IT'S HIP TO LOVE ABBA
Right
now it is hip to love ABBA. From neo-camp films like Priscella, Queen
of the Desert, and Murial's Wedding, to baby-boom nostalgia peddlers,
VH-1, ABBA's music is suffering a mini resurgence which will certainly
pass. Their current re-surfacing is understandable given the abhorrent
mining of the 70's rampant in popular culture's desperate search for material.
But I would like to examine them in a different, perhaps more serious
light. For after the short attention spans are turned away from ABBA as
they must, many lingering questions and interesting phenomena are still
left untouched.
Oddly,
ABBA has neither asked for, nor needs any resurgence. During their heyday,
they commanded popularity and wealth topping lists from Billboard to Fortune
500 . Knowing this, it is hard for us to understand why they stopped.
Many will point to the interpersonal rifts within the band as reason for
their demise. They were after all, symmetrically comprised of two couples,
each
married, one blonde, the other auburn, and it is easy for us to understand
the tensions generated by such a line up. We had already been primed for
this break up by our acquaintance with the Beatles' problems of Yoko.
During the Beatles break up, not a soul on earth could understand why
the supergroup would just throw it all away. And while we couldn't understand
why, we could grasp how. Yoko. Nobody but John liked Yoko. John wanted
Yoko to be there and be involved and yadda yadda yadda. The Yoko problem.
We understand. What most people fail to see is we were simply being fed
a scapegoat. As we have seen countless times, scapegoats are vital when
situations are too complicated, revealing and interconnected to explain
in hand.
Like the Beatles, with whom they share much in common, ABBA ultimately had to rely on our gullibility and easily-swayed-with-lurid-headline nature in accepting their break up. But it cannot be that simple, and after some research it becomes obvious that this is exactly what they wanted us to think, yet the truth was much different.
To examine
closely the body of recorded works that comprises ABBA, you are at once
startled by the colossal scope of their oeuvre. I am not referring to
sheer number of recordings produced, although they certainly were prolific,
but moreso the implausibility of what it was they accomplished. Album
after album of insanely catchy, hypnotically hummable, yet deceptively
simple sounding pop gems. Most pop groups would kill for just one such
song. Most would be happy and very lucky to even hit upon one of the
melodies that ABBA churned out with clock like regularity. And while plenty
of groups have had their hit, ABBA couldn't miss. They became billionaires,
Kings and Queens because of it. But one has to ask, was this their only
purpose? To merely entertain us and become rich in the process? Yes, we
say, this is indeed the goal of any recording artist, its just most of
them don't have the talent to achieve what ABBA achieved.
To spend
time with ABBA, listening, analyzing, putting the pieces together, it
becomes clear that they were drawing upon something else to fuel their
success. Something extra that makes it impossible for the human ear...
the human mind to ignore. For if you think about it, what is it about
a song that makes it "catchy?" What are the elements that give it a hook?
If there were quantifiable ingredients to this, everybody would be doing
it, every song would be a miniature masterpiece capable of capturing a
secure place in our brainspace. Every pop artist would be a household
word. Every songwriter a millionaire. Yet
this rarely happens.
And not only did ABBA have the ability to create intense melodic hooks, they often packed several of these hooks into one song alone. Any other respected pop artist would certainly try to spread a sudden burst of song writing insight over an entire album's length. But ABBA couldn't find the time to get them all in. An album wasn't really long enough for ABBA! No, they packed their never-ending stream of hooks anywhere they could: in every verse, chorus, song, single and album. And that still wasn't enough space to include every gem.
It is
instructive to think about the obstacles in ABBA's path. First and foremost
they were from Sweden. (Or so we were led to believe.) And after nearly
a decade of writing and singing hit songs in ENGLISH, the members of ABBA
could barely speak our foreign tongue. Yet are we to assume that they
just ucked into burning their English lyrics into our subconscious minds?
Could any of us write three or four dozen number one hit songs in Swedish?
Even one? Do we even know what Swedish is, as a language?
Do we even know where Sweden is on a map?
But four unassuming Swedes come out of nowhere and instantly rise to the top of a long standing, 100% English speaking, American and British dominated system? Only Vladimir Nabakov was able to achieve similar cross-language success and look at the status we give him. But ABBA? English wasn't an obstacle to them. They even recorded their package of hits, ABBA Gold in Spanish, flawlessly translating their infectious message to whatever language seemed necessary at the time. And it is no accident that English was indeed the necessary language.
Think
also about the craft of song writing. In the pop idiom there exist only
seven primary chords and their respective variations with which to base
your work. Including majors and minors and some other nifty tricks, the
possible total of unique and unheard constructions isn't all that large
a number. Taking into account the entire history of pop music leading
up to ABBA, it seems
nearly impossible that the chord progressions ABBA hit upon over and over
again, had been completely unheard and un-thought of until they decided
to start writing music well into the 1970's. ABBA songs are not complex.
Most rely on two, maybe three chords max to comprise a song. Where were
these chord progressions the whole time before ABBA came to our attention?
Are we to believe that nobody thought of them before? If I said that right
now I could put out five albums, each with twelve or more songs, all of
which are incredibly simple, unique, hook laden, catchy and irresistible,
and none of which have ever been heard before, you'd rightly think me
insane. No! It isn't mathematically possible nor likely. Even so, people
to this day still write songs in vain attempts to 'hit one.' More power
to them - it is a spectacle indeed when once in a rare while somebody
does it. But nobody has been able to do it on the scale of ABBA, with
the possible exceptions of the Beatles, and the British post punk band,
XTC. Nobody is likely to do it again either, unless...unless...
These
crafty songwriters are special people who know our minds this well and
are able to speak directly to some primal need we have for three chords
that we can hum. This talent should also ignite our suspicion. If it is
so easy for a handful ofprolific pop-meisters to manipulate us in this
fashion, it is not conceivable that other messages are also getting through?
In other words, what if ABBA wasn't as benign as we always thought? What
if their sugar-coated, innocent Swedish exterior was a purposeful
construction? An image meant to deflect their real purpose?
In fact,
everything we know about them should lead us to question them more closely.
They claimed to be from Sweden yet was this ever proven? No. They claimed
to be husbands and wives, yet why did they look more like siblings? Why
was hair color really the only identifiable difference between them? Could
we ever tell who was singing what? Who was playing what instrument? Was
it even the four images we now identify as ABBA making the music? Where
did they learn their command of the English pop idiom?
What did they do before they hit our scene? Why suddenly an album in Spanish?
Isn't it a bit too convenient that the acronym for their first names happened
to spell ABBA? ABBA. Certainly this circular palindrome, this seeming
nonsense word that has entered our vocabulary bears another look. It seems
so elemental, "Abba," an infant's first words, the first two characters
of our alphabet in endless repetition ike some sort of binary code. ABBA
- 1221. Abbabbabbabba - 1221221221221. Babble? Perhaps not to the trained
eye, the sensitive receptor. Yes ABBA left us at the height of their popularity,
and isn't that cause for concern? What could really account for their
premature break up?
Perhaps their work among us was done. The permutations of 12/21 were exhausted as well as their clever chord constructions, and they simply stopped. Perhaps they were just transmitters, beaming a message from afar. When they stopped receiving, so unfortunately did we.
But keep an ear open, I say. Listen to and remember your ABBA songs. One day you will certainly need them, one day they will be important, one day they will lock into place.
Or perhaps
a new group will suddenly hit the scene, cranking out hit after hit after
hit, and this time you will take careful note. Maybe they will be from
Sweden, but I sincerely doubt it. You can be sure of three things though:
they will sing in English, they will quit before their time, and we will
all make them rich by listening.
Copyright © 1996 Lee Skirboll
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