Tag: Abba

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Music Industry Reform

The music industry is structured to rip off artists and fans. It’s time the government legislated minimum standards for all recording contracts specifically to prevent companies from charging artists for ancillary services they are actually providing to themselves, and to guarantee minimum royalties per unit sold regardless of advances. Producers should also be prohibited from seizing co-writing credits for songs they record even if they suggest specific arrangements and instrumentation. And yes, break up the ticket agent monopolies so that venues and artists are free to choose the lowest cost agencies. Every recording on which the singer is auto-tuned (which is almost all of them now) should be labelled as such so we can tell who really is a good singer and who is just processed noise.

And it should be illegal to claim that ABBA was ever really anything more than a banal pop band.

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Meryl Streep Can’t Sing

There have been shameful moments in Hollywood history this past decade– events and appearances and speeches that made a rational person cringe with revulsion and consider changing the channel to a preacher of faith healer or Fox News or anything… Hugh Grant. Halle Berry’s Oscar speech. Michael Moore chasing an elderly Charlton Heston down the walkway of his home. Chris Rock’s mockery of Jude Law…

And my nomination for the lowest of the low: Meryl Streep “singing” “Winner Takes it All” in Mama Mia. Performed in one take, according to the bedazzled talents behind the camera. And in interview after interview, the actors in the film admit that they never respected Abba back in the 70’s but now that they have been paid, they can see that they really were musical giants– and did you see Meryl nail it in one take? Suddenly, Bjorn Ulvaeus is the Swedish Bob Dylan.

This self-aggrandizing, cloying, critics-be-damned attitude is supposed to be lovable on some deeper level than I can ever imagine, like Sarah Palin’s leadership qualities or the expressions on the faces of Secret Service agents. But what if it is just as it appears to be: a massive, slobbering wet kiss of desperation: no, I don’t have any real talent, but because I am a celebrity, you may stand back astounded at my generosity of spirit, that I would be so silly on purpose. Because it’s just fun.

No it’s not. Real fun is the Beatles’ “Help”, “The Pink Panther”, and Abbie Hoffman threatening to surround the Pentagon with meditating hippies and levitate it (the generals announced that they would stop him). Abbie, not ABBA.

As Dr. Seuss once observed: this “fun” proclaimed by Meryl Streep is the wrong kind of fun. She has confused her own singing with the careful talent that Richard Lester applied to his films, and Peter Sellers to his, … when it is actually the kind of fun you do in your bedroom with your girlfriends during a sleepover.

The first lesson is the hardest: it’s not nearly as amusing for those watching as you think it is.

Abba Babble

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Abba Babble

Get this– from the Toronto Star, April 2, 2000:

Buried in their songs is a complex artfulness disguised in simple pop formulas, a carefully crafted infectiousness that resonates in the group’s shimmering four-part harmonies, crisp, Scandinavian enunciation, and deceptively easy rhythms. These songs, these performances, are the work of pop music geniuses. They reel us in every time we hear them.”

And one day we will all come to believe that Gilligan’s Island is really an existential drama about the dread with which modern man faces technological domination.

Their names are Bjorn Ulvaeus, Anni-Frid Lyngstad (the red-head), Benny Andersson, Agnetha Faltskog (the blonde). Anni-Frid, Bjorn, Benny, Agnetha: Abba.

Faltskog no longer has anything to do with music. Lyngstad is into environmental causes. Benny plays accordion in some obscure folk band somewhere in Sweden. Bjorn is promoting a musical, “Mama Mia” based on Abba songs.

The most disgusting aspect of this revisionism is the pompous self-importance it allows small-time talents like Bjorn Ulvaeus.

You know, I could have sort of liked Abba a little, if I hadn’t read this drivel.

 

“Serious music critics now rank Ulvaeus and Andersson’s songs with those of the Beatles and the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, and their musical weight in European culture alongside Grieg and Sibelius.”

Exactly which serious musical critic?  Let me assure you, serious music critics do not rate Abba with the Beatles or the Beach Boys or even, probably, with Bobby Sherman.  Well, okay: with Bobby Sherman.

What is this? Some kind of neo-con aesthetic putsch? You have to believe that only an idiot who is unaware of the Beatles’ career beyond 1965 could make such a statement. The kind of idiot who never listened to Revolver, Rubber Soul, Sergeant Pepper’s, White Album, Let it Be, and Abbey Road. As for the Beach Boys, well, yeah, lyrically there’s not much to choose from, but please name me a single Abba song that, in terms of musical imagination, could be uttered in the same breath as “Good Vibrations”.

Exactly which Abba song can be compared to “A Day in the Life”, “Eleanor Rigby”, “Norwegian Wood”, “Penny Lane”, or “Fool on the Hill”?

You want to know something else? The girls were never all that good-looking either.