yustyoking

Clive’s Nobel Prize

Speed Hump by realPfft:

It’s award season and Donald Trump has announced that he wants the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump sees himself as a peacemaker and he feels that his efforts to bring peace to Gaza and a negotiated settlement for Ukraine qualify him for the Nobel Prize.

Alfred Nobel invented dynamite. Seeing the carnage of war, Nobel felt responsible. To counter the view of him as a “merchant of death” and to strengthen peace initiatives, he created the Nobel Peace Prize.

You can’t just announce that you want the Nobel Prize, however, that’s not how it works. You are awarded the Peace Prize if, in fact, you deserve it.

Not everyone is eligible. Among other things, you have to be alive to qualify, the prize is not awarded posthumously.

You also need to be nominated, but in Trump’s case, that is no problem since he has been nominated at least 12 times, most recently by Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. The government of Pakistan nominated Trump for his work in brokering a cease-fire between Pakistan and India. In 2022, Péter Szijjártó, the Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, suggested awarding the prize to Trump for the Abraham Accords. In the past decade, several American lawmakers have nominated Trump, some out of conviction, others to curry favor.  

There are six Nobel Prize categories: physics, chemistry, medicine, economics, peace and literature. Some years, the Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to an author, other years to a poet. “Song lyrics are also a form of poetry,” Clive Flatenbad of Swedish rap duo realPfft points out. “Therefore, Mutte and I as songwriters should also be eligible for the Nobel Prize in Literature. We have released 140 songs. There’s probably some literary merit in our work somewhere in there. Huh, huh, huh?”

Fortunately for Clive, just because he is gauche doesn’t disqualify him for the Nobel Prize.  

Clive’s argument is not completely outlandish since, occasionally, the Nobel Committee chooses a home-grown Swede for the Nobel Prize. “That’s me!” says Clive, whose father is Swedish and whose mother is British. “I grew up in Stockholm,” he insists. “Therefore, I deserve the prize.”

Competition is stiff and no motivation is off-limits. The band’s motto is “With realPfft in Modern Times,” a bastardization of Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf’s slogan “For Sweden in Modern Times.” (För Sverige – i tiden)

To bolster their argument, the boys point out that realPfft has received The Freilitzer Music Award from the district of Sjælland in Denmark in 2021, a grant from The Catherine C. Grant Foundation in the town of Bristol in England in 2022 and the Big Bellyacher Award for Good Housekeeping from the city of Tokyo in 2024.

Just as Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward qualified them for the Nobel Prize, the boys claim that the lyrics to their song Speed Hump qualify them for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Sample lyrics: Don’t insult him/ Don’t insult me/ Spending coin/ To put bumps in the roadway… Any love, any love, give me, give me/ Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! / Papa done me, si si dumb need/ Papa done me, si si dumb needy… Pick me up, pick me up, give me, give me/ Pick me up, pick me up, give me, give me… In the roadway… Coin/ Spending coin… etc.

“Mutte has created many an audio effect at the mixing console. Give us the Nobel Prize in Physics,” Clive suggests, using a scatter-shot approach to the awards. “I’m a cough drop addict. Medicine! We have good chemistry. Chemistry! I know how to add. Economics! The cards are stacked against us, but the problem, as I see it, is too few categories. Where is the Nobel Prize in Choreography? Where is the Nobel Prize in Fashion Design? The Nobel Prize in Dumb Jokes? It’s like the Oscars. We could win an Oscar for videos by my younger brother Tim in the category Best Original Short Visual Representation of a Musical Composition by a Swedish Rap Duo Out of Uppsala, Sweden. Easy-peasy, we could win that Oscar! Hands-down.

“We finish every day’s struggle in the studio by making a ‘V for Victory’ sign with both hands, shouting to one another ‘Peace, brother!’ That alone makes us worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize,” according to Clive.             

“If Trump wants the Nobel Peace Prize without creating peace,” reasons Clive in an open letter to the Swedish Academy, “we deserve the Nobel Prize in Literature without creating literature.”

Note: Since you need to be nominated by a public official in order to win, I, blogger Kevin Feingold, officially nominate songwriters Clive Gunnar Flatenbad and Mutte Anders Fjutt for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2026. May they live to be 100 years old! (Ja, må han leva i hundrade år, the Swedish version of “Happy birthday to you.”)