At the event in North London for Rip It Up and Start Again in 2005, I remember a voice in the audience piping up - apropos of absolutely nothing that the panel were discussing - to cry out:
"ABBA were better than the Velvet Underground!"
A poptimist, obviously - responding to an uncontrollable contrarian urge from within.
At the time I thought that - alongside its Tourettic quality and irrelevance to what we were talking about at that moment - that this was a really silly opposition to make. As if you had to choose, or to rank one above the other. Isn't Poptimism supposed to have freed itself, and all of us, from such binaries and hierarchies, rather than simply inverted them?
(Some years later I watched a doc on ABBA and concluded that they operated just like any other "artistically autonomous unit" from the mid-Sixties onwards. They were a proper band, writing their own material and producing it themselves, aspiring to superhuman levels of craft and musicianship, with lyrics that grew increasingly adult and emotionally sophisticated. Structurally, then, ABBA were "rockist" - operating very much not like a boyband or girl group (bossed around by producers, singing words written by professional others). So ABBA's true peers at that time would be Fleetwood Mac, as opposed to The Jacksons.).
Perhaps the outcry was based on a sense of historical injustice, ABBA having not been given their fair due?
Well, they are the first entry in the Spin Guide to Alternative Music, so some respect had been granted in the 1990s.
And in fact, if you go back to the music press of the time, you will see a fair amount of positive commentary on ABBA's pop genius.
And it came from musicians too: Elvis Costello famously described them as a big influence on Armed Forces (the dramatic piano cascades of "Oliver's Army", the sleek bright tightness of the sound throughout).
Okay the Richard Cook review is a little retrospective,and after the event, coming out in 1982, but hey look here's Dave McCullough raving about them in their "imperial phase" real time.
And then a few years later you have Paul Morley describing Human League as the new ABBA.
My ABfav ABBA tune
What a strange, super-sophisticated song structure! So many hook-full phases, such great playing.
Number 2 would be "S.O.S.", jostling hard - equal probably - with "Dancing Queen".
Andrew Parker pointed me to this Mark Fisher K-punk tribute to ABBA from 2004:
ReplyDeleteTHEY PASSED ME BY, ALL OF THOSE GREAT ROMANCES
Thu. April 29, 2004
The Abba ‘tribute’ on Five tonight was so bad it could almost have been C4. Couldn’t they have done better than some no-mark who insisted upon referring to Agnetha as ‘the blond one’. To every standard cliche wheeled out – they had crap clothes! The men were ugly! Elvis Costello trotting out his yawnsome anecdote about ‘Oliver’s Army’ stealing the Rachmaninov-like piano from ‘Dancing Queen’ – they added their own perplexing idea that the words were incomprehensible. Abba lyrics have always struck me as models of clarity; lines like ‘the judges will decide/ the likes of me abide’ and ‘the gods will throw the dice/ their minds as cold as ice’ were Shakespearian in the epic grandeur of their fatalistic melancholy. At least the guy from Attitude had the courage to talk ingenuously and without irony about this aspect of the music; about its poignancy and pain. Andy Bell was slightly embarrassed about saying – of course rightly – that Abba songs were the equal of the Beatles’.
Thing is, Abba wrote real love songs. In most Pop, ‘love’ is a code for infatuation or sex or some combination of the two. With Abba, we were dealing with emotions that had simmered and accreted for years. Like Roxy Music, they were both confidently post-adolescent and thorougly modern. There was no question of their pretending to be teenagers or pursuing a teenage market, but unlike today’s borocracy – Norah Jones, Amy Winehouse, you know – they didn’t trade on a conservative, ‘classic’ notion of what ‘adult’ pop had to entail. Like Roxy, Abba were a band who could only have been formed by people in their late twenties/ early thirties. That’s why the Pop Idol singers of a couple of years back struggled so ingloriously when asked to perform Abba songs. Not only because they were simply too young to have gone through the ringer, but also because their whole MO is based on a distinctly unerotic sexualised emoting. Abba never emoted, and if sex featured in their songs, it wasn’t usually as their subject (‘Gimme Gimme Gimme’ apart natch), but as part of their emotional background; sex typically operated as a sign of betrayal, another weapon with which the estranged lovers could hurt one another.
Where boyband histrionics and emotional grandstanding leave us cold, the coldness of Abba’s delivery was paradoxically intensely emotionally engaging. In many ways, a close parallel would be Krafwerk. It was the disjunction between the dispassionate, almost robotic vocals and the profound passion of the subject matter that made them so affecting.
That "post-adolescent" phrase has struck me. On one level, it's what menopausal mums would feel comfy dancing to at a wedding reception. On another, it's the assumption that, say, Jackson Browne is more authentic and worthy than Van Halen. One suggestion that has sprung to mind is that, though Primal Scream has always revelled in the teenage, Andrew Weatherall had a more mature aesthetic.
DeleteTaylor Parkes also wrote a great review for The Visitors album in Melody Maker's book Unknown Pleasures - Great Lost Albums Rediscovered. Back in 1995.
ReplyDeleteYes, Taylor’s essay went a little way towards adding an extra few bob onto all those Visitors LPs languishing in the bargain bins.
ReplyDeleteWhat about this one after The Visitors, the bleakness of which has subsequently often been compared to Joy Division. Not at the time though.
https://youtu.be/1HnOFwqpLRQ?si=uGIwbARNvuY77wYt
I bought a copy dirt cheap some years after reading the essay but I confess never got round to playing it. I think I finally gave it a listen on streamers but such is my general condition of internet/streaming induced amnesia I can't be sure...
DeleteGreat essay though
I wonder if the reason why the USA was the one territory that never entirely got ABBA was because The Carpenters were filling their niche in more-than-adequate fashion - A similar pristine approach to production/arrangements, soaring melodies with an underlying melancholy.
ReplyDeleteAlso, like ABBA , you could always tell Karen Carpenter was singing about adult pain and emotion.