I was watching “Prime Suspect 2,” the second season of the great, dark Helen Mirren Scotland Yard detective series. The epiphany that turned me into an ABBA junkie didn’t occur until 1992, and it felt almost like an absurd accident. I owned exactly one of their albums, called “ABBA: The Album,” and would periodically take it out to listen to “Take a Chance On Me” or “The Name of the Game.” (I thought of the rest of the songs as filler.) The music on those tracks was heady and rousing, and I would put the songs on right next to Talking Heads or Supertramp or the Clash or Earth, Wind & Fire, never paying much attention to the lyrics. None of this occurred to me, as a myopic male, when I was first listening to ABBA, quite casually, in the late ’70s. And the fact that it was grand and pop and feminine made it, at the time, “dismissible.” But it was ABBA, and ABBA alone, who transformed the intricacies of feminine passion and yearning into an ecstatically sustained and larger-than-life pop opera. Blondie, to me, was the single greatest band of the new wave, and Heart, at the time, were pioneering the shocking idea that a woman could hold an electric guitar. Sure, there were potent women voices in the rock landscape of the ’70s, from Joni Mitchell to Donna Summer to Linda Ronstadt. Coming between those two eras, ABBA reigned as the Top 40 bards of feminine romantic desire and heartbreak and betrayal and devotion.Īnd that, to put it bluntly, is why almost no one took them seriously.
During the’ 70s, they were the soaring expression of female consciousness in pop music, bridging the gap between the girl groups of the Motown ’60s and the rise of Madonna, who revolutionized the music industry - not to mention the world at large - in the early ’80s. Why is that? The answer, ironically enough, is tied to one of the signature dimensions of ABBA’s power as a group. He, along with ABBA, was the great pop machine of the 1970s, yet Elton John churned out songs that were regarded as instant classics, whereas ABBA, for all the group’s chart-topping success, spent decades establishing their prestige in the pop pantheon. One of the period’s emblematic figures was Elton John, who for all his glitzy camp flamboyance always commanded credibility. Was it because the ’70s were such a rock-oriented time? Hardly. Yet it’s telling that there was such an extreme prejudice against ABBA during the group’s own era. It provides a hit of aural-lyrical endorphin, a surge of sublimity. In a way, it comes down to something basic: How do you measure the glory of a melody? A chord? A hook? A harmonic convergence? A great ABBA song like “Super Trouper” or “Dancing Queen” or “SOS” is more than a “catchy” piece of songcraft. For whenever I think of ABBA, the following words tend to spring to mind: pure, pop, luscious, irresistible, incandescent. With ABBA, it went that way for a long time, though to me that’s quite a mind-boggling statement.
Yet it’s no exaggeration to say that ABBA, in their heyday, were reviled by the mainstream press, and that if you tried to make a case for taking them seriously you’d probably be laughed out of the room. Not everyone felt that way, of course the people who bought all those ABBA records clearly dug them.
In the ’70s, you always tended to hear two things about ABBA: that they were most stratospherically successful pop group since the Beatles (which was true) and that musically, they were a shiny bouncy joke - the quintessence of bubble-gum triviality, four smiling Swedish troubadours in space-age polyester disco suits singing happy jingles of ear candy.
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