The other day I received a message from Jack McGuinness.
Jack. Singer, guitarist and songwriter in Motvind from Gothenburg. A man from a time when rock was not a career plan, not a brand strategy, not a social media format, but something you lived before you even understood what it meant.
I met Jack for the first time when I was a teenager in Hammarkullen. I was young, curious, and still trying to understand what the world of music really was. And suddenly he appeared in front of me, sailing out naked and freshly showered, completely unbothered, as if this was the most natural thing in the world.
And in my teenage mind I probably thought: there he is. A real rocker.
Not a fake one. Not someone who had bought the attitude. Not someone who had studied the pose in a mirror. He just was. Free, physical, unashamed, alive. As if rules belonged somewhere else, to other people, in other rooms.
That moment stayed with me. Not because of the nudity itself, but because of what it represented. Rock, for me, did not arrive through a poster, a record sleeve or a stage light. It came walking out of a shower in Hammarkullen and said without saying a word: this is also a way to live.
That is why Jack’s words about the old rehearsal rooms hit me so hard.
He writes about a time when young bands did not have study associations waiting with organised rehearsal spaces, no hourly paid circle leaders, no curling parents, no soft system of help designed to make everything smooth. In the mid-1960s, when the first pop and rock bands were forming, you found what you could find. Basements. Youth centres. Industrial warehouses. Demolition apartments. Scrapyards. Forgotten rooms in forgotten parts of the city.
One of those rooms was in the area that would later become Nordstadstorget in Gothenburg. Kjell Åshede had found it, opposite Klädpressargatan, near the legendary jazz club Jazz Artdur, where great musicians passed through before history made them untouchable. Jack remembers the smell: coffee roasting, old wine, cigarette smoke. A smell that never left the memory. In that room he named the band Bloody Mama.
That is where music history often begins.
Not in clean studios.
Not in funding applications.
Not in political speeches about culture.
But in rooms that smell of smoke, beer, damp carpets, old sofas, dust and impossible dreams.
Jack describes walls covered with egg cartons and rag rugs. Ashtrays full of cigarette ends. Beer. Carpets that smelled of rubbish, malt and vomit. Sofas that should have been thrown away years earlier. It sounds unhealthy, and it probably was. But it was also free.
And freedom is the part many politicians no longer understand.
When Studieförbunden now warns that thousands of playing opportunities for young people have disappeared, the response from politics should be serious. It should be: what are we losing when rehearsal rooms close? What happens to the next generation of musicians when the first room disappears? What happens when young people no longer have a place to be loud, bad, stubborn, confused, brilliant and unfinished?
But instead comes the kind of answer that makes the clocks stop.
The claim that the pressure on rehearsal rooms has decreased because young people today learn to play music on YouTube.
That is not an explanation.
That is cultural blindness.
YouTube can teach you a riff. YouTube can show you a chord. YouTube can explain a drum fill, a bassline, a pedal, a vocal effect, a mixing trick or how to record in a bedroom. YouTube is a fantastic tool.
But YouTube cannot replace a band.
It cannot replace four people in the same room trying to find the same pulse. It cannot replace the moment when the drummer and the bass player suddenly start breathing together. It cannot replace the glance between a guitarist and a singer when a song lifts for the first time. It cannot replace the conflict, the waiting, the bad ideas, the good mistakes, the nervous laughter, the first argument, the first breakthrough, the first time you realise that together you sound larger than your own life.
To say that rehearsal rooms are less needed because young people learn music on YouTube is like saying football pitches are unnecessary because children can watch Champions League. Or that swimming pools are unnecessary because there are videos about breaststroke. Or that schools are unnecessary because everything is already online.
Music is not only information.
Music is not only technique.
Music is body, volume, timing, listening, friction, cooperation and courage.
You do not learn that alone in front of a screen.
The rehearsal room is not just a room. It is the first stage. The first workshop. The first free zone. The first place where young people are allowed to sound terrible before they become good. It is where they learn responsibility without anyone calling it responsibility. Democracy without anyone calling it democracy. Project management without anyone showing a PowerPoint. They argue about song order, volume, lyrics, transport, money, who came late, who forgot the cable, who wrote the chorus and why the bass is always too loud.
That is real education.
Not polished. Not measurable. Not always pretty.
But real.
Sweden did not become a music nation by accident. The so-called Swedish music miracle was not built only by professional studios, export offices and catchy choruses. It was built from below. In youth centres. In study associations. In basements. In rehearsal rooms. In local venues. In spaces where nobody earned money but everybody learned something. It was built in rooms where young people were allowed to fail long enough to one day become good.
Jack’s generation knew this because they had no choice. They created music in places nobody had designed for culture. Maybe that was part of the power. Nobody was standing there measuring them. Nobody demanded a strategy. Nobody asked what the outcome would be. Nobody wanted them to explain the value of what they were doing before they had even discovered it themselves.
They were allowed to be left alone.
That matters.
A subculture needs space before it can become visible. It needs darkness before it can handle light. It needs rooms where it can be ugly, immature, loud, pretentious, ridiculous, beautiful and alive at the same time. If everything is organised too early, evaluated too early, branded too early and made presentable too early, something dies before it has even learned to breathe.
Today, of course, we should not romanticise dangerous rooms, bad wiring, mould, smoke and broken sofas. Young musicians deserve safe spaces. But safety must not become control. Organisation must not become suffocation. A rehearsal room must not become another bureaucratic box where creativity has to behave before it has even begun.
Because the young person with rich parents, a villa, a garage, instruments and patient neighbours may survive anyway. The teenager with money can buy equipment, lessons, studio time and silence. But the young person in a crowded apartment, without contacts, without a garage, without money, without a private room where a drum kit can fit, needs the shared space.
That is why rehearsal rooms are also a class issue.
When they disappear, it is not the most privileged who lose first. It is the young people in the suburbs. The ones without connections. The ones who need someone to hand them a key and say: here, you are allowed to be.
That room can change a life.
Jack McGuinness knows this. Motvind knows this. Göteborg’s old music scene knows this. Before there were albums, stages, radio, reviews and history, there were rooms. Smelly rooms. Cold rooms. Dirty rooms. Rooms full of noise and young people who did not yet know what they would become.
Motvind came out of that world. Out of Gothenburg, out of the suburbs, out of a time when music was connected to society, class, resistance and language. It was not music as decoration. It was music as a way of standing up. A way of saying: we are here, we sound, and we are not asking permission.
That is what politicians miss when they reduce music to digital learning.
The bedroom can create the song.
The rehearsal room creates the band.
The stage creates the artist.
These are not the same thing.
A young person can sit at home and become technically impressive. They can play fast, clean and perfectly. They can upload clips and collect views. But if they never stand in a room with others, if they never have to listen, adjust, give way, push back, wait, fail, try again and feel the air move when real instruments meet real bodies, then they have missed the deepest part of music.
Music is what happens between people.
YouTube is a tool.
A rehearsal room is a context.
A tutorial does not build a band.
A screen does not build a music life.
A hammer does not build a house by itself.
What is needed now is not another lazy explanation about young people and technology. What is needed is a serious understanding of what rehearsal rooms actually are. They are cultural infrastructure. They are social infrastructure. They are democratic infrastructure. They are where talent without money gets a chance. They are where lonely kids find a tribe. They are where noise becomes music and music becomes identity.
When 8,000 playing opportunities disappear, it is not just numbers disappearing.
Future bands disappear.
Future songwriters disappear.
Future stages disappear.
Future voices disappear.
Future life paths disappear.
And perhaps worst of all: young people lose one more place where they are allowed to become something before anyone knows what that something is.
So no, young people have not stopped needing rehearsal rooms because YouTube exists.
They need rehearsal rooms precisely because the world has become so digital.
They need places where music becomes physical again. Where sound is felt in the body. Where people must listen to each other for real. Where creativity is not just content, but community.
I think back to Jack in Hammarkullen. Naked, freshly showered, completely free. A real rocker before I even knew what that meant. And I think about his memories of those old rooms in Gothenburg, with their smoke, carpets, beer, smell and dreams.
Maybe that is what this is really about.
Not nostalgia.
Not old men romanticising the past.
But the knowledge that music needs rooms where life is allowed to be larger than common sense.
Because rock was never born from convenience.
It was born when someone found a room.
Someone plugged in.
Someone played too loud.
Someone else answered.
And for a moment, a few young people believed they could become bigger than the world had planned for them.
That is not something YouTube can replace.
That is not something politics should cut away.
And anyone who does not understand that has never really heard music being born.
By Chris...
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