In the early 1920s, jazz became a key symbol of the high modern era and its new lifestyles. In Sweden, the introduction and appropriation of jazz 1920-50 inspired widespread dis-cours-es on the modern transformations of identity. This is a study of how jazz-related texts from that time thematized new ways of being human along several dimensions: (1) the new versus the traditional; (2) the young versus the old in terms of age and generation; (3) the low versus the high in terms of class and aesthetic taste; (4) ethnic, racial and national -otherness- versus what was regarded as -normal- white Swedishness; (5) the female and sexual Others versus male heterosexuality. A wide range of sources are analysed, including hundreds of song lyrics but also poems, novels, films, radio programmes and essays, as well as interviews with key figures from that period: authors like Artur Lundkvist, jazz musicians, swing fans and agitprop activists. The result is a complex cultural studies mapping of crossing forms of identifications, where different positions interact in often ambiguous and often contradictory ways, including representatives of moral panics, primitivism, modernism and profane popular entertainment. This intersectional study of cultural clashes and hybrid cosmopolitanism thus crosses conventional borders by interpreting the intertextual dialogues between widely differing voices and genres who all contributed to the formation of modern everyday life during the birth of the Swedish welfare society, often seen as a folkhem -home of the people-.