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Mamma Mia, Here I Go Again!

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HAL 

Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.


Joined: 17 Mar 2003


PostPosted: Wed Feb 06, 2013 11:48 am
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Only because you asked me to.
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watt price tully Scorpio



Joined: 15 May 2007


PostPosted: Wed Feb 06, 2013 1:05 pm
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If we're talkin' Norman Gunston can't go past this;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW2kSkurQFs

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David Libra

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Joined: 27 Jul 2003
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 06, 2013 2:07 pm
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OK, you managed to convince me to listen to the song (funnily enough, even though I've heard a lot of ABBA on the radio over the years, I wasn't really familiar with this one). It's not too bad a bit too upbeat for my liking but I get why you appreciate it. It's certainly impeccably constructed, and there is something pleasantly minimalist about the clip (I think that lip thing was borrowed from several European art movies, though not that Countdown's audience would have known that, granted!).

The one thing that struck me about the song and the video was just how different they are to the pop music of today. It's so refreshingly, well, non-cynical. This is not 'music' by committee, at least not nearly to the same extent as today's top 40 hits. For one thing, they actually wrote it!

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Tannin Capricorn

Can't remember


Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania

PostPosted: Wed Feb 06, 2013 2:38 pm
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David wrote:
I think that lip thing was borrowed from several European art movies, though not that Countdown's audience would have known that, granted!


Ahah! Well spotted! The clip was actually done for them on the cheap by a friend of theirs who had never done a video clip before; he was just moonlighting from his day job and making stuff up as he went along.

(Err ... should I mention that in his day job he directed European art movies? Well directed movies of some sort. Not sure of the details.

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3.14159 Taurus



Joined: 12 Sep 2009


PostPosted: Wed Feb 06, 2013 2:45 pm
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stui magpie wrote:
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.


The Mullery Gang weren't too bad but since the week-end I can't get that song of theirs out of my head. Razz
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partypie 



Joined: 01 Oct 2010


PostPosted: Wed Feb 06, 2013 2:58 pm
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Tannin wrote:
David wrote:
I think that lip thing was borrowed from several European art movies, though not that Countdown's audience would have known that, granted!


Ahah! Well spotted! The clip was actually done for them on the cheap by a friend of theirs who had never done a video clip before; he was just moonlighting from his day job and making stuff up as he went along.

(Err ... should I mention that in his day job he directed European art movies? Well directed movies of some sort. Not sure of the details.


Lots of people I know watched Countdown AND went to European art movies. Countdown was a must see every week especially for anyone who had anything to do with the music industry.
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Tannin Capricorn

Can't remember


Joined: 06 Aug 2006
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 06, 2013 2:59 pm
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David wrote:
The one thing that struck me about the song and the video was just how different they are to the pop music of today. It's so refreshingly, well, non-cynical. This is not 'music' by committee


And that reminds me of the major factor I only glossed over in my screed - sex! ABBA did something very special on that front. This is the 1970s, remember, don't bring your own standards to this, look at it through the prism of the time: the two girls were incredibly sexual and 100% pure and clean and Swedish virginal at the same time! You saw whatever you wanted to see! That duality wasn't new or unique, of course, but you will seldom see it quite so starkly as you do here, and almost never see it done with so little sense of contradiction or ambiguity.

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Dr Pie 

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Joined: 08 Nov 2007


PostPosted: Thu Feb 07, 2013 1:06 am
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Tannin, your explanation of ABBA's success and your deconstruction of the Mamma Mia video was brilliant and the fact that my then friend Phil Griffiths said something very similar at the time (1975) doesn't undermine your insight.

However my view in 1975, which remains my view in 2013, is that ABBa's originality was only in their use of video. Their harmonies and some of their arrangements owed a huge amount to The Mama and The Papas who first hit the charts almost a decade earlier. The Mamas and Papas were very much pre-video. While Michelle Phillips had been a model and the two men were probably as attractive as the men from ABBA, Mama Cass had the figure of an old style opera singer. She also had a fabulous voice, much better than either Agnetha or Frida.

Check this out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN3GbF9Bx6E

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think positive Libra

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Joined: 30 Jun 2005
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 07, 2013 7:00 am
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David wrote:
OK, you managed to convince me to listen to the song (funnily enough, even though I've heard a lot of ABBA on the radio over the years, I wasn't really familiar with this one). It's not too bad a bit too upbeat for my liking but I get why you appreciate it. It's certainly impeccably constructed, and there is something pleasantly minimalist about the clip (I think that lip thing was borrowed from several European art movies, though not that Countdown's audience would have known that, granted!).

The one thing that struck me about the song and the video was just how different they are to the pop music of today. It's so refreshingly, well, non-cynical. This is not 'music' by committee, at least not nearly to the same extent as today's top 40 hits. For one thing, they actually wrote it!


And the words make sense and mean something. And you can actually understand all of them.

Now try jump in my car, truly an oz class classic!

....and I loved my roller strollers.

And my Smokie jumper my mum knitted for me, 10 sizes too big!

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Pies4shaw Leo

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Joined: 08 Oct 2007


PostPosted: Thu Feb 07, 2013 12:34 pm
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There was absolutely nothing forward-looking about Abba's music. It sounded dated when it was made. It could only be described as "well-constructed" pop music or the like if one were willing to subscribe to a division between a very narrow category of "pop" music and other categories of music.

That's to say, if you take away, eg, all the music from the 70s except for Tony Orlando and Dawn or the Bee Gees in their "disco" phase, Abba might look like good music in the remaining company. But, if one is willing to acept that Abba was contemporaneous with, say (just to think of some that happen to come to mind as selling into the "pop" market in the "Abba decade"), Paul Simon, Steve Miller, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, Don McLean, Led Zeppelin, Australian Crawl, the Police and whoever else, it looks like what it was (and remains) - cheap pastiche. High-selling cheap pastiche, of course, but nothing more.

So, for example, put "Ring Ring" in this one-per-year "pop" list from 1967 to 1980 (not a "best" list, just a "song from the year that I happen to remember hearing then on the radio as I write this" list):

See Emily Play
I Heard it Through the Grapevine
Honky Tonk Women
Bridge Over Troubled Water
Maggie May
Without You
Ring, Ring (instead of, say, Superstition or Loves Me Like a Rock or Money)
The Joker
Sister Golden Hair
50 Ways to Leave Your Lover
Blinded By the Light (the Earth Band's version)
Werewolves of London
Refugee
Don't Stand So Close to Me

.... You get the drift.
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David Libra

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Joined: 27 Jul 2003
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 07, 2013 2:09 pm
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Pies4shaw wrote:
That's to say, if you take away, eg, all the music from the 70s except for Tony Orlando and Dawn or the Bee Gees in their "disco" phase, Abba might look like good music in the remaining company. But, if one is willing to acept that Abba was contemporaneous with, say (just to think of some that happen to come to mind as selling into the "pop" market in the "Abba decade"), Paul Simon, Steve Miller, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, Don McLean, Led Zeppelin, Australian Crawl, the Police and whoever else, it looks like what it was (and remains) - cheap pastiche. High-selling cheap pastiche, of course, but nothing more.


I've had this argument with my girlfriend before, but I wouldn't necessarily classify Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin as pop music. I acknowledge that 'pop' is an ambiguous designation it was originally used to refer to anything that wasn't classical, jazz or folk but I think the difference between, say, Scott Walker and Justin Bieber in today's music spectrum is substantial enough to warrant distinguishing labels. The same, retrospectively, seems to go for Floyd and ABBA. Erroneously or otherwise, I've often considered 'pop' to be the Biebers and ABBAs of this world basically, the inoffensive, generally derivative stuff that fills top 40 countdowns and is usually concocted in boardrooms.

The trouble with this view is that the distinction wasn't nearly so obvious in the '60s and '70s as it is today. Just as The Beatles and Led Zeppelin were considered perfectly mainstream in the '60s, bands like ABBA and the Bee Gees actually wrote their own music and might as Tannin establishes here stand up to serious critical praise in some way. So, there's a bit of grey area to see the least. All the same, ABBA does seem to fit in the pedigree of modern commercial pop somehow.

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think positive Libra

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PostPosted: Thu Feb 07, 2013 2:45 pm
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Who gives a shit?

It was good to listen to and dance to, that's what it was for after all!

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Pies4shaw Leo

pies4shaw


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PostPosted: Thu Feb 07, 2013 4:14 pm
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David wrote:
Pies4shaw wrote:
That's to say, if you take away, eg, all the music from the 70s except for Tony Orlando and Dawn or the Bee Gees in their "disco" phase, Abba might look like good music in the remaining company. But, if one is willing to acept that Abba was contemporaneous with, say (just to think of some that happen to come to mind as selling into the "pop" market in the "Abba decade"), Paul Simon, Steve Miller, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, Don McLean, Led Zeppelin, Australian Crawl, the Police and whoever else, it looks like what it was (and remains) - cheap pastiche. High-selling cheap pastiche, of course, but nothing more.


I've had this argument with my girlfriend before, but I wouldn't necessarily classify Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin as pop music. I acknowledge that 'pop' is an ambiguous designation it was originally used to refer to anything that wasn't classical, jazz or folk but I think the difference between, say, Scott Walker and Justin Bieber in today's music spectrum is substantial enough to warrant distinguishing labels. The same, retrospectively, seems to go for Floyd and ABBA. Erroneously or otherwise, I've often considered 'pop' to be the Biebers and ABBAs of this world basically, the inoffensive, generally derivative stuff that fills top 40 countdowns and is usually concocted in boardrooms.

The trouble with this view is that the distinction wasn't nearly so obvious in the '60s and '70s as it is today. Just as The Beatles and Led Zeppelin were considered perfectly mainstream in the '60s, bands like ABBA and the Bee Gees actually wrote their own music and might as Tannin establishes here stand up to serious critical praise in some way. So, there's a bit of grey area to see the least. All the same, ABBA does seem to fit in the pedigree of modern commercial pop somehow.

Well, that's the problem that I was identifying, isn't it? If you start from the proposition that "pop" is all the music that was "inoffensive, generally derivative stuff ... concocted in boardrooms", you finish up analysing the musical worth of different kinds of bilge. On the other hand, if you look at "pop" as music intended for mass consumption by the (then) record-buying public, LZ and PF were very much "pop" - Black Dog and Money, eg, were ubiquitous in their respective years (centuries). So, for that matter, was "Thick as a Brick". Indeed, one recent biography of Syd Barrett bemoans how the Floyd "sold out" to "pop" just after they recorded "Arnold Layne". (Personally, I used to think that the Floyd "sold out" after Meddle - but that's a matter for another day.) On that view, one looks for some line dividing between the "creative" musician and the one who just wants to be rich and famous. Personally, I think that's a bit of a nonsense. I'm willing to have a conversation about "The Wall" (which I don't especially like) on the assumption that the writer of (most of) it wanted to be creative and rich and famous. As, eg, with the writer of (most of) Graceland and The Rhythm of the Saints.

The list I gave was of a whole lot of music (some of which I like, much of which I don't) for which the authors (with the exception, perhaps, of the Stones, who later resigned themselves to it all being "only rock'n'roll") would probably have made serious artistic claims, at the very same time that they hoped to sell lots of their records. They may have been songs intended to capture the "youth" mass market, or some part of it, but they seemed to want - and managed - to be more.

Personally, although much of the music I treasure is very distinctly not "pop", I have never accepted that "pop" music can't be "art" music, at the same time - and, certainly, much of it was when Abba were around (the first time). You seem to be ceding that ground.

Thus, asked in its proper context, the answer to the question "What could I do to improve this sound?" asked in relation to Abba must be a re-sounding one: "FFS, turn it off. It'll make you go blind."
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David Libra

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Joined: 27 Jul 2003
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 07, 2013 4:22 pm
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Yeah, I think even as I wrote it I thought it was kind of tenuous. Though I have far less issues designating between art film and Hollywood film (even though both are commercial products, strictly speaking). Perhaps I make a far better film snob than music snob. Mr. Green

If we were to assert some kind of distinction, we could try to find a similar concept to auteur theory in cinema. The idea there was to distinguish between film that is made according to a director's wishes and film in which the final product is controlled by the financial backers. That's definitely the case with music obviously, Britney has little say in which songs she gets to sing or how the final product sounds, whereas Radiohead probably control the entire process but it's far more difficult when applied to the musical landscape of the '60s and '70s. Perhaps it's less about motive (money v artistic success) than simply artistic control. But even then, I have to acknowledge there's a wide spectrum.

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Last edited by David on Thu Feb 07, 2013 4:27 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Nick - Pie Man 



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PostPosted: Thu Feb 07, 2013 4:24 pm
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Is this the first time you've listened to Abba??
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