#13 - SOS / ABBA

Has there ever been a pop band which has been as loved - and as hated - as ABBA? Even in the period before they appeared on the Eurovision Song Contest, when they were only well-known in Sweden, there were protests held and satirical songs written about them. In parallel with the long history of critical condemnations of ABBA, however, they have attracted greater love and admiration, from a wider range of listeners, than perhaps any other band of the era. What explains this range of reactions to them and why are they still so popular decades after their late-70s heydey? I break down their early hit, ‘SOS’, among others, to try to answer the surprisingly tricky question of what we’re listening to when we listen to ABBA.

All the songs discussed in this episode, including the original recording of 'SOS' can be heard here. Portishead's version of 'SOS' is not on Spotify but can be found here at the time of writing. If you're enjoying the series, please leave a review on Apple podcasts; thank you.

With very special thanks to Paul Wierdak, the producer of this episode. 

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Secret Life of Songs, a podcast on pop songs and what they mean to us with me, Anthony, a musician who writes and performs under the name sky coloured. Is there a pop band which has attracted more devotion and more contempt than ABBA? In August 2008, when the musical based on their music, Mamma Mia, was breaking records on Broadway and the West End, cultural commentator Neil McCormick wrote an article in The Daily Telegraph entitled, 'I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do Not Like ABBA'. Back in their late '70s heydey, the writer Robert Christgau, known as the ‘Dean of American rock critics’, wrote a single sentence reviewing one of their albums: 'We have met the enemy and they are them'. Even in their pre-Eurovision period, when they were only well-known in Sweden, there were protests held and satirical songs performed targeting their alleged commercialism and lack of heart. 

And yet you don't have to look far to find equally committed paeans of affection and love for the band. When introducing a 1993 BBC documentary on them, presenter John Peel says, ‘In the 1970s when I should have been humming Pink Floyd B-sides, I caught myself humming ABBA singles. Now, when I should be humming Nirvana B-sides, I catch myself humming ABBA singles.' More recently, figures from music as diverse as Ray Davies, the lead vocalist and songwriter in the Kinks, Nile Rodgers, the guitarist in legendary disco band Chic, new wave artists Chrissie Hynde and Elvis Costello, contemporary singer-songwriter John Grant, and the conductor Charles Hazlewood, all speak of their admiration for the band, and there's an equally widespread love for them beyond music. The film-maker Ben Wheatley, who used the song 'S.O.S' - the subject of this episode - in his adaptation of JG Ballard's High-Rise, said in a Q&A: 'I am an unironic and unapologetic fan of ABBA. I love ABBA. I'm Ben Wheatley and I love ABBA'. As with the John Peel quote, expressions of ABBA fandom often come accompanied by a wry smile, as if voicing love for ABBA is a little shameful; it's a small confession; it has to be done with a knowing nod to - what, exactly? 

I'm fascinated by ABBA, not just because I also love their music, but because of this startling range of reactions to them, and what it suggests about the complex effects of their music on us. Within ABBA-hatred, there are two broad types: one which sees their success as proof of the vulgarity of popular taste, a point typically made by figures aligned with the political right, and, on the other hand, one which sees in their career a dereliction of an artist's responsibility to oppose prevailing conformist social norms, usually made by those on the left. It's hard to escape the feeling, when looking at the way people have responded to ABBA, that we're also talking about the way people feel about the state of the modern world; in reacting to ABBA they're also taking an opportunity, consciously or not, to voice their feelings about modernity as they see it. I'm going to look at this song in the context of ABBA's story to try to understand what it is we're reacting to when we listen to them, what we sense is being reflected in their music, what produces all that vitriol among the haters and all that complex affection for them among those of us who love them wholeheartedly. 

In the first few bars of the verse in 'S.O.S' we get the first clue as to what set ABBA apart from the bulk of popular music as it existed up to the point they arrived on the scene. We've been established in a clear D minor in the introduction - itself not unusual - but the moment the harmony shifts from the starting key, on the word 'days', we hear a movement which takes its cue from a musical style far removed from standard popular musical influences. It does not move to the subdominant, as it would do in a minor blues. Instead, it shifts to the dominant 7th, in an inversion. Then, after a single bar, it moves elegantly back to the tonal minor, and one without a flattened 7th, as again would be typical in blues-influenced music. It's a pure minor triad, and in combination with the accompaniment figure in the piano, with its intimations of the Alberti bass pattern, the stylistic reference point here is clearly that of the European classical tradition. In fact, the harmonic similarity of a piece such as Beethoven's Fur Elise is perceptible - you can almost play the two pieces on top of each other. 

But of course this isn't classical music - for a start we've already distinctly heard a synthesiser and an electric guitar doubling the piano melody in the introduction. And in just a few bars, the synth is fully foregrounded in the great blossoming of the two-bar figure lifting us into the chorus, which transports us abruptly away from anything pseudo-classical and into a style more closely approximating folk-rock, with jangling acoustic guitars and a sudden rich mass of vocal harmonies. Finally, in the second part of the chorus, on the line 'when you're gone', the song becomes more like the glam rock of ABBA's era, with chunky power chords moving in parallel motion, and notes from the blues scale suddenly cropping up in the melody. 

In a sense, it isn't surprising that by 1976 ABBA had become masters of weaving together a multitude of different styles with such adeptness you barely notice their incongruity. By the time they started performing together as ABBA in 1974, each of the four members of the group had had notable success within the Swedish music industry, in bands and as solo artists, playing music directly derived from American-style folk, jazz and rock n roll, but also influences from much closer to home, like Schlager, a central European song tradition which drew on operetta and traditional folk music, wildly popular in the region from the 1950s through to the early 1970s. 

If you read about the often circuitous combinations and recombinations of the line-ups which would eventually lead to the formation of ABBA, and the stylistic and artistic decisions taken even once the band were formed and finding huge success, what stands out as a powerful common thread is the lack of abiding authorial intent: there is no sense that what any of them were doing was searching for 'their sound' - some innate and unique creative genius they were striving to access - instead, what seemed to shape their decisions at every juncture was an effort to land on what would sell, or what would build their profile as a band, most famously, their attempts, eventually successful, to appear on the Eurovision Song Contest. Styles were adopted then quickly discarded. The formation of the band itself - a 'supergroup' of sorts, consisting of four already well-known Swedish musical personalities - was partly a result of the judgment that together they could achieve greater chart success. 

If Postmodernism is, as in Fredric Jameson's formulation, the cultural logic of late capitalism, ABBA's trajectory encapsulates this, as it does his view that the true watershed technological development of the postmodern was the arrival of colour television in the early 1970s, given the centrality of screen culture to their story, from their Eurovision appearance in 1974 to the astonishing success of the Mamma Mia franchise in this century. And there are further points of contact between ABBA's work and some of the most familiar themes of postmodernism, itself an idea, or set of ideas, which were gaining traction at the same time as ABBA’s rise to global fame, through writers such as Jameson and Jean-Francois Lyotard, whose influential The Postmodern Condition was published in 1979. 

When, for instance, we consider the notion that one of the key characteristic traits of postmodernism is the ‘play of styles’ - setting a multitude of different stylistic signifiers alongside each other in a complex pastiche or patchwork - we come quite close to a description of ABBA’s whole approach to production, what MacCormick sniffily described in his Daily Telegraph piece as their ‘variety show’ quality. As Jameson puts it, ‘postmodernism ... ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production [in a] heightened bricolage’, a phrase which might be describing the first minute of ‘S.O.S’, in which ABBA gesture towards a jazz ballad, a glam rock song, late 60s folk-rock, and classical music, all knitted together in a ‘heightened bricolage’, displaying an almost uncanny refusal to treat any one sound or style as more worthy of reverence than any other. 

And that startling unpretentiousness - the lack of respect paid to given distinctions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art - ties ABBA to another key facet of the postmodern, as described by Jameson, who observed that ‘one fundamental feature of [postmodernism] … [is] the effacement … of the older ... frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture’. This tendency to reference disparate, often unlikely musical styles, is seen on their 1975 eponymous album when they include an instrumental rock-classical piece, ‘Intermezzo No. 1’ alongside ‘Pick a Bale of Cotton’, a honky-tonk medley of Leadbelly songs. These are the sort of hodge-podge moments sometimes held up by ABBA critics as proof-positive of their vacuousness but, in the first place, it’s a rare and underrated quality to care so little about your credibility, and if they are misfires, perhaps they might be more generously viewed as failed experiments, the sorts of experiments all ambitious artists have to undertake. They may fail in themselves but are invaluable in leading to later triumphs, such as, in the case of ABBA, their greatest and most distinctive production, ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! A Man After Midnight’, which brilliantly synthesises funk and disco with a piccolo line that could have been lifted from Bizet or Puccini. 

It bears repeating just how unusual an accomplishment this deft patchwork of styles was. They are rarely if ever associated with prog rock, but of course at the same time as ABBA’s formation, bands such as Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, preceded by Procol Harum and the Wallace Collection in the previous decade, were gaining credit for their use of classical music in rock and pop forms. But simply because ABBA’s integration of influences was more seamless, because they resisted the impulse to flaunt their mastery of different styles, instead binding every stylistic gesture to the overall purpose of a song, they aren’t typically thought of as progressive. It might seem a pedantic point but I’ve always thought that the standard begrudging admission of their critics - that they ‘wrote good tunes’ - is wide of the mark: in fact, ABBA’s melodies, strictly speaking, are often unremarkable: it’s in their brilliant mastery of tonal harmony and in their songs’ dazzling arrangements, that the distinctiveness of their music is revealed. You can dip into virtually any ABBA song, certainly any on their Gold compilation albums, and find some clever melodic sequence or subtly devastating harmonic movement, which is one half of the reason these songs have had such remarkable durability. Think of the way the verse harmony in ‘Dancing Queen’ moves briefly out of the home key - A major - into E, before landing on a B minor 7th chord, cancelling the sense of E major, and heralding a return, via a decisive 2-5-1 sequence, back to A major, so that each chorus hits us with a feeling of renewal, of being born again. Or the entire, deceptively sophisticated tonal scheme of ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’, which captures the lyric’s theme of the difficult final acceptance of a relationship’s end by delaying the arrival of the home key after going through a sequence of open-ended harmonic patterns and long melodic suspensions, as on ‘goodbye’. Or the succession of yawning spread 7th chords in ‘The   Takes It All’, exquisitely dovetailing with the song’s theme of separation and strain, previewed first in the introduction, echoed in the piano accompaniment throughout the verse, before appearing at the song’s defining moment, in the melody at the outset of the chorus.

Yet it’s only by considering the way ABBA developed their songs in the studio - their consistently inventive orchestrations and innovative use of studio techniques - that we can fully understand the unique character of their music. Interviews with the technicians who worked with ABBA demonstrate just how finely-wrought these arrangements were, and what’s more, give us a sense of what the band were trying to achieve in the recording studio. Michael B Tretow, the sound engineer on all of ABBA’s studio albums, explaining the density of their style, says that ‘our aim was to give as much music for the money so these arrangements are very complicated: [there were] a lot of things going on’, and goes on to describe how, once all the many parts had been recorded, they would overdub the whole band: as he puts it, ‘[what if] everybody plays their part all over again and I put it on different tracks and I adjust the speed slightly out of tune and there it was - it was so huge’. This technique of doubling the same part on top of itself and adjusting the timing or tuning of one very slightly - essentially a sort of manual chorus effect - does not simply make it sound bigger: it excites or brightens the sound, which as Tretow makes clear, was part of the point: ‘we developed a thing with vocals that you could actually overdub by altering the pitch even more. It sounded thinner and brighter and you combine that with the original vocals and that made them like … sparkling dust over them’, which he says accompanied by a sprinkling gesture, implying that this technique, used over and over in ABBA’s music, gave the sound its glittering, shining quality. You can hear it in the very first bars of ‘S.O.S’: the piano intro is played on two pianos, with one being progressively detuned, taking the piano - subtly but unmistakably - out of its natural, bare state, as might be expected from a pure jazz ballad, say, and into a glossier, more artificial, perceptibly produced sound-world.

This idea of the music’s shining surface is another point of overlap between ABBA and a common theme of postmodernist style. Film theorist Pansy Duncan, for instance, has written about ‘postmodernism’s fascinatingly glossy surfaces’, and Jameson himself wrote about postmodernism’s ‘representations [which are] sheer surface or superficiality’. Even in an art form such as pop music, in which what drama there is very often derives from the tension between the surface and what’s implied beneath it, the role of the surface in ABBA stands out; as mere superficiality to their detractors, but to everyone else, a key part of their complex meaning. Elvis Costello, for instance, describes them as having ‘a very surface appeal, you know, pretty-looking people and a slightly kitsch look, slightly kitsch music at times, and then these really great tragedies.’ This idea that there’s a deep sadness in ABBA, buried beneath ostensibly cheerful, upbeat music, has been picked up on by many of their listeners, and endorsed by Benny Andersson himself, who has placed this aspect of their music in a line of Scandinavian melancholy running through Edvard Grieg, August Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman. 

There’s something a bit peculiar in this idea - which crops up frequently in writing on ABBA - that there’s some hidden darkness at the heart of their music, especially when considering a song like ‘S.O.S’, which opens with the lines, ‘Where are those happy days, they seem so hard to find’. If there’s sadness here, it doesn’t seem very buried. In trying to answer the question of why, despite this, many listeners still insist the music’s true feelings are hidden, we approach this fundamental question of the complex emotionality of ABBA, and, what’s more, hit again on a key aspect of postmodernism, what Jean Baudrillard saw as its characteristic retreat from ‘desire [and] passion’ into a ‘cold and cool universe’. One of Jameson’s most well-known descriptors of the qualities of postmodernism was what he called its ‘waning of affect’, by which he meant its shying away from direct expressions of emotion and towards flat representations, towards a depthlessness and the absence of a sense of the ‘inner world’ of the human subject, a transition he demonstrates with the journey from Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893) to Andy Warhol’s prints of Marilyn Monroe (1962).

I think of these ideas when considering the vocal performance of Agnetha Faltskog in the verses of ‘S.O.S’. Her voice is never treated individualistically; it’s never fetishised for its particular quirks; it has a pure, almost colourless quality and, with the possible exception that she’s singing English lyrics in a Swedish accent, is entirely without idiosyncrasy. Her emotional expression never seems greater or lesser than what is exactly proportionate to the sense of the lyrics - you could say it was a neutral delivery if that didn’t imply that an emotionally neutral performance of these lyrics would draw far more attention to itself than what she consistently gives. The art critic Kristian Vistrup Madsen, in a brilliant recent essay on the band, writes, ‘Agnetha was always the star of their music videos, but when the camera points at her, she aims her blank stare somewhere beyond us.’ Occasionally, in TV performances, her male bandmates Benny and Bjorn seem to smile knowingly at us, as if they also think the whole thing’s a bit frivolous, but that’s never the case with Anni-Frid, and especially Agnetha, who maintains a steady expression throughout, to accompany her scrupulously even vocal delivery.

I wonder if it’s this that explains why people rarely take ABBA’s expressions of heartbreak at face value. There’s an absence of rawness, of grit, in ABBA’s style. The whole point of the remarkable cover of ‘S.O.S’ which Portishead’s Beth Gibbons made for the High-Rise soundtrack is that you suddenly hear the song’s expression of suffering directly; the song’s tempo is slowed, Gibbons’ voice is exposed, and the pain in each phrase is suddenly heard with shocking immediacy. In ABBA’s own recordings, it’s never like this: even ‘The Winner Takes It All’ eventually builds to a thumping 4-to-the-floor disco anthem. 

And this lack of the obvious signifiers of emotional authenticity in ABBA’s music is at the core of what aggravates those who hate it. The music writer and DJ Dave Haslam puts it like this: ‘There was a sense in the 70s that Sweden and these people and the settings of these videos were better than us somehow, and they represented something quite gorgeous that we could only aspire to. We allowed ourselves to buy into this idea and that’s why something like punk was so important, it kind of turned it all around and said, “culture isn’t about something gorgeous that comes from overseas, [that] makes us feel good, it’s about something much closer to home, our own streets and our own hearts and our own desires.’ He goes on: ABBA ‘had more top 3 singles than Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Joy Division put together but I would argue that their cultural significance is nothing compared to any of those groups because all those groups went deeper and all those groups knocked the world off its axis and all those groups discovered new things, new ways of articulating how we feel’. In critiquing ABBA in this way, Haslam is making himself a standard-bearer for the modernist conception of art, in wholesale contrast to the postm odernist, as described by the essayist Perry Anderson, who put the difference like this: ‘The culture of modernism was … an art cast in heroic mould, it was constitutively oppositional: not simply flouting conventions of taste, but more significantly, defying the solicitations of the market … postmodernism … by contrast … expressed a new relation to the market … a culture of accompaniment, rather than antagonism, to the old economic order’. ABBA’s music, in Haslam’s characterisation, is escapist (it merely ‘makes us feel good’), it's creatively exhausted (it does not ‘discover new things [or] ways of articulating how we feel’), and above all, it inscribes a comprehensive complicity with the market, both by presenting an aspirational lifestyle in their videos and album covers - much as advertising of the era did - and by itself being colossally successful in the music marketplace. The representatives of true art that he puts forward - punk, Patti Smith, and so on - were, by contrast, ‘constitutively oppositional’, or as he puts it, they ‘knocked the world off its axis’. 

Reacting to all this, I’d first want to probe a little at the implied criteria for inclusion in Haslam’s list of the truly significant, truly expressive music of the era. It all features distorted guitars, a naturalistic production style, an embrace of rough edges and an aversion to sound processing. Not only does this seem to me to be a narrow definition of musical value but it might also be seen in the light of the long-established critical practice of invoking rock music’s authenticity to condemn other, less prestigious musical styles. As we saw in the first episode of this series, when rock fans chanted ‘disco sucks’ as they burned Donna Summer records, such claims have often been made on behalf of a dominant culture innately exclusionary to people for whom desire and identity did not correspond to accepted norms. Following the same pattern, ABBA’s music has found deep affection from the same communities who took disco to heart: the affinity between ABBA and queer culture has been clear from the outset of their career, culminating gloriously in the 1994 film and musical, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. And it might be inadvertent but isn’t there also something faintly nativist about Haslam’s argument that culture should be ‘about something much closer to home, our own streets’? 

It brings us to what I think is the more fundamental issue with critiques such as Haslam’s: what world are we expecting our artists to reflect? The world we live in, one dominated by the utopian promises of modern marketing and globalisation, or an imagined one where that Romantic idea of authenticity is still viable, where the defining features of late capitalism are somehow absent? One reason why ABBA’s music can still affect us so much is surely that the world they lived in and reflected, one outlined by theorists of the postmodern, is still the one we live in. Many writers have connected the emergence of postmodernism with the defeat of the radical politics of the 1960s: the geographer David Harvey, for instance, described postmodernism as a ‘withdraw[al] into a kind of shell-shocked, blasé or exhausted silence’ in the wake of the inexorable advance of the New Right across the US and Western Europe. To the extent that we are still living in that wake, in the failure of alternatives to the capitalist status quo, perhaps this also is a reason for the enduring resonance of both postmodernism and the music of ABBA.

But this correlation between what ABBA present to us and the themes of late capitalism is not, as their critics assume, the same thing as complicity in it, and I think the reason for this circles back on the question of the complex emotional landscape of ABBA’s glittering pop tragedies, their bricolage production style, and above all in Agnetha’s blank, enigmatic expression. That sense, that hiding beneath the music’s shining surface is a desperation and sadness which in fact is being directly stated in the lyrics, what we might call the ‘hiding-in-plain-sight’ quality of ABBA’s emotional expression, I think is actually a savvy guide to enduring the false promises and disappointments of life in modernity. It's worth noting that, applied to music, the idea of 'layers', of 'surface' and 'depths', is ultimately a metaphor. Everything which occurs in a moment of music is encountered simultaneously; the listener cannot sift through the various elements of the sound one by one, they occur all at once. The metaphor of music’s layers is based perhaps in the image of the musical score, or the mixing desk, in which different sounds are represented by a layer of space. In fact, we hear music as a unity: the glitter, the melancholy, the steadiness in Agnetha's voice, all is heard as one, and the result is a whole and coherent stance towards emotional experience. This is my pain, it says, or my joy, or my desire, or my regret, and I understand that the world as it exists has rendered emotional disclosure inherently suspect, but nonetheless I am delivering it with a credible, unashamed stoicism: a stoicism which is embodied partly in Agnetha’s unflinching composure, and partly in the sheer delight that can be contained in inventive, masterfully-crafted pop music. Madsen writes, ‘ABBA’s music was always about keeping your chin up … this is what resounds throughout ABBA’s oeuvre: the impossibility of utopia, and the sad beauty of mindless perseverance … In early disco music, as it came out of black and queer communities in the US, pain was a friend you had to learn how to dance with.’ I’m not sure I can go as far as Jameson, when he says that the products of the postmodern age contain a buried idea of a ‘redeemed social order’; like Madsen, I don’t hear utopianism in ABBA, but I do think their music presents some sort of survival guide, and, while it isn’t a roadmap to a better world, there is - and surely will be - a necessary role for the principle of perseverance in any sort of future we might hope to see. 

Next time on the Secret Life of Songs I’ll be talking about techno, a genre of electronic music which emerged in post-industrial Detroit in the early 1980s. It was pioneered by a trio of musicians known as ‘The Belleville Three’, one of whom, Kevin Saunderson, would go on to produce the internationally successful hit ‘Good Life’, the focus of the episode. It’s a song which asks an old question in a new way: what is the good life and what does it look like in the wake of the many transformations in our ways of living wrought by modern technology?

This episode was produced by Paul Wierdak. If you're enjoying the series please consider rating and reviewing it wherever you get your podcasts.