1. ABBA

Knowing me, knowing you, is the best I can do.

Welcome to my newsletter, the encyclopedia of me, which will chronicle moments in the ME-dia, as interpreted by ME. Like all encyclopedias, it will be more or less alphabetical. But it will not be completist in any way shape or form, plus, because it is about ME, I reserve the right to write about anything I want to, even if it’s not music or media and even if it doesn’t begin with A.

However, to get started, here is my first entry, which does start with A, and is on the band ABBA. I think that’s a good place to start, not only because I can’t think of a worthwhile band whose name comes before that in the alphabet, but because Abba are the font and summation of all cheesy 20th century popular music and are pretty much impossible to hate. Also, as you will see if you continue reading, they are connected to many other things, like the Buzzcocks, Climate Change activism, Will Ferrell and the Oscars. My favorite song by them is “Knowing Me Knowing You,” but that is neither here nor there.

ABBA

The other day the writer and singer Tracey Thorn posted a video on her Twitter of a mashup of the Buzzcocks and Abba, which was, she said, “so far up my street it’s coming out of my eyeballs.” The video served the dual purpose of reminding me how much I liked both those bands, but also that the Eurovision Song Contest, one of my favorite televised events of the year, is approaching. It will be held in Rotterdam May 18 – 20 and the final will be televised on May 22.

This year’s version may have a slightly higher profile than usual here, due to the Will Ferrell movie “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga” which was nominated for an Oscar for the song “Husavik.” Still, most Americans haven’t really heard of it. In a nutshell, the Eurovision Song Contest is a widely televised event which pits European countries-plus-Israel against each other in a weekend of extravagant song performances, which are then voted on by phone, by the people of the participating nations. One way of thinking about it is as the Olympics of song, only minus entrants from America, Africa, Australia, or Asia. As with the Olympics, many of the entrants are only pretending to be the nationality they say they are: for example, Celine Dion once competed as a Swiss person. Also as with the Olympics, contestants are special people who are often related to other special people – because special people beget special people. Check out this video from the Swedish entrant of 2009. The singer is…wait for it…the mother of Greta Thunberg.  

I love the contest for many reasons, not least of which is the cheesy music it gives us, but more existentially, I love the way it exposes the limitations of treating the acts of music appreciation as if it is a contest. In the case of Eurovision, it will surprise exactly no one that the countries most likely to win by popular vote are the ones with no serious beef with other countries, which is hardly an objective measure of quality. Similarly, in real life, lists of “the best” ten, or 100, or 500, artists, or albums, or songs, or concerts, are routinely and ridiculously held out as the basic unit of measurement for rock journalists to use as empirical data. If you work as a rock journalist for any period of time, you’ll inevitably have had to turn to a phrase like ‘named the 56th greatest album of all time by Rolling Stone magazine”[1] to make your point. I presume it’s obvious what’s wrong with that sentence, but in case it’s not, suffice to say, music is not a contest, and if it were, Rolling Stone should not be the judges.

But back to Abba! Abba is the sine qua non of Eurovision music, a genre sometimes called Euro-disco. The band achieved its notoriety via their (winning) appearance on the contest in 1974, and have since gone on to worldwide stardom, yet Abba’s whole presence in the world whiffs of the worst type of Rom-Com fantasy. Every single time you see them, they look like they are like the four most awkward kids in high school clad in their grandma’s idea of nice clothing, sporting outdated haircuts and thick glasses, and who, at the end of the narrative, will rip off their outer wear to reveal that underneath it all they are super-heroes. Then they will fall in love with one another and live happily ever after.

(This is more or less the plot of the Fire Saga movie, sorry to be a spoiler.)  

Abba’s songs also have that same quality of purity and ridiculousness rolled into one big ball of corn. They are full of vapid platitudes and sung in words of one syllable and yet it is humanly impossible not to enjoy them on some level or other. Even my daughter likes them, despite the fact that she was subjected to a loud and inescapable loop of the movie “Mamma Mia” at the tender age of 7 when the Amtrak train she and her father were on got caught in a snowbank and they were transferred to a greyhound bus, and I’m pretty sure we all have a quintessential Abba moment like that. Mine took place in the basement discotheque at a resort in the town of Sousse, Tunisia, the details of which I will leave to your imagination, and your own is probably equally intense.

In conclusion, Abba is an excellent band, so please sign up and stay tuned to my newsletter, wherein I will probably review this year’s contest – as well as Tracey Thorne’s new book “My Rock ‘N’ Roll Friend,” a portion of the Oscars (I say a portion because I can never sit through the whole damn thing), and a lot of other things as well, all more or less alphabetically. I’m going to post on Thursdays and Mondays – and maybe other days as well – and the next post is going to be on the magical band A-HA.  

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[1] i.e. “Exile In Guyville,” by Liz Phair