Thinking about ABBA
Here’s my latest Pitchfork column - a piece on ABBA!
I deliberately wrote it as a quite ‘old school’ bit of music criticism - heavy focus on lyrical meaning, artistic themes, privileging of maturity and meaningfulness etc etc. It was fun to write like that - I constantly fret while writing Popular that I care too much about the lyrics (I can’t help it! Blame Morrissey!) so it was relaxing to let this tendency OFF THE LEASH.
I showed it to Dave Moore of Cure For Bedbugs (see links bar), who had (sort of) requested this column. He picked up on something quite deliberate - no addressing or attempting to convince or slagging off people who hate ABBA. My feeling is that if the rest of the piece is treating ABBA like a band firmly in the rock canon, it should do so in this way too, and assume that the initial question “Why are ABBA worth thinking about?” has already been answered to the satisfaction of every reasonable reader!
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