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Tannin 
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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| Post subject: Mamma Mia, Here I Go Again! |  |
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Kitsch. Twee. Cutesy. Vapid. Manufactured. Huge!
ABBA was a unique phenomenon, never seen before or since. For the first and last time in musical history, a slick, super-clean act designed to appeal especially to pre-teen and young teen girls still in the pink phase .... went ballistic. Everybody bought it. (Almost.) And it happened here in Australia first.
Who could forget the electric shock of lip-synched Mamma Mia harmonies for the very first time? Even hardened, cynical jazz, blues, folk, and rock musos were blown away by it - even as we dissed it we knew we loved it.
But did you know that the whole Mamma Mia thing came from Australia? It was just an unknown album track till Molly Meldrum played it on Countdown and Australia went crazy for it. People started trying to buy it in the shops but there was no such record. RCA Australia cabled Sweden asking for permission to release it as a single. Permission refused. Molly played it again, and the queue of buyers became a tidal wave. RCA gave up, the Australian branch pressed the single, and it went straight to number one and stayed there. You couldn't move for hearing it on the radio. After a few weeks of that, they saw reason and released it in the rest of the world, where it also went to number one, and the ABBA phenomenon was alive.
Kitchy viewing, you will cringe at least once a minute, but you can't miss this. http://www.abc.net.au/iview/#/view/30478
Play it loud!
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�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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Buckley Swan
Joined: 12 Dec 2012
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Australia, the country that loves ABBA more than its Aborigines!
_________________
My daughter was born in a premiership year.
www.wickettowicket.com.au - Grassroots cricket website, message me if you'd like to contribute. |
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Buckley Swan
Joined: 12 Dec 2012
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I'm not an ABBA fan by any means but that album cover for Arrival is fantastic, a classic.
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_________________
My daughter was born in a premiership year.
www.wickettowicket.com.au - Grassroots cricket website, message me if you'd like to contribute. |
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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| Buckley Swan wrote: | | Australia, the country that loves ABBA more than its Aborigines! |
Ouch! 
Tannin, I must be too young. I don't get it!
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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you bastard.
I've watched half so far and I'm transported back to the 70's.
AAARRRGGHHHHHH.
At least the cars were cool. 
I could play all their hits on piano, (simple arrangements but catchy) and I probably could still now after a bottle of red.
ps. I always preferred the brunette over the blonde.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| Buckley Swan wrote: | | Australia, the country that loves ABBA more than its Aborigines! |
mate, I missed your comment earlier but now that I've seen it I'm going to institute an award for the most off topic, unrelated, bullshit post in the VPT for 2013,
You just earned the lead.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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3.14159 
Joined: 12 Sep 2009
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| Not an Abba fan but they were better than the Bay City Rollers or the Ted Mullery gang. |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| Roar Power wrote: | | Not an Abba fan but they were better than the Bay City Rollers or the Ted Mullery gang. |
I'll give you the first with no argument, and the second reluctantly.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Tannin
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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| stui magpie wrote: | | Buckley Swan wrote: | | Australia, the country that loves ABBA more than its Aborigines! |
mate, I missed your comment earlier but now that I've seen it I'm going to institute an award for the most off topic, unrelated, bullshit post in the VPT for 2013,
You just earned the lead. |
pffft!
Just barely a learner. I can be more offensive and further off-topic than that in the ten minutes before breakfast, and it takes nine of those minutes to get out of the shower and switch the computer on. NPM rings the bell harder than than without even trying. TP needs winding up before she hits her proper form, but she can blow minor league bullshit like that stuff into the weeds the way a sonic boom cleans up cobwebs. And as for ....
Ahh, let it go. Just let it be said that, off-topic and absurd as it was, we can really only look at this post as a hint that the lad has a bit of raw talent. Let's see him spend the off-season working out in the weight room (and not, repeat not taking "supplements"!) then throw him up against a few old hard-timers like Swoop and David and Member. Not to mention Fire Up. Then we will see if he can produce the form in the big games or not. 
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�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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Tannin
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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| Roar Power wrote: | | but they were better than the Bay City Rollers or the Ted Mullery gang. |
Well, yeah, OK. But then, so was my sister. And that was before she had her first lesson on the bagpipes.
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�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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partypie
Joined: 01 Oct 2010
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| I invented a word meaning kitch (after seeing a Swedish glass exhibition at the NGVin the 70s) The word was "abba-ish". I still use it occasionally |
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Tannin
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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| David wrote: | | Tannin, I must be too young. I don't get it! |
David, you might be right. I was going to post mate, you will never get it, you just had to be there. But let's have a go at explaining.
Here is the clip. Play it loud!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unfzfe8f9NI
Look at the video first. Now, you might start off by seeing all the things that mark it as a '70s clip - clothes, gauche moves, embarrassingly transparent in what it attempts to do, and very, very cliched. The thing is, video clips were brand new in 1974. These early ABBA clips didn't follow the cliches, they invented them.
Now listen to the mix. Notice how the unique sound of the marimba playing the intro grabs your attention. (You may or may not like it, but you will react to it.) These days, you hear all sorts of weird sounds all the time, but starting a pop song with a marimba ... that was daring.
Now, as the song gets into its stride, notice the towering tonal structures, the perfectly structured musical light and shade .... ask yourself "what could I add to improve this sound?" and "what dross should I take away because it adds nothing to the sound?" In both cases, the answer is nothing at all. You could use more modern instruments and mixes, you could throw a lot of technology and money at it, you could disguise your arrangement techniques more carefully, but in the end , forty years lateryou wouldn't really change anything. Everything that you'd strive to achieve now with special effects and lots of musicians is really already done, just with keyboards, guitar, drums and (especially) bass. If you listen carefully, you can hear how the bass has been used to push the sound out and punch beyond its weight. That's seriously good production - 40 years on, it's a mainstream pop song, and it still holds up. Outside of specific genres (classical, acoustic blues, folk) you can't often say that.
Now look at the personnel: beautiful girls blonde and dark, handsome men, beard and clean-shaven. One of each. Notice the way they play off each other visually (or the director does it). Having every member of the band identifiable is always a big plus.
But there is more: it's subtle, but very real - the girls are in charge. Yeah, sure, the boys do the techo stuff with the instruments, and a lot of (not all) the songwriting, and we had seen girls fronting bands before, but there was something different about the way ABBA did it, something that your nine-year-old and twelve-year-old girl could sense. They weren't just there to sing sweet and look pretty. ABBA made fantastic role models for the girls, and as for the boys .... well, you figure it out.
(This was more than just a seeming - all four band members worked on the arrangement as equals, and they spent a vast amount of time in the studio together relentlessly crafting each raw song idea until it was as perfect as they could make it. That amazing attention to detail really shows.)
Now consider the lyrics. Always, Abba lyrics have been a bit NQR. They read like a child's lyrics "just one look and I can hear a bell ring, one more look and I forget everything" - who on earth would write something that dumb and obvious? Ans: a child .... or Björn, who barely spoke English, but wrote stuff anyway. Amazingly, ABBA made that crippling difficulty into a positive! I'm sure that a lot of their massive appeal to children and early teens can be explained in their weirdly child-like lyrics.
Oh, but one thing about Björn's broken-English lyrics that was never second-rate: he always had a tremendous ability to find a word that sounded the way he wanted. Like all the truly great songwriters, Bjorn and Benny had the knack of deciding that (e.g.) "we need an "ooh" sound at the end of this line where the voice goes up" and finding a word to deliver that. (Listen again to your Rolling Stones albums - Mick Jagger is the best there is at that game. But all the good ones do it. Mind you, Jagger grew up speaking English!) Go back to the video again and listen to the bit with those silly words I quoted earlier - "just one look and I can hear a bell ring, one more look and I forget everything". Pretend to yourself that you don't speak any English and just listen to the sound of those words and the way it matches the structure of the song and the girl's voices perfectly. Do that with a few other ABBA songs and you start to see that it's no accident: despite their child-like words and awkward moments, from a purely musical point of view, the lyrics are consistently excellent. (I sometimes wonder what they would be like if they wrote them in their native Swedish? Perhaps working in a foreign language actually helps the ear select the right sounds?)
Now, let's get to the meat of this: let's walk through the structure of the song, step by step.
Play that arresting marimba intro once again, then observe the understated perfection of Björn's guitar riff (what would you change if you were playing it? Ans: nothing). Then the girls start singing: their voices are pure and yet fulfilling, quite different to each other but perfectly matched as they swap lines with deceptive ease (you try that - it's bloody hard!), and the sound of the words carries through the first verse, building, building the structure by logical, seemingly inevitable steps (observe the bass player's role here) until suddenly the bridge is upon us (the "just one look" bit) - and WHAM they hit us with the full power of those perfect voices, right between the eyes. And, on the video, the director suddenly starts cutting between close-ups to double the impact.
Is it a cliche? Sure it is ... now. In 1974, it was completely unexpected and it wiped the floor. Everybody paid attention.
Now, if this was some quite clever pop band of the ordinary kind - the Bay City Rollers, let's say - we would get to this first crescendo and repeat it with variations 'till the end of the song (dumb version) or (smart version) drop back to a quiet middle eight to rest the ear and then repeat. Not ABBA. Not with Mama Mia. They have set you up with the attention-getting intro and the clever buildup of the verse, then knocked you out with the power of the bridge. Now they stick the boot in: everything else drops out and the marimba comes back, but this time the girls are doing that distinctive blending harmony thing with plosive, percussive word-sounds that are quite unique. Not only that, the director does that ever-so-simple looking thing with the lips. No-one had ever seen that before (at least not to speak of) and in combination with all those other things I've mentioned above, the effect was instant. Everybody loved the song. Nobody ever forgot those lips. Overnight, ABBA went from being an obscure Euoro-pop band to the biggest thing in Australia. This was the start of 14 successive top-ten hit singles. I don't know if any other band has ever done that. The Beatles, maybe, or maybe not.
They had lots of other songs, many hugely successful, and this was not their first-ever hit, but Mamma Mia was the song which broke through all the usual resistances and became instantly familiar to everyone.
In the history of modern music, there have been a handful of timeless moments which have defined the age and guided the course of musical development for decades afterwards. Some of these unforgettable milestones are Daltrey's stuttering electric rendition of My Generation; Rotten's bleak and compelling "no future, no future" in God Save the Queen Dylan's prophetic "even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked!" on It's Alright Ma (I'm only bleeding), and Keith Richard's then-incredible decision to play the horn line of (I can't get no) Satisfaction on guitar instead. Abba's Mamma Mia is one of those moments.
Disclaimer: I have never been an ABBA fan, have never bought an ABBA record, or even played one. In the 1970s I was listening to Jettro Tull, the Beatles, The Who, Dylan, the Stones, Split Enz, and of course the mighty Skyhooks. I mostly only heard ABBA on the radio. But I don't have to be a fan to recognise genius when I see it.
_________________
�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives!
Last edited by Tannin on Wed Feb 06, 2013 11:52 am; edited 1 time in total |
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partypie
Joined: 01 Oct 2010
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Tannin is correct - Abba produced perfect pop songs repeatedly.
Anyone remember Gary McDonald's/ Norman Gunston's parody? There must be footage of that somewhere |
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Tannin
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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^ thanks for that reminder. Er ... I'm not sure that "thanks" is the right word, but let that pass. If you are up for it .... here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myJM8wPCGX8
(Not the footage you were after, but the audio should at least provide a reminder.)
_________________
�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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Tannin
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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Oh you bugger! You started me searching for Gunston's Abba clip and that led to this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69zoOUUxbJI
I spent forty years getting over the Seventies, and now look what you have started again!
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�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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