Arnon Grunberg

Vodka belt

Paradox

On Abba – Chal Ravens in LRB:

“In 1977, Abba were waiting at Arlanda Airport in Stockholm when they noticed a dishevelled young man charging towards them. Their security guards spotted him too, along with the spatter of dried vomit on his leather jacket. ‘You’re my favourite band! I love you!’ a 20-year-old Sid Vicious slurred, as his idols were hurried to safety. Improbably, Vicious’s favourite Abba song was the gloopy ballad ‘Fernando’, which, in its English-language version, imagined a conversation between two old Mexican revolutionaries: ‘Do you still recall the fateful night we crossed the Rio Grande?’ The punks loved Abba. The Sex Pistols songwriter Glen Matlock borrowed a few notes from ‘SOS’ for ‘Pretty Vacant’. Siouxsie Sioux and the teenage misfits who hung out at Club Louise, a lesbian bar in Soho, danced to Abba and Diana Ross in the basement. Elvis Costello lifted the piano frills of ‘Dancing Queen’ for ‘Oliver’s Army’. Abba seemed to hark back to the early days of rock’n’roll, capturing its bubblegum paradox of disposability and durability, its youthful immediacy if not its charged libido. They steered clear of 1970s excess, indulging in neither progressive pomp nor sidelong voyaging.”

(…)

“To this hodgepodge, known as schlager in its mass-produced pop form, Abba added the Anglo-American songbook – from Leiber and Stoller to the Beach Boys, the Beatles and Motown – and a dollop of classical flair via Benny’s ornamented arrangements. Like so many of their songwriting heroes, the group specialised in hiding their sadness behind smiles. ‘Even the happier songs are melancholy at their core,’ Benny told Jan Gradvall for the band’s ‘approved’ biography. The blues weren’t native to Sweden, but ‘we had some kind of blues,’ he noted in his Hall of Fame speech, ‘because above the 59thlatitude from eastern Russia, through Finland, into Scandinavia, there is this melancholy belt, sometimes mistaken for the vodka belt.’”

(…)

“The boys had met on Sweden’s ‘folkpark’ circuit in 1966 and quickly started writing songs together, encouraged by their soon-to-be manager and label boss Stig Anderson. In 1970 the four of them went on a couples’ holiday to Cyprus, where they marvelled at the combined effect of their voices during evening singalongs. Within three years they had pooled their individual careers, and names, into Abba – with permission from the original Abba, one of Sweden’s biggest producers of herring.”

(…)

“‘The Rolling Stones’ manager never spoke of how much his band made, but ours did,’ Björn said. Complaining that the taxman was the chief beneficiary of Abba’s success, Anderson embarked on a series of avoidance schemes, including an umbrella company called Abba Invest, the purchase of a sports equipment firm that went bust after a bad winter, and a bungled deal for crude oil that lost the band several million dollars. Yet Abba themselves have always defended Sweden’s redistributive system, choosing to stay put rather than flee to tax-friendly domiciles; only Frida left, moving to Switzerland in the late 1980s to live with her third husband, Prince Ruzzo Reuss.”

(…)

“It’s hard to tell the Abba story without creating a tragic heroine or two. In the 1990s Agnetha remarried briefly, embarked on an inexplicable relationship with her stalker and stopped listening to music for a decade. Frida was vaporised into the European aristocracy, but her prince died young, and her daughter in a car crash soon afterwards. The gossip press painted them as a distant princess and a hysterical recluse, but in these books it’s the boys who come across as the weird ones. Emotionally distant and seemingly free of the parental guilt that ate away at the absent mothers, they’re tight-lipped even with their approved biographer. Björn struggles to remember his own life and blames this on his parents’ ‘unequal and very unhappy marriage’. ‘If I wanted to write my memoirs I wouldn’t be able to,’ he says. Benny, meanwhile, wonders whether his autobiography could be in musical notes rather than words: ‘That way you don’t have to write anything or tell anyone about how things have been.’”

(…)

“If the Beatles cast a shadow over pop songwriting from the 1970s to the 1990s, every decade since has belonged to Abba. The musical Mamma Mia! opened in the West End in 1999, followed by two film adaptations saved only by the presence of Meryl Streep. (Completists can also visit Mamma Mia! The Party, a rowdy themed restaurant in London’s O2 Arena and the only spin-off not sampled for this assignment.) Even the Swedes came to terms with Abba being their most famous export. By the 1990s economic boom and bust had hollowed out Swedish social democracy. Pop culture ate itself, yet Abba remained – and remain – pure and unspoiled, an original juxtaposition of modernity and folk tradition. What came after was always going to be a ‘blank parody’, as Fredric Jameson would have it. Nobody in Steps, to my knowledge, played the accordion. ‘Is there no one who can come up with any new stuff, who can do something corresponding to what we did back then?’ Benny wondered in 2000. ‘Something isn’t quite right, that’s not how it should be.’”

(…)

“But the new songs can’t dim the glow of Abba Voyage. Best not to spoil it for those who haven’t been, but it’s notable that the space is designed so that the audience can see one another. We’re lit up in our sequinned glad rags, experiencing something like time travel. I find that I’m crying into my red wine, thinking of my parents, both dead now, who met in 1974 at a hotel disco in the Arctic Circle, close to where Frida was born. I’m not the only one experiencing a twinge of saudade in this crowd of old friends, sisters, grandsons, divorcées, the whole family picnic. It’s enough to silence any doubts about the commercial spectacle. Who needs a soul when you can live for ever?”

Read the article here.

Right, no soul is needed when you can live forever. Probably, no soul is a prerequisite for living for ever.

And pop culture ate itself anyhow.

This sentence is a novel in itself: “Agnetha remarried briefly, embarked on an inexplicable relationship with her stalker and stopped listening to music for a decade.”

Inexplicable, yes, like most relationships.

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