In ABBA's "On and On and On" the singer's at a party and gets into a conversation with someone who's worried about the world. He turns out to be a Swedish government minister and shouldn't really be saying that stuff (so they sing a stomping Beach Boys pastiche instead). Like a lot of ABBA's more rocking songs it doesn't quite work but fails in an endearing way-- but beyond that it struck me as an odd thing to be singing about.
I'm sure that in 1980 the band were something like royalty in Sweden and almost certainly were really going to dinner parties and meeting ministers. It's the matter-of-fact way they mention it that surprised me. I can only think of one other song about meeting a politician at a party-- Pulp's "Cocaine Socialism". The Pulp song takes the meeting as a springboard for a savage attack on Tony Blair's Labour Party, as well as Cool Britannia and cocaine and corruption. "Cocaine Socialism" is a fine record but it never struck me as odd-- biting outsider opposition was the tone I expected a record about politicians at parties to take. As opposed to ABBA's convivial reasonableness.
Of course I go to dinner parties sometimes myself, and though there aren't any politicians involved convivial reasonableness seems a fine aim. Maybe that's a reason I find myself enjoying ABBA more the older I get. Actually I can't remember not enjoying them: They were my favorite band at seven; they're one of my favorite bands at 34. What I want to explore in this column, though, is how ABBA often seem a very adult band, writing songs squarely set in the adult (as opposed to adolescent or teenage or college-age) world, coping with adult emotions, and particularly adult compromises and disappointments.
I'll admit I'm talking here mostly about the later ABBA, roughly from 1976's Arrival onwards. The earlier, goofier ABBA is also terrific-- and was the version that launched Europop as we knew it (try Holland's Luv' for a marvelous band that uses the ABBA of "King Kong Song" and "Ring Ring" as a springboard). I don't find myself feeling the songs as much as their later records, though, possibly because I think Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson are excellent lyricists and on the earlier albums their confidence in their English wasn't up to showing that.
Critical wisdom has it that ABBA material darkened in the late 1970s because the two couples who formed the band both split up. There's surely a lot of truth in this-- their later albums are studded with fantastic, rueful break-up songs-- but I don't necessarily want to confuse "adult" and "dark" here. ABBA songs aren't "dark" just because of the intra-band divorces, they're more universal than that: the sorrow in them is often a sense that the best of times, the most lived parts of life, have already, irretrievably happened. "Having the time of your life"-- the chorus of "Dancing Queen" is literally and painfully felt: this is as good as it gets. In so many ABBA songs the important stuff has all happened in the past-- when Chiquita was sure of herself, when Fernando crossed the Rio Grande, when the narrators of "One Of Us" or "Thank You For The Music" made the decisions they're looking back on in the songs.
And what happens afterward? "Now you're working in a bank, a family man, a football fan, and your name is Harry."-- this from "Our Last Summer", a relatively jolly song about lost first love that still fits in "a fear of getting old, a fear of slowly dying". Fears come true: dreams don't. But one of the things that makes ABBA adult rather than adolescent is that they're usually sympathetic to their fading everymen protagonists. Harry may just be a bank clerk but his life isn't horrible or wrong or a betrayal, it's just a bit more boring than it once was. "Should I Laugh Or Cry", a portrait by his tired, frustrated wife of an absurd domestic Napoleon, is probably the saddest record ABBA ever made but even this pathetic individual, shouting in too-short trousers, is no monster.
Compare, if you like, the ridiculous paroxysms of agony and disgust a band like Radiohead go through contemplating the simplest of socializations on "Fitter, Happier" or "Paranoid Android". ABBA understand and will not condemn compromise, and contentment, and dull satisfaction, and the flipside to the songs where they lament past excitement are the songs in which something immense does disrupt the adult world and its settlements. "Lay All Your Love On Me"-- not by accident the most irresistibly physical of any ABBA track-- spells it out: "a grown up woman should never fall so easily". On "The Visitors", set in a Soviet-occupied country, the European bourgeois world the band generally document becomes a terrified but precious pretense, one that can be shattered by a strangers' hand rattling the doorknob.
Strangest and maybe best of all is "The Day Before You Came", a simple portrait of an ordinary adult life on the day before it is changed forever: By what, we never learn. As the UK journalist Taylor Parkes notes in his fantastic 1995 essay on ABBA, the spectral choirs of backing vocals suggest a murderer as much as a lover. Here is the central ABBA theme: life is trivial and nothing happens, but the somethings that might happen are worse.
"The Day Before You Came" is full of awkward conversational lyrics: "I must have gone to lunch, at half past 12 or so, the usual place, the usual bunch". Their slight stiltedness is what makes ABBA great lyricists-- as non-native speakers they rarely risked too many metaphors or much poetic imagery, preferring a matter-of-fact reportage of feeling. Combined with Agnetha and Frida's occasionally halting pronunciation this could make them sound devastatingly direct and vulnerable.
Sometimes ABBA could be high-falutin', though: "Happy New Year" has a death's head lyric which pins down the essential horrid sameness of January 1st and concludes that "man is a fool and he thinks he'll be OK, dragging on feet of clay, never knowing he's astray". Of course "Happy New Year" also has a chorus that goes "Happy New Year! Happy New Year!" and ABBA were a band that didn't know how not to write a catchy song, so it has a use-value that fights against its bleakness-- thank goodness, or it would just be a moan. Because of the sheer sticking power of ABBA's melodies their lyrics can often be safely ignored-- in a pub quiz once I asked teams to identify a verse from "Knowing Me, Knowing You"-- "In these old familiar rooms, children once played. Now there's only emptiness, nothing to say". The song is one of the band's most famous in Britain, but nobody got it right.
In other words, ABBA's adultness, or darkness, is mostly strictly optional. In the same way as their characters lead well-ordered lives while suffering the occasional regret and pang of anxiety, ABBA never let their existential worries get in the way of their day job: writing immediately fabulous pop music. "The Visitors" may be about political paranoia but it's also got a blazing synthpop chorus. "The Day Before You Came" makes the rare move of putting its music where its mentality is and was one of the band's first flops.
Sometimes ABBA's musical instincts seem to sabotage the band's emotional impulses. "Our Last Summer" sticks to your head as doggedly as any of the band's hits until its bittersweet mood is jarred by a really downright vulgar guitar solo. Even this fits the mood, though. Then we were Summer heroes, it seems to be saying, now we're grown-up and awkward and the kind of basically not very cool people who think this song could use a bit of ill-placed axe work. Which is fine-- when the band did try and be fashionable (their recording jaunt to Miami at the mainstream height of disco, for instance) the results were even more inelegant than usual.
As a fan, I indulge ABBA's sometime musical inelegance as much as I enjoy their terrific songcraft, but what I keep coming back for is the sadness and richness in their songs. I've concentrated here on the lyrics because I think they're undervalued, but in the end the hooks are always going to be what sells ABBA, and this is probably as it should be. If you're fond of their hits at all though, keep their records around, sniff about their back catalog a little more, and don't dismiss them: You may find that your life ends up more like an ABBA song than you imagine.
