Dark Side of the ABBA

(Abyss Beneath Bad Attitude)

You don’t care about ABBA, but are still listening to the White Album? You better start to care.

ABBA- the Swedish phenomenon that took over the world between 1972- 1982 with their insanely catchy songs. Ten years of perfect pop and sweetness performed by two couples in glittery space costumes making music together, exporting Swedish melancholia and sadness around the globe, and all with a cold precision and perfection.

Portishead captured the darkness that lurks beneath the surface of ABBA with their cover version of ‘SOS.‘ that they did for Ben Wheatley’s Science-Fiction dystopia High-Rise (2015). Beth Gibbon’s nocturnal cigarette-voice and the gloomy instrumentation now highlight what was strangely hidden and low-key unsettling in this song about a crashing relationship by the Stockholm- Four. How did we miss that ‘SOS’ was about a heartbroken person who is literally drowing and sending out a maritime distress?

But is it really just a hint of melancholia and sadness that is layered upon their hit songs? No.

ABBA is the scary lover you never wanted. It is that one person who is your biggest mistake, the fatal attraction that will give you the most miserable time of your life, and probably until you die (of unnatural causes). ABBA is everything unhealthy in romance, a fantastic blur of existential despair mixed with an occasional portion of detached borderline lunacy.

The Manson Girls scribbled ‘Helter Skelter’ on the wall of Roman Polanski’s house before they killed his wife Sharon Tate and her friends. But what they really should have been scribbling is the title of an ABBA song, because they are the lords of the fucking nuthouse. The title of this story- Dark Side of the ABBA- is a bit misleading, because it implies that there is also a light side- but dark is the only shade here, like Scandinavian Midsummer it is endless darkness in an irritatingly bright disguise. There is something very unsettling and sinister about ABBA, an insanity beneath their family-friendly pop that gives you the same shivers as f.e. Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads, only worse, because there are no edges we can hold on to. It’s like floating in space with the complete mental health hospital alphabet.

Let’s go through some of the songs.

LAY ALL YOUR LOVE ON ME (1980 )
One thinks of Kathy Bates in Misery when listening to this manic, obsessed stalker’s dream with a pastoral sound. This is unfiltered and honest jealousy, but it does not please us the way honesty usually does. Because it is a honesty that refuses any filter or development. There is confusion, but no apology or play surrounding this jealousy, but it is being layed on the subject of obsession like a thick, heavy layer of tar: „Don’t go wasting your emotion / Lay all your love on me / Don’t go sharing your devotion / Lay all your love on me“

TAKE A CHANCE ON ME (1977)
We are on the level of desperate, prideless love now. The shiny happy upbeat song basically says: I know you don’t love me, but please still be with me. I’m gonna wait and be here if one day you have no other option: „You want me to leave it there / afraid of a love affair / But I think you know / That I can’t let go / If you change your mind / I’m the first in line / Honey I’m still free / Take a chance on me“
A lover from ABBA? No, thanks.

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY (1976)
Who needs punk, this is probably the most nervous song in pop-history, even Greg Sage’s Wipers get nervous in face of the shrill violins. The cash-mantra is nothing but a creepy glockenspiel’d golddigger’s dream: „In my dreams I have a plan / If I got me a wealthy man / I wouldn’t have to work at all / I’d fool around and have a ball / Money, Money, Money… / A man like this is hard to find / but I can’t get him off my mind“

ME & I (1980)
Sums up the bi-polar craziness perfectly. It even taps into medical fields, one of those brief, laconic moments of the realistic self-reflection of a highly intelligent psycho: „Sometimes I have toyed / With ideas that I got from good old Dr. Freud / Nothing new of course /…/ I just want to say that a lot of that applies to me / ‘Cause it’s an explanation to my split identity“ A split identity? Who would have thought that when it is even manifested in their band name! But AB-BA wouldn’t be AB-BA if they wouldn’t let a happy little hobbstweedle-serenade follow these split identities’ meta-reflection: “We’re like sun and rainy weather / Sometimes we’re a hit together / Me and I“
Truly the kids of Satan.

TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE (1986)
The ABBA-boys are not clean and free of mayhem either, although they occasionaly reveal a rather smudgy side. Just when we thought that they are (barely) strong enough to shield off sex with underage girls after having a listen at ‘Does Your Mother Know?‘ , they present us a cynical offer, this time from the top league of sex-disgust:

„If you dream of the girl for you / Then call us and get two for the price of one / We’re the answer if you feel blue / So call us and get two for the price of one / She said: ‘I’m sure we must be perfect for each other / And if you doubt it, you’ll be certain when you meet my mother“

And it goes on and on and on like this…

What does it mean, you still have doubts?

Then why is it that Bjorn Ulvaeus can’t remember any of ABBA’s success? All the glitter jump-suits, platform-booted stage glory, golden records, and Eurovision Song Contest victories- all of this is gone due to a long-term memory loss. What we see here in reality is a trauma victim, a man who was being held hostage in a perpetuum mobile of sinister lunacy and is now sacrificing his memory for what is really a need for collective amnesia, taking it all on himself.

The key to that and all of the madness and creepiness might be his ex-wife Agnetha Fältskog, who at her peak was Sweden’s hottest ass in the music industry. Admired by millions of men all over the world, she craved for something else: she hit it off with the Dutch forklift driver Gert van der Graaf, who had been obsessed with her since his childhood. She ended the relationship two years later.

Waterloo- I was defeated, you won the war
Waterloo- promise to love you for ever more
Waterloo- couldn’t escape if I wanted to
Waterloo- knowing my fate is to be with you
Waterloo- finally facing my Waterloo

by Saliha Enzenauer