Gay people particularly respect entertainers who cloak suffering behind carefully constructed artifice because it's a skill most of us are still forced to learn. ABBA concealed the distress of their ditties with as many deliciously gaudy overdubs as the era's analog recording techniques could muster. Embedded in some of the brightest whiteness pop has ever known, ABBA invented their own blues, one that hasn't left the radio. They whispered private anguish in the midst of the party."Embedded in some of the brightest whiteness" refers to the fact that the members of ABBA grew up in 1950s Sweden, where you could only hear 2 hours of music on the radio each day and — amid the "classical music, jazz, Swedish folk, Italian arias, French chanson, German schmaltz and John Philip Sousa" — there might be one pop song but never any "American blues."
२४ मे, २०१५
Taking ABBA as seriously as possible.
This essay — at NPR — is so over-the-top about ABBA that it's really very weird. I'll quote the last few sentences:
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Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke. Besides, isn't it Bob Dylan's birthday?
In the United States, ABBA only had one song that hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and then only for one week (Dancing Queen). Most of the rest of their well-known songs never broke into the top ten.
Favorite stupid pull quote: "Music of the 20th century is so rooted in African-American suffering that it's no surprise that most U.S. critics were deaf to any other culture's sadness."
Yes, the suffering Swedes. It's nice to note that their suicide rate is down to below the United States now.
Yes, dumb stupid racist U.S. critics. So insensitive.
ABBA was huge in Australia. Huge.0
They expertly crafted well-written, tightly performed pop songs. That doesn't make them artistically important.
The fact that they were/are a hit in the gay community a la Streisand etc, also doesn't make them important, and no amount of deconstruction will yield anything other than a group of people who mastered the art of the pop song.
I actually did grow up in Sweden in the 1950s, moving to the US in 1960. (Then to Iceland, and back to America.) NPR is, as usual, short on facts, long on credulity. Every home in those days had a multi-band radio on which one could listen to damn near every radio station in Europe. In the U.S. the choices were far fewer, and I'll bet the ABBAs know this. Note also that pretty much all Swedes hate all Americans, and have since at least WW2. (And, as payback, pretty much all the other Nordics, from Iceland to Finland, hate the Swedes.)
I should add that the gramophone had by then been introduced. I was able to buy as many Elvis Presley recordings as my allowance would permit.
Gay people particularly respect entertainers who cloak suffering behind carefully constructed artifice because it's a skill most of us are still forced to learn.
Dear stereotypical gay drama queen: concealing suffering behind a persona is part of what is known as "the human condition".
Dude, it's OK to enjoy music that people you want to impress consider trivial pop fluff. ABBA had tight production and catchy tunes. You could do worse than ABBA. Lots of people loved, and love, ABBA. You like ABBA. Just come out of the closet and admit it. No need to make a post-modern federal case out of it.
Waterloo, du är mitt öde mitt Waterloo...
Wo wo wo wo ....
I find I like ABBA more now than in the 70's when I wasn't supposed to like them.
Deja Voodoo- are you surprised that an NPR piece "is, as usual, short on facts, long on credulity"?
And, while I will defer to your expertise on all things Swedish, my experience with my Swedish friends and relatives is that they don't hate Americans. Of course my experience may be colored by the fact that I speak Swedish.
"What Andersson did point out was that his group possessed a rarely acknowledged capacity for the sorrows of artists living within the "melancholy belt" above the 59th latitude, where the sun virtually disappears for two months and snow falls for nearly half a year."
SAD.
Pop was enjoyment of the superficial.
So now pop is simulacrum of sadness.
Is any part of the culture safe from improvement by gays?
And... individual suicide rate might be down, but the national suicide rate is WAY up!
Abba is my guilty pleasure band. As much as I know they are uncool and "gay" I am consistently wowed by their pop sheen. It's just really well constructed ear candy. Undeniably catchy.
This article though is crap.
They were the best palindromic Swedish pop group of all time! Thankfully that means nothing.
Someone actually paid Barry Walters to write that drivel. I think I'm going to cry.
Articles like that is what happens when Music Studies people get PhDs.
ABBA embodies the intersectionality of a culturally homogenous, narrowly nationalist, expensive public transportation, generous health care classically trained music state....
...and the glorious rhythmic west African slavery-forged American gospel/blues/pop song. New levels of global community have been reached!
GO Bjorn, Benny, Agnetha and Frida!
GO ABBA!
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ganderson:
I claim no expertise, only experience, which is, granted, many years in the past. I've been with my family in Iceland for long periods regularly over those years.
Har du bott i Sverige?
What a bunch of eyewash. Too precious for words--but then that's NPR.
As for ABBA--tremendous commercial success--they've become the elevator music of our modern life.
But as a Kiwi friend of mine once sniffed, their music is simply Eurotrash. If you've spent some time in Europe watching European television and seeing the "Eurovision" music contest, you'll know what he meant. But you'll also have to admit that it is winning Eurotrash (they won the contest in 1974).
Music critics-- is there a more worthless species of "journalist" roaming this earth? So concerned about cultural misappropriation, yet so willing to look the other way when James Taylor calls himself (unironically) a "churning urn of burning funk."
The statement is incorrect on account of "weirdness!"
Always a good reason for dismissing an explanation.
I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate ABBA.
Eurovision mindlessness, gratuitous earworms.
The world would have been a better place without them.
DejaVoodo- Jag har aldrig bott i Sverige- jag växte upp i MN och läste svenska vid universitetet. Jag har många släktingar och kompisar i Sverige- de flesta bor i Göteborg.
On another note- was Icelandic easier to learn, coming from a Swedish background, or was just like learning any other Germanic language?
I think I know where he was trying to go.
If you read a lot of their lyrics carefully, and especially if you know the history of the band, he is correct - their songs superficially sound like mindless happy-pop, there is a ton of angst and pain in those songs.
And I hated ABBA (not so much now) - I grew up on heavy metal.
The only reason for going commercial, is to make a lot of money.
If you want to see Frida's talent before she went commercial, this is the one that melts everyone heart. She had Jazz down pat.
The abba crap merely gave her financial security. The music being interruptions of the endless commercials.
Frida the Housewife
Brian McKim & Traci Skene,
Music critics-- is there a more worthless species of "journalist" roaming this earth?
Well, speaking as one, I beg to differ. Then again, I'm a classical music critic, which is a slightly different beast.
Go ahead, try me. I'm fairly lame on opera and keyboard music, but pretty sound on everything else.
@Michelle: Perhaps I should have narrowed my grumpiness to _pop_ or _rock_ music critics-- the kind that have plagued us since Rolling Stone was printed on newsprint.
ABBA dId much to dispel the stereotype of Norsemen as raiders of coastal villages, much given to rape and pillage. They presnted a positive, wholesome image of Norsemen.......I like Abba and h Beach Boys much better now than when I was young.......The rap against Beethoven is that his music is too sublime. Take his Ode to Joy. How often does the Berln wall fall or Hillary get indicted and you want to crack open the Ode to Joy to celebrate. Most days you're just not in the mood to storm the gates of heaven. Just so with a lot of the music of that era. I'm no longer as alienated as Bob Dylan or as horny as the Rolling Stones or as trippy as the Moody Blues. They precisely captured a moment, but that moment has passed. The Beach Boys and Abba were far more banal, but that is precisely their strength. Life is a random procession of banal moments that are mildly enjoyable. Abba helps us enjoy our banal lives and the middling moments of fugitive joys.
"When I lived in Porpoise Spit, I used to sit in my room for hours and listen to Abba songs. But since I've met you and moved to Sydney, I haven't listened to one Abba song. That's because my life is as good as an Abba song. It's as good as Dancing Queen. (Muriel's wedding)
I love their stuff. I remember every time they were on TV in the 70s my dad would say, "they sing phonetically, they don't speak English...Sweden's biggest export besides Volvo."
When I was a child, my father used to listen to ABBA, Handel, and Simon & Garfunkel in the car (among the few tapes he owned). He would gently explain to me the dread of seeing Longboats on the horizon, the horror that was sure to come. The smoking ruins, crying women and lifeless bodies dotting the hillsides after they left.
No amount of Volvos and well-crafted, mature-themed pop songs filling the airwaves can fill a hole like that.
I remember him gripping the wheel of his MGB and staring out at the California desert in silence.
ABBA, if you're reading this: 'Thank you for the music' my ass.
Never forget.
I would have welcomed ABBA when they arrived in a longboat, whether it had a Dragon Head or a Dancing Queen.
NPR, home of Studies-Studies grads.
(And, as payback, pretty much all the other Nordics, from Iceland to Finland, hate the Swedes.)
What does Sweden have that Norway doesn't?
A good neighbor.
I like ABBA these days, more than I did when they were current. I usually put ABBA on when I am doing some housework. Good voices, well-crafted pop. I once read that they were modeled in part on the Mamas and the Papas.
Re the Swedes hating Americans or not: during her trips to Europe in the '70s, my mother got rather annoyed at Swedes pontificating against the Vietnam War. Given that Sweden supplied iron ore to the Third Reich's war machine, such criticism about Vietnam was rather grating.
I met plenty of Swedes in South America in the '70s, and got along fine with them. One exception was a rather obnoxious Swedish communist. One of his paisans apologized to me for his outbursts. In retrospect I should have informed that Swedish commie that one reason for my attitude towwards his beloved ideology was knowing a neighbor, an ethnic Swede born in Estonia who experienced Stalin's and Hitler's invasions of her homeland when she was a child.
Speaking of Swedes & music on a blog coming from Wisconsin reminds me of My Name is Yon Yonson, I come from Wisconsin...
Actually, Frida had a Norwegian mother, and a German Sergeant as a father. Sent to live with her grandmother in Sweden to keep from being treated as a Nazi bastard child, after the war.
ABBA was awful then and hasn't improved with age.
I verk in a lumber mill dare..
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