The World That ABBA Made

There is astir apt not a 2nd that goes by without an ABBA opus being played determination successful the world. A remix of “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” is pulsing done a nine connected a Mediterranean island, a Vietnamese market store is piping successful “Happy New Year,” a Mexican vigor presumption is playing the Spanish-language mentation of “Knowing Me, Knowing You.” Live performances, too, proceed unabated, and not conscionable successful karaoke bars, oregon successful signifier productions of “Mamma Mia!” Maybe it is greeting successful Kawasaki, Japan, and a tribute set is performing for 30 radical successful a nationalist square, oregon evening successful Johannesburg, wherever a antithetic tribute enactment plays to a sold-out theatre. (The radical Björn Again, the champion known of these reënactors, claims to person been summoned to execute for an enthusiastic Vladimir Putin; the Kremlin denies this.) In London, you tin spot and perceive the existent thing—or, astatine least, life-size holograms of its members, affectionately called ABBAtars, fronting a unrecorded set successful a purpose-built arena.

Such is the afterlife successful popular Valhalla. ABBA, made up of the songwriter-producers Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson and the singers Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, is bigger contiguous than it ever was during the group’s progressive years, betwixt 1972 and 1982—a dense agelong that saw the 2 couples that made up the set splitting up but continuing to marque euphony together. Not that ABBA didn’t bask plentifulness of adulation successful its day, opening with a breakthrough triumph successful the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, with “Waterloo,” and continuing with a bid of albums that dominated popular charts astir the world. Scenes from “ABBA: The Movie,” which follows the set connected its 1977 Australian tour, amusement “ABBAmania” successful afloat sweaty force, with fans thronging and reporters needling.

Still, dissimilar the Beatles, ABBA was ne'er capable to shingle a faint odor of the unhip successful its time. At best, the set members were seen by stone critics and listeners arsenic craftsmen alternatively than artists. At worst, particularly successful their autochthonal Sweden, they were seen arsenic peddlers of lowest-common-denominator pop: “as dormant arsenic a tin of pickled herring,” successful the words of a diss way by different artist, a motion to the Swedish canned-fish institution that shares ABBA’s name. A agelong nineteen-eighties spent successful the wilderness, with the group’s alumni pursuing lacklustre solo albums and unwieldy projects, specified arsenic a philharmonic astir chess, did not springiness the critics overmuch origin to alteration their assessment. In 1989, 7 years aft the set split, Sweden Music, the steadfast of ABBA’s songs, was sold to PolyGram, with the anticipation that the backmost catalogue would merchantability dependably but modestly.

The nineties saw the beginnings of a reversal of ABBA’s fortunes—commercially, with the tremendous occurrence of the 1992 greatest-hits compilation, “ABBA Gold,” but besides successful the arena of cool. That aforesaid year, U2 brought retired Andersson and Ulvaeus for a sing-along rendition of “Dancing Queen”; the British synth-pop duo Erasure released an EP of ABBA covers; and Kurt Cobain improbably selected Björn Again, the tribute act, to look alongside Nirvana astatine the Reading Festival. It was astir this clip that a fig of English-language books astir the set began to appear: archetypal the scurrilous “ABBA: The Name of the Game,” bizarrely co-written by the erstwhile Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, past a translation of Fältskog’s autobiography, past Carl Magnus Palm’s definitive biography, “Bright Lights, Dark Shadows: The Real Story of ABBA.” The travel of books has continued to this day, with instrumentality memoirs, song-by-song breakdowns, and nary less than 2 world monographs connected the opus “Fernando.”

Into this crowded tract steps Jan Gradvall’s “The Story of ABBA: Melancholy Undercover,” a publication that does not, successful fact, archer the communicative of ABBA. Gradvall forgoes the modular band-bio signifier and opts alternatively for a rangy survey of the group’s origins and legacy. It is simply a omniscient choice, and not conscionable due to the fact that determination isn’t overmuch to adhd to Palm’s seven-hundred-page opus. A set composed of 2 couples who got divorced and past chronicled the fallout successful their euphony (if much obliquely than, say, Fleetwood Mac) whitethorn look similar a piquant taxable for a biography, but the radical members’ consummate professionalism and fierce protectiveness of their backstage lives person made it hard to acceptable their communicative into immoderate of our received genres. There is amazingly small melodrama oregon calamity to gully on: conscionable 4 co-workers.

Gradvall, who has been connected the ABBA bushed for galore years and has interviewed its members extensively implicit the past decade-plus, has realized that the astir absorbing happening astir the set isn’t its communicative but its penumbra: the wider philharmonic satellite that birthed it, and the 1 it volition permission behind. His method is digressive and episodic. Vignettes astir events specified arsenic the genesis of “Mamma Mia!” and capsule profiles of each member—Andersson the fountain of melodies, Ulvaeus the introspective searcher, Fältskog the reluctant star, Lyngstad the tragic kid with a cleanable voice—are interposed with bits of chatty philharmonic sociology, each fixed a pleasant breeziness successful Sarah Clyne Sundberg’s translation. We larn astir raggare, Sweden’s distinctive rocker culture, and astir dansbands, the typically horn-driven groups that play an eclectic premix of styles astatine open-air dances. Fältskog and Lyngstad some started their philharmonic careers singing successful dansbands; arsenic Gradvall writes, ABBA would occasionally gully connected this tradition, arsenic successful “I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do,” with its metallic swarm of saxophones.

In the aftermath of the nineties revival, ABBA’s euphony has travel to look truthful universal—pure, uncut, lab-grade pop, purified of immoderate particularizing influences—that it tin beryllium hard to retrieve that it originated successful a peculiar milieu, and a marginal 1 astatine that. From the vantage of the aboriginal seventies, it seemed improbable that these 4 Swedes, with their guileless voices and sequinned signifier outfits, could scope the highest level of the planetary popular empyrean. Sweden was not known arsenic an exporter of music. Domestically, folksong and German-style schlager ballads dominated the charts good into the sixties, portion stone and rotation and R. & B. filtered successful slowly, often done Britain. As successful the U.K., the archetypal Swedish groups to play a peculiar marque of American-style euphony often enjoyed success. Before ABBA, Andersson played keyboards successful the Hep Stars, a garage-rock outfit whose signature song, “Cadillac,” was adapted from the Renegades’ mentation of Vince Taylor’s 1959 “Brand New Cadillac”—a crippled of philharmonic telephone that transformed Taylor’s upbeat stone fig into a brooding minor-key stomp. It was a smash successful Sweden, but it didn’t precisely instrumentality implicit the world.

These kinds of lossy translations would go a concealed root of powerfulness for ABBA. “Waterloo,” which gets its ain chapter, sounds a spot similar idiosyncratic trying to gully stone and rotation from representation aft getting a partial glimpse of it. The peppy shuffle bushed and the agleam chords crushed the verse successful acquainted territory, but Andersson’s martial soft flourishes connected the insignificant chord successful the pre-chorus concisely propulsion the opus determination older and darker. With its Phil Spector-by-way-of-schlager dependable and its winning E.S.L. lyrics—“My, my! / At Waterloo Napoleon did surrender / Oh, yeah! / And I person met my destiny successful rather a akin way”—the opus is simply a spirited workout successful trying connected philharmonic styles, adjacent arsenic a resigned ambivalence bubbles conscionable beneath its surface. The prime that ABBA’s detractors criticized arsenic inauthenticity was ever thing else: a playful theatricality, a delight successful assuming roles and guises. ABBA albums are afloat of genre exercises—a chanson connected “Ring Ring”; glam and prog-rock excursions connected the mid-seventies records; a much sustained involvement successful disco toward the extremity of the decade; nary shortage of tropical-flavored numbers similar “Sitting successful the Palmtree” and “Happy Hawaii.” Before they settled connected a sanction and a radical identity, the members concisely toured unneurotic successful a cabaret-style assortment act; this tone is carried guardant successful their music.

From the start, ABBA’s ambition was to marque genuinely planetary popular music. Stig Anderson, the band’s manager, explained that “Waterloo” came retired of a tendency to find a opus rubric that would beryllium universally intelligible to Eurovision’s viewers. (Other songs execute universality by bypassing connection successful favour of axenic sound: “Ring Ring,” “Bang-a-Boomerang,” “Dum Dum Diddle.”) The set decided to sing successful English, the planetary connection of pop, for overmuch the aforesaid reason. The champion section successful “The Story of ABBA” contextualizes this choice. “The de facto lingua franca connected Planet Earth today,” Gradvall writes, “is tourist English: English reduced to its bare essence, a banal cube containing the language’s astir commonly utilized phrases. . . . Pop euphony was 1 of the archetypal taste expressions to harness the inherent imaginable of tourer English.” The publication reconstructs the past of European popular sung successful corrupted Englishes, from Adriano Celentano’s 1972 faux-English novelty deed “Prisencolinensinainciusol” to the micro-genre Gradvall presumption “charter disco,” successful which Euro artists made specified tourist-English pronouncements arsenic “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” implicit the sorts of grooves a Swede was apt to perceive connected vacation successful the Mediterranean. ABBA continued successful this tradition, with what A. O. Scott has called “those lyrics successful a connection uncannily similar English,” filled with stilted diction and funny malapropisms. In lines similar “Money, money, money / Must beryllium funny / In the affluent man’s world,” meaning takes a backmost spot to prosody.