The World That ABBA Made

There’s most likely not a second that goes by with out an ABBA tune being performed someplace on the earth. A remix of “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” is pulsing by a membership on a Mediterranean island, a Vietnamese grocery retailer is piping in “Completely happy New 12 months,” a Mexican radio station is taking part in the Spanish-language model of “Understanding Me, Understanding You.” Stay performances, too, proceed unabated, and never simply in karaoke bars, or in stage productions of “Mamma Mia!” Perhaps it’s morning in Kawasaki, Japan, and a tribute band is performing for thirty individuals in a public sq., or night in Johannesburg, the place a distinct tribute act performs to a sold-out theatre. (The group Björn Once more, the perfect identified of those reënactors, claims to have been summoned to carry out for an enthusiastic Vladimir Putin; the Kremlin denies this.) In London, you possibly can see and listen to the true factor—or, at the very least, life-size holograms of its members, affectionately referred to as ABBAtars, fronting a stay band in a purpose-built enviornment.Such is the afterlife in pop Valhalla. ABBA, made up of the songwriter-producers Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson and the singers Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, is greater right this moment than it ever was in the course of the group’s energetic years, between 1972 and 1982—a dense stretch that noticed the 2 {couples} that made up the band splitting up however persevering with to make music collectively. Not that ABBA didn’t get pleasure from loads of adulation in its day, starting with a breakthrough victory within the 1974 Eurovision Music Contest, with “Waterloo,” and persevering with with a sequence of albums that dominated pop charts all over the world. Scenes from “ABBA: The Film,” which follows the band on its 1977 Australian tour, present “ABBAmania” in full sweaty pressure, with followers thronging and reporters needling.Nonetheless, not like the Beatles, ABBA was by no means in a position to shake a faint odor of the unhip in its time. At finest, the band members had been seen by rock critics and listeners as craftsmen somewhat than artists. At worst, particularly of their native Sweden, they had been seen as peddlers of lowest-common-denominator pop: “as useless as a can of pickled herring,” within the phrases of a diss monitor by one other artist, a nod to the Swedish canned-fish firm that shares ABBA’s identify. An extended nineteen-eighties spent within the wilderness, with the group’s alumni pursuing lacklustre solo albums and unwieldy tasks, similar to a musical about chess, didn’t give the critics a lot trigger to alter their evaluation. In 1989, seven years after the band break up, Sweden Music, the writer of ABBA’s songs, was bought to PolyGram, with the expectation that the again catalogue would promote dependably however modestly.The nineties noticed the beginnings of a reversal of ABBA’s fortunes—commercially, with the large success of the 1992 greatest-hits compilation, “ABBA Gold,” but additionally within the enviornment of cool. That very same 12 months, U2 introduced out Andersson and Ulvaeus for a sing-along rendition of “Dancing Queen”; the British synth-pop duo Erasure launched an EP of ABBA covers; and Kurt Cobain improbably chosen Björn Once more, the tribute act, to look alongside Nirvana on the Studying Competition. It was round this time that plenty of English-language books in regards to the band started to appear: first the scurrilous “ABBA: The Identify of the Recreation,” bizarrely co-written by the previous Rolling Stones supervisor Andrew Loog Oldham, then a translation of Fältskog’s autobiography, then Carl Magnus Palm’s definitive biography, “Vivid Lights, Darkish Shadows: The Actual Story of ABBA.” The stream of books has continued to today, with fan memoirs, song-by-song breakdowns, and no fewer than two tutorial monographs on the tune “Fernando.”Into this crowded subject steps Jan Gradvall’s “The Story of ABBA: Melancholy Undercover,” a e book that doesn’t, in reality, inform the story of ABBA. Gradvall forgoes the usual band-bio kind and opts as an alternative for a rangy research of the group’s origins and legacy. It’s a smart alternative, and never simply because there isn’t a lot so as to add to Palm’s seven-hundred-page opus. A band composed of two {couples} who obtained divorced after which chronicled the fallout of their music (if extra obliquely than, say, Fleetwood Mac) could look like a piquant topic for a biography, however the group members’ consummate professionalism and fierce protectiveness of their personal lives have made it onerous to suit their story into any of our acquired genres. There’s surprisingly little melodrama or tragedy to attract on: simply 4 co-workers.Gradvall, who has been on the ABBA beat for a few years and has interviewed its members extensively over the previous decade-plus, has realized that essentially the most fascinating factor in regards to the band isn’t its story however its penumbra: the broader musical world that birthed it, and the one it should go away behind. His methodology is digressive and episodic. Vignettes about occasions such because the genesis of “Mamma Mia!” and capsule profiles of every member—Andersson the fountain of melodies, Ulvaeus the introspective searcher, Fältskog the reluctant star, Lyngstad the tragic baby with an ideal voice—are interposed with bits of chatty musical sociology, all given a nice breeziness in Sarah Clyne Sundberg’s translation. We find out about raggare, Sweden’s distinctive rocker tradition, and about dansbands, the sometimes horn-driven teams that play an eclectic mixture of types at open-air dances. Fältskog and Lyngstad each began their musical careers singing in dansbands; as Gradvall writes, ABBA would often draw on this custom, as in “I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do,” with its metallic swarm of saxophones.Within the wake of the nineties revival, ABBA’s music has come to appear so common—pure, uncut, lab-grade pop, purified of any particularizing influences—that it may be onerous to keep in mind that it originated in a selected milieu, and a marginal one at that. From the vantage of the early seventies, it appeared inconceivable that these 4 Swedes, with their guileless voices and sequinned stage outfits, may attain the best stage of the worldwide pop empyrean. Sweden was not generally known as an exporter of music. Domestically, folksong and German-style schlager ballads dominated the charts effectively into the sixties, whereas rock and roll and R. & B. filtered in slowly, typically by Britain. As within the U.Ok., the primary Swedish teams to play a selected model of American-style music typically loved success. Earlier than ABBA, Andersson performed keyboards within the Hep Stars, a garage-rock outfit whose signature tune, “Cadillac,” was tailored from the Renegades’ model of Vince Taylor’s 1959 “Model New Cadillac”—a sport of musical phone that reworked Taylor’s upbeat rock quantity right into a brooding minor-key stomp. It was a smash in Sweden, however it didn’t precisely take over the world.These sorts of lossy translations would turn out to be a secret supply of energy for ABBA. “Waterloo,” which will get its personal chapter, sounds a bit like somebody making an attempt to attract rock and roll from reminiscence after getting a partial glimpse of it. The peppy shuffle rhythm and the intense chords floor the verse in acquainted territory, however Andersson’s martial piano thrives on the minor chord within the pre-chorus briefly pull the tune someplace older and darker. With its Phil Spector-by-way-of-schlager sound and its profitable E.S.L. lyrics—“My, my! / At Waterloo Napoleon did give up / Oh, yeah! / And I’ve met my future in fairly an identical manner”—the tune is a spirited train in making an attempt on musical types, at the same time as a resigned ambivalence bubbles just under its floor. The standard that ABBA’s detractors criticized as inauthenticity was at all times one thing else: a playful theatricality, a enjoyment of assuming roles and guises. ABBA albums are stuffed with style workouts—a chanson on “Ring Ring”; glam and prog-rock excursions on the mid-seventies information; a extra sustained curiosity in disco towards the tip of the last decade; no scarcity of tropical-flavored numbers like “Sitting within the Palmtree” and “Completely happy Hawaii.” Earlier than they settled on a reputation and a bunch identification, the members briefly toured collectively in a cabaret-style selection act; this spirit is carried ahead of their music.From the beginning, ABBA’s ambition was to make genuinely international pop music. Stig Anderson, the band’s supervisor, defined that “Waterloo” got here out of a want to discover a tune title that will be universally intelligible to Eurovision’s viewers. (Different songs obtain universality by bypassing language in favor of pure sound: “Ring Ring,” “Bang-a-Boomerang,” “Dum Dum Diddle.”) The band determined to sing in English, the worldwide language of pop, for a lot the identical purpose. The very best chapter in “The Story of ABBA” contextualizes this alternative. “The de facto lingua franca on Planet Earth right this moment,” Gradvall writes, “is vacationer English: English diminished to its naked essence, a inventory dice containing the language’s mostly used phrases. . . . Pop music was one of many first cultural expressions to harness the inherent potential of vacationer English.” The e book reconstructs the historical past of European pop sung in corrupted Englishes, from Adriano Celentano’s 1972 faux-English novelty hit “Prisencolinensinainciusol” to the micro-genre Gradvall phrases “constitution disco,” by which Euro artists made such tourist-English pronouncements as “Sure Sir, I Can Boogie” over the types of grooves a Swede was more likely to hear on vacation within the Mediterranean. ABBA continued on this custom, with what A. O. Scott has referred to as “these lyrics in a language uncannily like English,” full of stilted diction and curious malapropisms. In traces like “Cash, cash, cash / Have to be humorous / Within the wealthy man’s world,” which means takes a again seat to prosody.