Tedium - Greenlandia 🇬🇱

Greenland’s greatest rock band singlehandedly brought rock ‘n’ roll (and revolution) to the island

If you were a music fan living in Greenland in the 1970s, you most assuredly owned a copy of Sumé’s Sumut. The record was revolutionary for a number of reasons. For one thing, it was a rock album in Greenland, sung in Greenlandic rather than Danish or English. (And for another—based on a data point the country’s official tourism website shared around 2016, a popular album in Greenland is proportionally more popular on the island than it might be in the U.S.—if 5,000 copies sell, that means that one in 12 residents bought that album, which would be the equivalent of an album selling 28 million copies in the U.S. alone.)

And it emphasized a message of freedom and sovereignty in an area that was treated as a second-class citizen to Denmark, which had colonized the region in the 1800s—taking over from Norway, which had colonized the land six centuries prior. The album was a huge success—and a quietly political record.

The record’s politics start with the cover art for Sumut, which depicts the violent struggle between a legendary figure in Greenlandic culture named Qasapi and a Norse chief named Uunngortoq. The basic story of the battle between the mythic characters can be read in Google Books, but the long and short of it is that Qasapi won handily. (The man who created the artwork is equally legendary in Greenlandic culture, by the way; Aron of Kangeq was a 19th-century Inuit who went from being a seal hunter to the country’s best-known artist, thanks to a cultural reassessment of his work during the 1960s.)

Also highlighting the politics of the record is the label it was released on. Demos, the Danish publishing arm of the anti-war Danish Vietnam Committees, released the album essentially as a way of taking a stance against imperialism. Denmark’s control of Greenland was pretty much as imperialistic as you could get.

But when it comes down to it, the most political thing about Sumut was the fact that Sumé was singing songs in Greenlandic. It was the band’s way of showing off some native cultural identity when Greenland was in severe danger of becoming culturally assimilated as a part of Denmark—a strategy that Denmark began to encourage after World War II by offering Greenlanders Danish citizenship and taking a more active role in the country’s affairs.

The assimilation is interesting to note when looking specifically looking in geographic terms, by the way. Nuuk is closer to Toronto than it is to Copenhagen, and the region’s Inuit background clearly creates cultural ties between the island and northern Canada. However, it’s challenging even now to travel to Greenland. For years, it was only possible to fly into the territory if you first flew into Copenhagen or Reykjavik first.

(That situation will finally change later this year, when United Airlines offers the first direct U.S.-to-Greenland flight out of Newark International Airport.)

Sumut however, showed a new path for Greenland that allowed the country to build its own cultural identity—keeping the traditional drum patterns and the native language—while embracing modern trends like the then-prevalent progressive rock that was popular in Europe and the United States.

That music, implicitly critical of the Danish government, quickly became associated with an independence movement in Greenland, one that saw success just a few years later. In 1979, Greenland was given a degree of home rule, allowing the country to start its own parliament and control over some internal policies. That home rule has expanded ever since and, barring current geopolitical events, is expected to turn into full independence at some point.

Sumé, as a band, didn’t last nearly that long, breaking up in 1977 after three albums. But their legacy long outlasted the band itself. In 2014, the band was the subject of a documentary, Sumé: The Sound of a Revolution, which makes the case that Sumé started the home-rule conversation in the country.

“Among other issues, Sumé’s lyrics put [feelings] of alienation, loss of direction, and the reestablishment of own self-esteem into words and questioned people’s indignation towards authority,” director Inuk Silis Høegh said of the band’s importance to Greenland. “I think all of those issues are just as much in play today as they were 40 years ago.”

That’s a pretty good way to sell a rock record, don’t you think? Good news for you: The full album is available on YouTube.

Happy Days, the primary branch connecting Greenland to pop culture.

Jumping the glacier: What a Happy Days plot device has to do with the current political situation in Greenland

Greenland doesn’t show up in Western pop culture very often, but when it does, it makes an impact.

One of the most prominent ways it did so may unwittingly have created the current geopolitical situation that’s playing out this week.

Here’s what happened: In 1980, Ron Howard was itching to build a career as a director, having directed his first feature film, Grand Theft Auto (no relation), in 1977. But he was ready to make a big-budget upgrade. Just one problem: He was the primary star on one of the most popular television shows in American history, ABC’s Happy Days. NBC had given him an opportunity to direct a made-for-TV movie that he then starred in, and it was too sweet a deal to pass up.

Ron Howard wanted to be a director so much that they printed it in the newspaper. (via Newspapers.com)

In a 1981 interview with the Petaluma Argus-Courier, he explained it was all business:

Howard said he didn’t leave because he had done all he could with the series and the role of Richie Cunningham.

“It wasn’t to escape ‘Happy Days,’” he said softly, his moderate length red hair and prominent mustache physically shedding the Richie image. “I left because I was able to get a better deal at NBC. I could direct,” which was something he longed to do. “It became more valuable for me to leave than to stay.”

That created a challenge for the show, which was on track to continue for a couple more seasons. So how did he get out of this arrangement? Simple: The producers used a plot device.

Richie Cunningham exited Happy Days by joining the Army, where he ended up getting stationed in basically the most remote possible place: Greenland. This allowed Cunningham to continue to affect the show’s plot in absentia. He communicated with his friends and family via periodic letters, and famously married his girlfriend, Lori Beth Allen, over the phone.

Happy Days somehow soldiered on without Howard for four additional seasons, ending in 1984 with season 11. On October 25, 1983, a year after directing Night Shift and five months before the release of Splash, Howard returned to the Cunningham household, in a uniform, and appeared throughout that final season, which allowed the show to have a proper series finale.

It may have been the end of Happy Days, but it was just the start for Ron Howard’s career. In the decades after Richie Cunningham’s move to Greenland, Ron Howard has become one of Hollywood’s most dependable big-budget directors, with massive hits like Backdraft, Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, and The Da Vinci Code under his belt. (Despite mostly good reviews, he has a few stinkers under his belt—those Da Vinci movies, representing more than half of his collaborations with Tom Hanks, are particularly unloved by critics.)

He also became popular with a more modern generation of TV fans as the narrator of Arrested Development—which, full disclosure, is my favorite TV show of all time.

The Razzie-nominated Hillbilly Elegy came during a critical nadir for Ron Howard.

But in 2020, he took on a project that, whether he meant it to or not, threatens to bring his directing career full circle. That year, he took on the film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy, the J.D. Vance memoir, for Netflix. The film, originally seen as a potential Oscars front-runner, earned critical scorn, becoming one of his worst-reviewed films on Rotten Tomatoes. (That said, Glenn Close earned an Academy Award nomination for her role as Vance’s grandmother.)

Elegy played a key element to Vance’s rise to prominence, becoming an inroad to both his Senate run, and later, his selection as Trump’s vice presidential nominee.

For his part, Howard has said was attracted to the project by the material, rather than Vance. In comments to Deadline last year after Vance drew condemnation for his various political comments, Howard said this:

Well, we didn’t talk a lot of politics when we were making the movie because I was interested in his upbringing and that survival tale. That’s what we mostly focused on. However, based on the conversations that we had during that time, I just have to say I’m very surprised and disappointed by much of the rhetoric that I’m reading and hearing. People do change, and I assume that’s the case. Well, it’s on record. When we spoke around the time that I knew him, he was not involved in politics or claimed to be particularly interested. So that was then. I think the important thing is to recognize what’s going on today and to vote. And so that’s my answer. It’s not really about a movie made five or six years ago. It is, but we need to respond to what we’re seeing, hearing, feeling now, and vote responsibly, whatever that is. We must participate. That’s my answer.

(Not exactly a ringing endorsement of his film’s subject.)

Anyway, a lot has happened since January, and the Vice President has largely stuck to the party line about Greenland: Its strategic advantage is so essential that the U.S. should take control of the Danish territory, despite the island’s leadership clearly favoring autonomy.

As Vance said recently: “Here’s the thing which I think a lot of folks don’t appreciate about Greenland. It’s really important to our national security,”

This week, Vance’s wife Usha will make a visit to the island, just as Richie Cunningham’s wife did after they got married over the phone. Usha Vance’s visit, admittedly, is much more controversial: It has been condemned by both Denmark and Greenland itself, and is seen as a trial balloon to help force a bigger foreign-policy shift.

But the result is one of the weirdest connections between a TV plotline and real life I can think of, a real full-circle moment: Ron Howard’s decision to become a director 45 years ago may have unwittingly screwed over the very territory that helped him explain away his departure from a hugely popular TV show.

It sort of makes you wish the U.S. Army had stationed Richie Cunningham in Guam.