Hall of Shame – The ABBA Comeback
On more occasions than not, after getting tanked up on Gin Tonics and red wine and listening to Iggy and New Order most of the evening, my friend Karla and I will end up listening to Elvis’ “In The Ghetto” and ABBA’s “The Winner Takes it all” – don’t ask. Yesterday was different though, since ABBA’s comeback singles and tour announcement after a 40 year break naturally dominated the time spared for them. The news didn’t trigger excitement but killed all lust to listen to any songs by them. And it is not even the music that is the worst about this comeback.
Maybe some newish, murderous insect stung the members of ABBA and infected them with a mysterious illness whose major symptom is a death-drive to destroy your brilliant legacy for no reason after 4 full decades. Or it is just another streak of the band’s delicious borderline gloom lurking beneath their work about which I have written in length before? The jolly Swedes, each worth US$200-300 million, could have just chillaxed and enjoyed their enviable lives as privateers with giant fortunes: buying nice luxury things, shooting pigeons, musing, and getting blowjobs from young hookers and stalkers while watching the newest installment of Mamma Mia and laughing at their inferiors Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan because they are NOT! But instead, Benny, Björn, Agnetha and Anni-Fried decided to release two new songs permeated by an almost desperate self-referencing nostalgia and the will to repeat. Two songs that seem to have come out of a kaputt time machine, two songs with an innate irrelevance in this worst of recent decades.
If it was just for the cheesiness and mediocreness of the songs, I would leave it alone- we’re used to reunion bands in the late autumn of their lives putting out boring new songs in order to sell a new album and tour. But the problem with ABBA’s comeback is really the form of the tour that was announced with the new album. I can imagine the smug, McKinseyan smiles around a Scandinavian conference table after one millennial asshole dropped the term “ABBA-tars“ for the first time in between his social media swipes. Or did it all take shape on the pentagram circle in uncle Benny’s party basement, in between the Aquavit and Alka Seltzer? Wherever the demonic nesting place, the band has decided to delight their fans with avatars of themselves on their reunion concerts. Let this sink in- the fucking holograms are not used to resurrect dead artists on stage, they are not used to project cartoon characters on stage as in the Gorillaz, but in ABBA’s case they are used to replace living and existing people. Holograms of their younger versions in space voyager gear, no less.
In this bold display of gerascophobia orchestrated by the demonic plastic surgery victim Simon Fuller, ABBA is not just kicking older people’s butts by refusing to walk on stage as breathing, aging artists. But the whole thing seems like the idea of a lunatic grandma who wants to go digital in the final stages of her life and, in the finest boomer manner, is acting completely irresponsible and opening the gates of hell for no other reason than wanting to be hip in a technology that exists for at least two decades. Fuck! What is happening here is that the lines between concert and musical blur and get merged into a virtual reality, as if we were not already tortured and cursed with sterile, virtual concerts during this endless Corona pandemic (Want to see Nick Cave’s streaming of his lonely session at the piano which he calls “Idiot Prayer”? Pay 30 bucks, idiot.) You might ask yourself why the ABBA members would want to bring a musical show on stage and sell it as reunion concerts when already several globally successful musicals (ABBAMANIA, Mamma Mia!) exist? Because transhumanism screams „Take a chance on me!“ and the future is set by fucking imbeciles like said Simon Fuller and their art- and life-degrading visions of profit.
„Stuff your avatars up your own arses, I hope one day your entire souls get distilled into an algorithm that floats in space-hell for eternity“ is what I want to scream at a compass pointing in Sweden’s direction. But then again, no supernatural magic trick is needed, because the four voyagers of a now colonized space full with the penis-rockets of Bezos and Musk have condemned themselves to the mental waterloo of transhumanism. Björn Ulvaeus (the soon-to-be avatar who rejects ABBA biopics because “I wouldn’t want an actor – not while I’m alive – to play me on the big screen”) appears like a crudely foolish artificial intelligence with a glitch when talking about ABBA’s coming virtual reunion enterprise: „We were photographed from all possible angles and were made to grimace in front of cameras. They painted dots on our faces, they measured our heads,“ is all that’s left 40 years later. Sadder words have never been spoken. Words that are fertilized by folly in old age which is so much more embarrassing than youthful foolishness. It is the sadness machine, the absolute void.
by Saliha Enzenauer