In “De Nada” You’re Welcome: Kevin Johansen’s Musical Third Space TIMOTHY WILSON, AND MARA FAVORETTO “Mixture is future.” -Kevin Johansen The night I was arrested by Swiss police, I entered a new world. Having mistakenly boarded an overnight cross-Europe train without my passport, I slumbered unaware and unhampered through several countries of the European Union, but ran into trou- ble when the train left the E.U. temporarily to pass through Switzerland. While in that in-between space, I was awakened in the middle of the night and hustled off the train to be detained and dealt with. I was not alone, but shared a cell with several other likewise identity-less lawbreakers: a tiny little Asian lady, a crooked-smiled gap-toothed fella who might have been Eastern European, a very skinny African man in a flowing colorful robe... In the middle of the night and the middle of nowhere, my fellow border-trespassers and I tried to make the best of our lockup in limbo. One shared Asian bean cakes, I had German wine, someone had Hungarian cigarettes, two of us played guitar, and another had beaming wide smiles and infectious laugh- ter. We didn’t have a single language in common, but still managed to have a very good time. I was actually sad to go when the Swiss deported us back to our various countries of departure. I felt like we had founded a space—a very uneasy one, to be sure, but not unpleasant—where identity and language didn’t matter as much. (Wilson 47) 1 S INGER KEVIN JOHANSEN AND HIS BAND “THE NADA” INHABIT THE IN-BETWEEN SPACE invoked by Wilson. Their music, which is not so much international as intranation- al, defies easy identification. Born of an Argentine mother in Fairbanks, Alaska, Kevin Johansen has spent his life shuttling between two hemispheric extremes. After moving to Buenos Aires at the age of twelve and then to New York at twenty, he cur- rently resides in Argentina. Musically, he lives in neither country, but instead, inhabits a strange place in between, because his music is stylistically and lyrically as well-traveled and footloose as he is. He sings in English and Spanish—and sometimes French and Portuguese—within the same song and even the same sentence. His music assimilates all the sounds of Latin America and North America: Brazilian samba, Argentine milon- ga, Andean folklore, folk and blues, funk, Mexican norte~ no and many others. He blends these styles into new combinations; some of his mixtures he has called “tex-mess,” “Andean cumbia,” “pop-klore” (from pop plus folklore, Spanish for folk), and “Barry White meets Nirvana.” Kevin Johansen and The Nada balk at no deconstruction of style, and love to turn genres inside out. Refusing to use only one language or typical style of either of the two immigrant countries he has called home, Johansen is a linguistic and The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 47, No. 5, 2014 © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1005