Abba’s new album is music for people who are not interested in music. There is nothing wrong with disinterest, after all, you don’t have to warm up to everything. Unlike modern theater or rhythmic gymnastics, however, you could have hits like Waterloo or Dancing Queen not withdraw. All you have to do is write down the title, the needle in your head lowers itself on the scratched single there, crackle, crackle, and the melody can be heard. If there is black bread in art, then Abba was the grape sugar – it goes straight into the blood (or into the dance floor), whether you like it or not.
Only in the years and decades after their – provisional, as we now know – separation did it become apparent that Benny Anderson and Björn Ulvaeus had actually found something like the global formula for pop in the 1970s. Whilst entire hit parades of that time melted away and fell into deserved oblivion, stayed Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! or Money, Money, Money just stand like boulders after the glaciers have retreated.
The party room and bell-bottoms disappeared, but Abba and her songs were still there – not just as an acoustic memory amplifier for the youth of many boomers. But really as songs. Regardless of whether it is staged as Thrash Metal or in a large jazz ensemble, on the plastic toad or with the didgeridoo: A song by Abba is indestructible.
Now some things are apparently indestructible, immortal in a way that causes heartburn. One could almost think that our times illustrate what Friedrich Nietzsche meant by the “eternal return of the same”. The past itself beset us, the zombies are approaching from all sides.
The 1980s are a standing now in the entertainment industry Stranger Things from fashion to music. Star Wars never stops and unfolds in several multiverses, Bet that ..? is back; and whoever was interested in music in the seventies can look forward to the tired comebacks from Yes and Jethro Tull.
Abba have not only been absent in this context, their return seals a worrying development. That is only partly due Voyage, which is nothing short of a passable Abba album. Comfortable songs for people who are not interested in music but want to enjoy their own childhood or youth again as an acoustic simulacrum. That something is “just like it used to be”, at least almost, is now the highest praise.
But there is more. An arena is currently being built in London in which, so to speak, all the party cellars of the 1970s are being resurrected as a cathedral. Abba will perform there, not in person, not just as holograms, but as technically perfect avatars of themselves.
This ambitious project is the reason why Björn, Benni, Anni-Frid and Agnetha recorded “new” music in the first place. It is about preparing a stage for the past on which it will have one foot in the doorway of the present until the end of days. A temple in which the myth is venerated and the money printing machine can be made permanent.
There is nothing wrong with that either. Once you understand it, it is only very uninteresting.
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