A Soundtrack for Mamma Mia 3 - Dance (While the music still goes on)

18 great Abba songs that are in neither MM nor MM2:

1. Eagle
   
2. Ring, Ring
   
3. That's Me
   
4. Disillusion
   
5. On And On And On
   
6. Cassandra
   
7. Under Attack
   
8. If It Wasn't For The Nights
   
9. As Good As New
   
10. Bang-A-Boomerang
    
11. Gonna Sing You My Love Song
    
12. Happy New Year
    
13. Dance (While The Music Still Goes On)
    
14. I Am The City
    
15. Rock Me
    
16. Summer Night City
    
17. The Way Old Friends Do
    
18. So Long [as the credits roll, Abba's best thumping rocker - all the movies' women can sing it and do Abba's own delightfully dippy choreography]
    

and on spotify.
I envisage MM3 taking place in Sydney, Australia and as fusing elements of MM and Muriel's Wedding. The climax is a performance by a reunited Abba where thousands of dancers whirl and co-sing around Circular Quay and The Rocks and the Opera House and even on the Harbour Bridge to, among other tunes, an extended/rearranged version of Dance (While The Music Still Goes On). The first 5 or so songs after Eagle on the Soundtrack are set in various locales around the world as characters deal with the frustrations and dissatisfactions in their lives before heading to Aus. for the big reunion. In principle I'd also support MM3 becoming a slightly more general salute to Swedish pop genius, e.g., include a couple of Robyn songs, say, With Every Heartbeat and Hang With Me.

Super Jumper (Abba vs Van Halen)

Mad Geniuses at work here both in the music mashup and in the video edit. It makes me so happy! Unutterably brilliant.

Abba's Frida (age 21) sings Ein ledig tag

The song is 'Ein ledig tag' ('A day off', 'A free day'). The setting is 26 September 1967, on a popular Swedish TV show, Hylands Hörna (although some versions of the videotape are date-stamped September 3).

It's a near virtuosic song, but Frida's pitch is perfect, and her expressive choices are beautiful. She's already a consummate professional, handling awkward questions at the beginning straightforwardly, firmly but lightly.

The segment reminds us of just how talented and, in Frida's case, feted the Abba boys and girls were as individuals. It's easy to imagine Frida fans from the '60s (and her teachers perhaps) originally tut-tutting that with Abba she was squandering her talent on pop music for kids, and that she was 'slumming it' by signing up with Benny and Bjorn in the 1970s.

Bonus Awesomeness: Frida sings a reworked Swedish version of 'Alice Blue Gown' in 1970. That vid. vaguely reminds one of Cremaster 1.

Wouldn't Frida have made a great Queen of Chain for Cremaster 5 had Ursula Andress not done it?!

Underrated Abba

10 excellent songs beyond Gold and More Gold (the embedded video below is a youtube playlist of these tracks):

1. If It Wasn't For The Nights
2. My Love, My Life
3. Gonna Sing You My Love Song
4. Disillusion
5. Dance (While The Music Still Goes On)
6. Like An Angel Passing Through My Room
7. The Piper
8. Dum Dum Diddle
9. Hey Hey Helen
10. I'm a Marionette

If It Wasn't For The Nights (Looking for a Happier Theresa Dunn)

If It Wasn't for the Nights is a fan-favorite album track from Abba's 'disco' album, Voulez-Vous (1979). It's musically effervescent but with near heart-breaking lyrics - a sad happy love song, europop, dance banger. Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977) is a famously muddled film, e.g., it keeps the book's ultra-shocking ending but makes its protagonist, Theresa Dunn (Diane Keaton) more fun-loving than (the book's) self-destructive, dramatizing her inner life with amusing fantasy sequences that are more Molly Dodd or Ally McBeal than Wild Strawberries or The Exorcist, say. In this vid., I use Abba's great disco-hit-that-never-was-but-should-have-been as a clue to how to edit together some of LFMG's lovelier set-ups and facial acting from Keaton to arrive at

Theresa Dunn, happy-sad rom-com heroine á là Fran Kubelik or Charity Valentine, only at the height of both disco and scuzzy, dangerous, '70s NYC/Chicago

At any rate, IIWFTN deserves to be much better known than it is (if only Madonna had covered it on MDNA...).

Great Songs of the '90s: Poster Children's He's My Star

A largely overlooked gem from 1995. I was reminded of this wonderful song again today by hearing Superstar (excerpt only) from Madonna's latest album, MDNA. There's a lot to be said in pop music for keeping things melodically and rhythmically simple (at least some of the time), which then allows for focus on timbre and on lyrics. That's the game Poster Children plays to perfection here. The problem with everything I've heard so far from MDNA, including Superstar, is that nothing fills up all the space that's left for timbral and lyrical explorations. M. doesn't seem to have any stories or personality she cares to share with us this time, and there's a general lack of effort on the timbre side of things. One wants to say something like 'M. can get anyone from Nile Rodgers on down to play on her records, so how has it come to this?' Anyhow, Poster Children's shoulda-been-a-hit shows everyone how it's done.

Update: Fave MDNA tracks after 1.5 full listens are Superstar, I'm a Sinner, Love Spent, and two bonus tracks, I Fucked Up and B-day Song. Still, none of these is an outright winner in my view. The best track on MDNA wouldn't make it into the top half of the tracks on Robyn's Body Talk (2010), which should be a little depressing to her M-ness. (Robyn's key collaborator Klas Ahlund co-authored Some Girls on MDNA, and that is indeed one of the better tracks. But all I could think of when listening to it was that Robyn would be a better fit for its attitude-heavy, robot-schtick.)

Update 2: What MDNA really needs is something like a cover of a great but relatively obscure Abba song to lift it. I'd recommend this forgotten gem from Voulez-vous for the purpose:

My Paprika, My Life

Paprika (2006) is the brilliant final film by anime director Satashi Kon, who died tragically of pancreatic cancer in 2010 at age 46. Bike was Andrew Brough's short-lived, post-Straitjacket Fits group. Its cover of Abba's 'My Love, My Life' was the standout track on the (patchy) 1995, Flying Nun Abba tribute, Abbasalutely. Paprika, Bike's cover, and Abba's original song (a somewhat unheralded album track from Arrival, but see here) all deserve to be more widely known than they are. I intend this vid. to contribute to building the audience for each of them, in part by demonstrating some surprising commonalities.

• Arrival was basically Abba's Rubber Soul/Revolver, which Bike literalizes.
• Abba's 30-something concerns about hall-of-mirrors effects in long-term, adult relationships are the principal realistic, domestic counterparts of Paprika's Philip K. Dick-style, divided-self, dream-within-dream-scapes.

I've seen it on your face
Tells me more than any worn-out old phrase
So now we'll go separate ways
Never again we two
Never again, nothing I can do

[Chorus] Like an image passing by, my love, my life
In the mirror of your eyes, my love, my life
I can see it all so clearly
(See it all so clearly)
Answer me sincerely
(Answer me sincerely)
Was it a dream, a lie?
Like reflections of your mind, my love, my life
Are the words you try to find, my love, my life
But I know I don't possess you
So go away, God bless you
You are still my love and my life
Still my one and only

I've watched you look away
Tell me is it really so hard to say?
Oh, this has been my longest day
Sitting here close to you
Knowing that maybe tonight we're through.

[Chorus]

Gaga does not write/perform Abba-worthy songs

To be fair, Gaga never said she did that I'm aware of (although, now, when her recorded output is becoming increasingly plodding and redundant and unpleasant, Gaga has exhibited a willingness to assert that her latest records are best-of-decade items), but many of Gaga's fans have made versions of the claim. Why it wouldn't have been enough to say that in 2009 Gaga got onto the sort of (largely producer-driven) hot streak of 3 or 4 excellent singles that Janet Jackson got onto with Control and then again with Rhythm Nation (and, beyond music, had one of those, culture-convulsing 'year of [insert artist name here]' years in 2009, the way only 20 or 30 pop music figures have ever done) is never explained.

Consider the following from The Stranger's David Schmader:

Lady Gaga's music is deeply conventional, but ingeniously so, marrying hooky verses to hooky bridges to hooky choruses (which are often split into two increasingly hooky parts), with one-off bonus hooks thrown in here and there for kicks, all of it produced with a consistency that's positively ABBA-esque. Just as Stephin Merritt (himself a die-hard ABBA fan) has made a career out of studious distillations of the Great American Songbook, Gaga's doing the same with dance pop, identifying the genre's most effective intoxicants and boiling them down into unprecedentedly effective pop crack.

Schmader never quite comes out and says that Gaga is as good as Abba or his beloved Stephin Merritt, but the overall impression is that, yes, Schmader thinks that that's her level.

Well, no. Not close. (I'm not sure that even Schmader thinks Gaga's so ingenious these days.) Just as Oasis had a few good songs but were never close to being as good as The Beatles and were made to look especially ridiculous by their own and others comparisons to this effect, so it's just obvious that Gaga 'is' Janet Jackson if she's lucky (although BTW isn't shaping up to be close to the equal of Rhythm Nation). That's still an amazing achievement for someone so young and relatively unformed, but if Abba-quality is going to be in the cards for Gaga, she's going to have to take some time off and really think about writing and about finding the right collaborators. Gaga's (evident to me at least!) manifest destiny - putting her piano and performance skills to work playing Jobraith covers and playing Judee Sill in a Sill bio-pic (or maybe playing both in some funky new miniseries for HBO) - remains undiscovered.

One of Us and Exposure

A late Abba single, One of Us has an interesting intro. and arrangement more generally. By 1981 Abba were trying to move with the times and use more electronic keyboard or sampled bass, which tended to be a real loss from the sinuous bass guitar of their peak records. I'm not sure what the technical details are for the bass in One of Us - it's part actual guitar, part keyboard-played sample I think - but for this song at least Abba's new approach worked very well:

I believe, however, that Abba may have stolen a bit of the bass and also the intro. sound more generally from the 1978 Gabriel/Fripp song, Exposure (whose more ingenious features, e.g., different instruments play in different time-signatures, also evidently inspired a lot of early Simple Minds):

What do you think?

The alleged rules

According to this blog post, women in popular music are sexistly scored according to something like the rule/policy that we can graphically represent by the territory under the following frontier:

I have a lot of other problems with the blog-posting, i.e., setting aside whether the rule allegation is correct, but in fact, I believe its frontier/rule allegation isn't correct, as any even half-way serious (albeit speculative) scatter-plotting would have shown. All your Kate Bush's and Siouxsie's and Aimee Mann's are in the top right quadrant of the graph. Probably Madonna, Gwen Stefani, Roisin Murphy, Chrissie Hynde, Feist, Jenny Lewis, Natasha Khan, and many others are there too. And super-talents with somewhat quirky looks from Tracey Thorn to Bjork to PJ Harvey to (Dresden Dolls') Amanda Palmer, to Carey and Tracyanne Camera Obscura to Tegan and Sara to Angel Deradoorian (all of whom I personally find very attractive - these are geek-goddesses at the very least) are hardly unheard of. Even if enough SOBs score them low on looks though, they've got talent points to burn and should still be, by consensus, above the frontier in the top left quadrant of the graph.

Of course, saying all this has involved us looking beyond our target blogger's principal focus: the true bubble-gum pop market. I agree that that arena is perhaps the most brutally superficial, 'looks first' market of all. Looking like Justin Timberlake or Gwen Stefani or Posh Spice or Rihanna (plus lots of luck) can get you initial success in that marketplace. But sustaining that success normally means proving that you've got real talent after all. Showing that you're more than just a pretty face or a slinky mover is, in most cases, almost like starting all over again. Not 1 in 20 tween-/teen-courting pop-stars gets over that hump, and then goes on to have a substantial, expanding career. That appears to be appropriate, and controlling for (oscillating through the decades) skew by sex in the bubble-gum pop market, I'd need to see serious evidence that that very difficult next step works in any especially sexist way. My own sense is that Justin Timberlake, David Cassidy, every New Kid on the Block, and so on, faced at least as much skepticism and vague resentment as Beyonce, Britney, the post-Spice Girls, and so on did. Getting off the brainless/talentless bimbo track - 'No, really, my looks got me in the door, but I can really play/sing etc., I'm Elton John, I'm Streisand, I'm Agnetha....' - after you've won the bimbo lottery isn't easy for anyone.

In my view, then, rather than allege spurious rules, it would be better just to look at plausible scatter-plots of both male and female popular musicians (i.e., on the same looks/talent axes). Plots we could agree on (supposing consensus about looks and talents scores could be found) might in fact be rather different for male and female stars. I'd guess, for example, that we'd find/agree that there are few, if any truly homely female stars. A sexist factor in culture at large - a double standard about looks that actors/television presenters/news-readers etc. have long complained about - could and probably does apply in pop music too. But what do the talent score distributions for the sexes in music look like after we control for looks scores? Roughly the same? Do they at least have similar means? Is either distribution skewed, and if so how exactly? What are the variances? Studying this would appear to be an interesting project, unlike some others.

Abba's 'That's me' gets Daft Punked

Abba's Dancing Queen had a terrific B-side, That’s me (both tracks are on the classic album Arrival). That's me is a great song, but it has an infamous, embarrassing/discomforting main couplet:

I’m Carrie not the kind of girl you’d marry/ That’s me.

That’s a very painful/exposed note to strike in a pop song (one that's very characteristic of later Abba as it happens). At any rate, a recent, v. fun, 7 min dance remix of That’s me solves this problem (such as it is) in a very Daft Punk-y way: dilate on the sing's piano riffs and underlying rhythms then use the two word title bare, i.e., just omit all the Carrie/marry stuff, along with all of the great, swoopy music-hall verses). Pain, be gone! Let's dance! Here's the nifty vid.:


Amazing how potent even very thinly-sliced Abba is. There's no reason why this couldn't be a huge hit tomorrow if properly released.