ABBA, good or bad?

[schmosef]

So I've had a Napster To Go account for a little while now. The service is far from perfect, but it's got its upside. Especially because they neglected to bill my credit card for about the first six months (no, it wasn't a promotion).

Anyway... I've been slowly building playlists of my favorite songs and also listening to the rest of each bands songs to see if there's anything else I like.

ABBA has a LOT of songs. I've sampled them all now and am quite shocked that there's only 13 that I like. Some that I've not heard before so I'm happy I spent the time checking out their catalogue. But many of the others are just bad and some are down right unlistentoable.

What's up with that? I thought that ABBA was one of the most successful European bands of all time.

So I'm asking you Europeans, is ABBA considered good, or an embarrassment?

[schmosef]

BTW, the band I'm now sampling is a-ha. "Take On Me" and "The Sun Always Shines On TV" are two of my all time favorite songs.

[Kurt]

Man...you've got a loooong way before you get to ZZTop...

AC/DC, you've overlooked them?

[schmosef]

Yeah, I'd better not forget AC/DC.

I'm not really going alphabetically, it's just a co-incidence.

[KRSESQ]

ABBA is all right but we're talking about serious hardcore '70's pop/disco here. Hell, if you like the tunes, go ahead and listen and screw anything anyone else tells you.

Incidently the video for Aha's "Take On Me" is pretty cool, if you can manage to find it anywhere. (A little bit of an "Altered States" influence.)

Kevin

[Gurm]

Why does a band need to have more than a greatest-hits-disc-worth of good songs?

Many a band/performer has achieved immortality on the strength of ONE solid tune.

[schmosef]

I'm not saying that they're not worthy of being listened to. I have 13 of their songs in my playlist and I intend to listen to them. I'm just saying that they have a lot of other songs in their catalogue and I'm really surprised that so many of them are really bad. REALLY BAD.

I'm just wondering if all the ABBA hype I've heard over the years about them being one of Europe's all time biggest bands is true or not. I'm not asking if they were a one hit wonder, and sure, there's lots of a bands that have been immortalized over just one song, I'm asking if the perception of ABBA in Europe equals the hype that we're told it does on this side of the pond. That's all.

[KvHagedorn]

Do the hypesters really matter? I think a lot of their songs are fun in a 70s disco type way, and that's about it. If you like a song, listen to it, and forget what other people say (unless, of course a girl you like likes them )

What would piss me off (and has pissed me off in the past) is getting an album with two good songs and the rest crap. Is Abba a really great band in this respect? No. When I get an album by Led Zeppelin, U2, Pink Floyd, AC/DC, etc. I can sit there and enjoy the WHOLE THING. They actually cared about creating such a thing.. not selling the latest greatest hit to teenyboppers who don't know any better. Abba had that approach, I think, yet actually did a few songs that endured in spite of themselves.

[schmosef]

You're not getting the point... :shakes head:

Listen. I'd always heard that ABBA was this great superstar band from Europe and that they had a huge following with lots of albums etc. and I'd always intended to listen to the rest of their catalogue. Someday.

Now that I have, I'm surprised that it's like 70% bad and about 10% utter crap. Most of their songs are not even good by "pop" music standards. UN-LISTEN-TO-ABLE!

Don't try to read into this. It's not a peer pressure thing for me. I'm asking an intellectual question. Is/was ABBA as big in Europe as they are hyped to be/have been? I'm asking this of the Europeans.

If they were as big, I'm wondering if it was just on the strength of the dozen or so songs they had that were good, or if maybe European tastes were so different/bad. Or maybe it was all hype. That's all.

For the record, yes, Zeppelin rules. :sigh: Anyone who doesn't know this needs help.

Lastly, a-ha, is friggen awesome. They've got a really great catalogue. Many songs I've never heard before and so many of them are really good. I think that I once heard they were big in Europe but they weren't hyped over here even close to the way that ABBA was.

[Gurm]

It's all relative.

Europeans have BIZARRE taste in music by any standards I'm familiar with. I mean, that's where trance/house/beat/stomp/drek originated. Nnn-tss! Nnn-tss! Nnn-tss! Over and over. Never heard it here until they brought it over. Bleh.

But at any rate - I think that they might feel the same way about BackDoor Boys or N-Stink. Several albums each, but only like 4 or 5 total good songs.

Many bands are like this. Even bands where every song is "good" have differing styles. For example, a band called "Little River Band" had a dozen top-20 hits in the 70's. Maybe even 15. Enough to fill a greatest hits album. But 90% of their music (they had a dozen albums) was 70's country-disco weirdness.

It just happens.

And ... "for the record", Zeppelin had a few good tunes, too. Their drummer couldn't keep a beat, their bass player was very good but underutilized, and the songs... well, they were very derivative at times. Overall solid stuff though.

[spadnos]

From Ah-Ha:
Listen to these songs from the album "Scoundrel Days":
"Cry Wolf"
"The Soft Rains Of April"
"October"
"Manhattan Skyline"

and from "Hunting High And Low" (the album with "Take On Me" and "The Sun Always Shines On TV")
"Hunting High And Low"
"Living A Boy's Adventure Tale"
"Here I Stand And Face The Rain"
Most of the others are also good, but those are my favorites.

As for ABBA - yes, my understanding is that they're one of the most popular bands of all time - but I wouldn't say they're the best. Not by a longshot. I like a few of their songs (don't tell anyone ), but mostly it's pop crap. The same kind of thing you get from the teen band-du-jour - wildly popular for a little while, then a footnote in music history. Except for the fact that they had a few that made it out of footnote status.

I still don't understand why so many people liked (and still like) them.

- Steve

[UtwigMU]

Good if you're gay or 14y old girl without beyond pop culture music taste.

[schmosef]

Thanks for that assessment, UtwigMU. It’s all so clear to me now.

[schmosef]

From a-ha, I also like:

-Dragonfly
-Forever Not Yours
-Minor Earth Major Sky
-Summer Moved On
-The Blue Sky
-The Living Daylights
-The Swing of Things

Their live album, How Can I Sleep With Your Voice In My Head, is awesome.

[Brian Ellis]

Who or what is ABBA?

If you want some good European music, Brahm's Triple Concerto, Orff's Carmina Burana (sp?), Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, Prokofieff's very Pop Peter and the Wolf, Strauss' Till Eulenspiegel, Sibelius' Finlandia, Vivaldi's Quattro Stagioni, Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Stravinsky's Rites of Spring, Beethoven's 9th, Bizet's l'Arlesienne are all light, listenable, popular music which will be around long after ABBA and the Beatles, ZZ-top, AC/DC and Michael Jackson are all dead and buried. I'm not saying that pop music is bad, but it is, by definition, transient but not without influence on good music (cf. some of Bernstein and Gershwin, both of whom interpreted current pop music idioms into some of their serious compositions).

Footnote: 2 or 3 ABBA tunes are catchy, even today, but they are not pop classics like some of Beatles, Queen or the Stones (or even Simon and Garfunkel, who get close to the same level). Catchiness though often equates with mediocrity, because it relies on a gimmick for it to stick maddeningly in one's head. The music of most pop music, played without words, is terrible; to take one ABBA example: Waterloo: it is the -^- foot of the title word that makes it stick. Take the word away and you're left with nothing but monotonous mediocrity. How many of you can pass the first three notes and this word in their mind, but cannot remember another word or note of that song? Yet it was a best-seller of its time (didn't it win the Eurovision song contest? That alone is the password to mediocrity. I can think of only one Eurovision winner that had merit, but it was forgotten even faster than the rest, because it was musically and poetically better than 90% of pop music: Dana's ballad "All Kinds of Everything" ).

Brian dixit!