

- Many in that generation of Swedish rap were rooted in South America, many of their parents came here as political refugees, Palme received them. There was some kind of socially critical analysis at the bottom, says Petter Hallén.

But the group that laid the groundwork for the gangster rap that dominates Swedish music today was the Cartel, which broke through in the public in the mid-00s.

- They reported crimes in a way no one else had done before. They represented a whole new category in Swedish rap: value transporters, says Petter Hallén.

Former Cartel member and founder of the group, Leo "Kinesen" Carmona, for example, has admitted that he participated in the spectacular Arlanda robbery in 2002. Today, he is serving a prison sentence for instigating murder.

In the mid-00s, the collective Byn Block Entertainment, also known as “BBE”, showed that it was possible to make a comet career as a rap artist, completely without a record company with Youtube as the main platform. Swedish rap becomes the dominant Swedish music style we see today, where artists such as ZE, Dree Low, Einar and Ant Wan are among the big names.

-Today's generation rapper, still rapping about changing his situation. But it's much more individualistic, says Petter Hallén, and continues:

- There is no happy ending in Swedish rap today. I don't think it's fair to call it a glamorization of crime and violence in Swedish rap. Sure there are weapons and violence in the songs but there are so many descriptions of the back of this, says Petter Hallén.