Having sold nearly 500 million albums since 1972, ABBA is not only one of the best-selling bands of all time, but is THE best-selling band outside of the English-speaking world. Although they started out in disco, ABBA was never confined by any particular musical genre. They wore great outfits, they gave good face, and they’ve been international cultural icons for more than four decades. So, when I hear people name ABBA as their “guilty pleasure,” as if enjoying literally perfect pop music was something to be ashamed of, I am genuinely baffled. Some people become consumed by that guilt. They take their natural love of exquisite harmonies, danceable beats, and universal sentiment and they bury it so far down deep under their hipster coolness that they sometimes have the audacity to say, out loud, that they actually hate ABBA. Others roll their eyes whenever they hear 120 beats per minute, and will regale you with one of a hundred tired, boring, anti-disco screeds, and they will point to ABBA with righteous indignation as the sine qua non of what everything that is wrong with popular music, because deep in their hearts they hate joy.
To those people, I ask: who hurt you?
No one really hates ABBA. I’ll concede that that may be more of an aspirational claim that a descriptive one, like “the arc of the moral universe is long and it bends toward justice,” but I need to believe it.
My selection for a song that should be played LOUD is ABBA’s “Waterloo,” which they wrote for the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, which they won. It’s tells the story of a love that is so strong, so overpowering, and so overwhelming that your “only chance is giving up the fight” and surrendering as Napoleon did at the Battle of Waterloo. Here it is:
Crank it up.
Runners-up for #30DaySongChallenge, Day 5:
- Aretha Franklin’s “Think”
- Stevie Wonder’s “Sign, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours”
- Fun’s “Some Nights”
- Three Dog Night’s “Joy To The World”
- Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk”
- Michael Jackson’s “Dirty Diana”