The Joy of ABBA

I’m mostly agnostic about ABBA: good pop music I’ve no real desire to put on myself but I wouldn’t turn off the radio if they came on. They were omnipresent when I was growing up and I know most of their hits. One thing I noticed a long time ago however is that they were far more sophisticated than their reputation as purveyors of plastic pop made them out to be. Many of their songs are actually deeply ambiguous about love and being in a relationship, even their most simple ones. The Joy of ABBA, shown above, is a BBC4 documentary which argues the same. I thought it might be interesting to look at some of their hits in this light.

In Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight) (1979) Agnetha sings about wanting a man and a romance, but what do you do when you got your man? Summer Night City (1978) wasn’t shy in suggesting it was all about S-E-X.

And while Dancing Queen (1976) was bittersweet enough, capturing that perfect moment on the dance floor and knowing it would be all downhill from there, Does Your Mother Know (1979) leers at her and suggest more prurient motives for the Dancing Queen’s partners…

Waterloo (1974) was of course the song that launched them into international fame, but it’s telling that even here falling in love is explicitly shown as losing a battle.

And then there’s The Name of the Game (1977), another song about falling in love and starting a relationship, but again deeply ambiguous about it and in a much more downbeat tempo, much more doubting the lover’s motives

But if being in a romance is doubtful, not being in one is worse. In Ring, Ring (1973) the heroine is desperate for her guy to call her, while in Take a Chance on Me (1978) she’s pleading to be accepted, even as a second choice. It’s not a flattering image of romance that you get from ABBA and it was there long before the pressures of being the biggest pop group in the world started to destroy their relationships.

Of course the bleakest picture of what it’s like not being in love is The Day Before You Came (1982), with Agnetha singing about all the mundane things she “must” have done the day before she fell in love, sleepwalking through life. It could’ve been uplifting, but neither the music nor the video does anything to refute the impression you get the singer is looking forwards as much to the end of her love as back to before it started. Love is all important but at best it delivers a cold, temporary comfort for ABBA.

As said, even up tempo, seemingly happy songs like SOS or Mama Mia (both 1975) are desperately pleas for attention from distant lovers. One of the few exceptions is Super Trouper (1980), where the singer does draw comfort from knowing that her lover is in the crowd she’s performing to. Even then though there’s the loneliness of her life before she fell in love…

Ironically, it’s in the divorce songs that a glimmer of hope is perhaps visible. Knowing Me, Knowing You (a-ha, 1977) has Anni-Frid accepting the idea that her relationship is ending, taking some solace in the idea that it’s all for the best.

But in The Winner Takes it All (1980), Agnetha is bitter; written at a time when both Anni-Frid and Benny, and Agnetha and Björn were going through a divorce, it’s not hard to see this song not just as a reflection of that, but also of the end of ABBA itself. And yet…

The other divorce song is When All Is Said and Done (1981); if Winner was supposed to be about Agnetha and Björn, this is about Anni-Frid and Benny, but this time there is some hope a more amiable separation can be reached. Maybe things aren’t always bleak.

Ha, of course not, as One of Us (1981) makes clear. In the ABBA universe, there’s no hope.