Gold: Greatest Hits

What, exactly, is the use of a “greatest hits” album in 2019? The full catalogs of almost every artist popular enough to merit such a collection are available through any streaming service, organized by algorithms, and easily sorted by play count, which means labels have little reason to waste time and energy on a task the machines have already mastered. Even when the indie rock band Spoon released a greatest hits record earlier this year, the band acknowledged that its fondness for the form outweighed what was a near-certain losing proposition businesswise.

That fondness exists because of the real power greatest hits albums once had: They threw open doors for curious new listeners, solidified artists’ place in the canon, and transformed reputations that had fallen into disrepair. In his 2016 eulogy for greatest hits, anthologies, and other, similar reissues, Stephen Thomas Erlewine noted that Bob Marley could have languished in relative obscurity were it not for the release of Legend in 1984. “By focusing on the hits, they crystallize the essence of each star,” wrote Erlewine, touching on compilations of work by Elton John, Billy Joel, and Tom Petty. “Over time, those greatest hits albums—purchased as a package, repeated incessantly on the radio—formalized each act’s conventionally-accepted canon and, in turn, cemented their enduring public personas.”

If the ideal greatest hits collection captures the fundamental truth about an artist, stitches them into an enduring place in our cultural fabric, and sells enough copies to fund the purchase of a minor island, then ABBA Gold—a 79-minute buffet of schlocky ballads, elegant pop delicacies, and disco heat rocks—is the definitive example of the format. The 1992 compilation rounded up all of the Swedish pop band’s international smashes into a refined package with surprising emotional range. It capitalized on a simmering, subcultural interest in ABBA’s work and sparked a full-blown revival, one that culminated in Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan belting and grunting their way through “S.O.S.” in the movie version of Mamma Mia! And it became one of the best-selling albums of all time, with copies continuing to trickle out of stores in shocking numbers to this day. Because of Gold, ABBA has become an integral part of the world around us, their music floating through common spaces around the world like a music fan’s lingua franca; without it, the band might have remained a curio, the kind of half-forgotten treasure you have to seek out rather than stumble upon.

Little more than a decade separated Gold’s release from the unceremonious end of the band’s recording career. After a delirious rise to global superstardom in the second half of the ’70s, ABBA was finally starting to lose steam. Its two constituent couples—Björn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Faltskog, and Benny Andersson and Frida Lyngstad—were either separated or divorced by the release of their final album, The Visitors, in 1981. And while all four members continued working together with an impressive level of professionalism, the fact remained that Ulvaeus and Andersson were writing music and lyrics, including post-breakup ballads and wounded domestic dramas, for their ex-wives to sing.

The band had soured on touring and promoting themselves after enduring some of the most frenzied appearances this side of Beatlemania, and the fatigue was showing up in their music: “I was sick and tired of everything/When I called you last night from Glasgow,” sighed Lyngstad on the title track of 1980’s Super Trouper. “All I do is eat and sleep and sing/Wishing every show was the last show.” And after conquering the pop charts in dozens of countries around the world, everyone was ready for a new challenge: Andersson and Ulvaeus were dreaming of a detour into musical theater, and Faltskog and Lyngstad were curious about reviving their dormant solo careers.

Boredom aside, ABBA’s commercial peak was clearly in the rear-view mirror by the early ’80s. The Visitors was their least successful album since the beginning of their career, and the band’s generation-spanning core audience was starting to wander into new spaces. The children who grew up with ABBA omnipresent on the radio were maturing into punk, rap, and new wave; the adults who enjoyed their lighthearted, melodic hits were less interested in minimally arranged character studies. Studio sessions in the spring of 1982 yielded little more than a few singles, and by the end of that year, it was clear ABBA’s time had come. Andersson and Ulvaeus collaborated with Tim Rice on Chess, a musical about a chess tournament (and love triangle) set against the backdrop of the Cold War; Lyngstad made an album with Phil Collins; Faltskog scored a few solo hits and duets before largely retreating from public life.

From a distance, it must have seemed unlikely that ABBA would explode back into the popular consciousness and stay there indefinitely. Yet Gold was perfectly positioned to take advantage of shifts in technology, music business, and the culture at large, all of which crested alongside the compilation’s release in 1992. In the decade since ABBA’s collapse, CDs had become the dominant form of physical media and were accelerating toward their turn-of-the-century peak. While the CD market had been steadily growing since the end of the ’80s, reissues covering the ABBA catalogue had become conspicuously absent from record store shelves around the world, a consequence of business decisions made near the beginning of the band’s career—all handled by the group’s famously unscrupulous manager, Stig Anderson—and an ensuing string of contracts, renegotiations, and acquisitions.

“Many in the music business raised their eyebrows when Stig signed with different record companies all over the world, instead of letting one major label handle the group globally,” wrote Carl Magnus Palm in his essential ABBA biography Bright Lights, Dark Shadows: The Real Story of ABBA. “That, however, was the whole point. Stig’s theory was that no company could be strong in every territory around the world and ABBA’s interests would be better served by working with the label that had the most impressive sales presence in each market.” Anderson’s decision to establish a network of international distributors meant that by the band’s demise, ABBA’s catalog could be handled differently according to each country’s needs; the compilation slapped onto shelves in Madrid wouldn’t necessarily be the same as the one stocked in Melbourne.

When Anderson’s Polar Music Group (and, consequently, ABBA’s songs and masters) were acquired by Polygram (now part of Universal Music Group) in 1989, the label had to wait for Polar’s patchwork of licensing deals to expire before devising a coherent strategy with which to approach ABBA’s library of hits. Plans for a box set were pared back to a single disc, a conservative play intended to gauge the market for the band’s catalog before investing any more resources. The label polled its offices around the world regarding song selection, market tested the album’s cover art—its classy, minimal black-on-gold a far from the kitsch of ABBA’s studio album artwork—with potential British buyers, and made sequencing decisions based on fan feedback rather than chronology.

Even though Polygram was dedicating reasonable amounts of time and money to ABBA’s revitalization, they still underestimated the amount of latent interest in the band’s music by the early ’90s, in part because that enthusiasm was rooted in marginalized communities. For gay men around the world, ABBA’s blend of naïve camp—consider the outfits they wore on stage, which ran the gamut from High Elven couture to sets of matching white silk kimonos—indelible melodies, and genuinely wrenching melodrama proved captivating. They wrote anthems for dancing queens and men after midnight, inadvertently adopting language that would become essential to gay life. And as much as the gay community loved ABBA, the band returned the favor: “In the ’80s, especially the first half, [it] was like ABBA was forgotten,” said Ulvaeus in a 2019 interview with Gay Times. “We thought that was it, we go on and do other stuff and ABBA will be forgotten. Then it was the gay community who underpinned the comeback… we felt that we had the full support, and it made a lot of difference.”

Goofy cover bands like Australian outfit Björn Again built on this enthusiasm for ABBA’s music and became genuine sensations at clubs around the world, dialing up the kitsch with even more outlandish attire and between-song banter delivered in Swedish accents. And if the commercial potential of ABBA’s music wasn’t already evident, it became impossible to ignore in mid-1992 when Erasure’s cover EP Abba-esque topped the charts across the UK and continental Europe.

So came the perfect storm surrounding Gold’s release: assembled at an ascendant moment in the music business by a label that approached the ABBA catalog with an unprecedented level of coordination and thoughtfulness, delivered to a public desperate for a convenient way to hear the band’s hits. It’s a fascinating story, yet it still doesn’t explain why millions of people around the world were ready to embrace ABBA once more with feeling. What is it about this band’s music that spoke, and continues to speak, to listeners across languages, cultures, and borders?

Unlike the great majority of contemporary hits, ABBA’s version of pop music is completely divorced from the influence of R&B, hip-hop, soul, funk, and Latin music—in short, from non-white musical traditions. Ulvaeus summed up their approach rather neatly in a 1981 interview: “Our musical roots are European—we like French and Italian songs,” said Ulvaeus. “This is probably why our songs work well in the countries of Latin America… in the United States, pop music is heavily influenced by the blues, soul, and gospel—which isn’t in ABBA’s heritage.”

Ulvaeus and Andersson grew up on traditional Swedish folk music and schlager music, a sappy, simple strain of pop with a distinctly continental European flair. And when their tastes began to develop as teenagers, they developed a network of influences that remained almost exclusively white: the Beach Boys’ golden teenage hymns, Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, Lennon and McCartney circa Rubber Soul, classical music, and musical theater. It’s no surprise that as mature composers and lyricists, they came to favor crystalline melodies, dizzying arrangements and counterpoints, and over-the-top emotional gestures.

This mix of influences helped create the band’s reputation as purveyors of unrefined schmaltz. The songs on Gold that have aged most poorly are the cuts that bear the greatest schlager influences, songs like “Chiquitita” and “Fernando” and “I Have a Dream.” Even gorgeous hooks wilt up against inelegant English lyrics, martial Germanic pomp, and faux-Italian balladry.

Rare misses aside, hearing Faltskog and Lyngstad’s impeccable voices weave through a battalion’s worth of riffs, bells, and whistles is an indefatigable source of ecstasy. Listening to “S.O.S.” or “Dancing Queen” or “Super Trouper” for the first time can feel like hearing “Good Vibrations” or “Born to Run” in the same fashion: Your pleasure centers are overwhelmed until they blow up like the Grinch’s tiny heart, expanding beyond their old size and becoming something new.

Listening to Gold with fresh, focused ears, I was struck by the sheer variety of sounds beneath its blinding polish. The ABBA ground-zero that’s anchored in my head lies somewhere between “Lay All Your Love on Me” and “The Winner Takes It All”: cavernous, sprightly, desperate dance-pop confections built for crying in the club. (Robyn became one of this decade’s great pop heroes by pinning down this same sad-ecstatic balance and welding it to modern, muscular production.) And while this might have become their most distinctive mode, it was far from their only one.

“Take a Chance on Me” is best remembered for its a cappella opening buoyant chorus, but its verses are pure Swedish honky-tonk; I hear them and think of Daft Punk’s “Fragments of Time,” a hidden jam on Random Access Memories that’s built on a warm country boogie. (Speaking of Random Access Memories: while that album’s connection to Giorgio Moroder may have been more explicit, its primary sound—expensive, theatrical, continental European pop—is pure ABBA.) “Money, Money, Money” is the most successful of Ulvaeus and Andersson’s early forays into musical theater, a gold-digging fantasy that’s given real edge through Lyngstad’s dramatic interpretation. Late-period hit “One of Us” is heartbroken, lilting reggae, and it boasts one of Faltskog’s most delicate vocal takes for good measure; glammy stomper “Does Your Mother Know” is dumb, clean fun, even if hearing Ulvaeus take the lead makes you wish they’d called in Elton John for the supremely bitchy guest spot the song deserves. The magnificent “Knowing Me, Knowing You” finds the band at its best and its silliest in the span of 60 seconds: An elegant chorus with a male countermelody leads into a second verse spoiled by vaguely, unintentionally pornographic backing whispers.

Skeptics pointed to the watch-like precision of every new ABBA hit as evidence of the band’s soullessness. In a 1993 essay in TIME after Gold’s American release, critic Richard Lacayo wrote that the band “was always easy to enjoy, if you could just put aside the unnerving sense that they were hastening the decline of pop music into commercial calculation and mindless buoyancy.” But the level of quality represented on Gold sprung from more than just studio scheming or bald ambition. By the time ABBA won the 1974 Eurovision contest with “Waterloo,” Andersson and Ulvaeus had each enjoyed a decade of domestic success as musicians, and Faltskog and Lyngstad were working solo artists in their own right. They had collectively played thousands of tour dates across Sweden, produced music for dozens of other artists, and spent untold hours working as a songwriting and performing team. Their mastery and enthusiasm for their craft was indisputable.

Calling ABBA icy or passionless also conveniently elides the intricate balance between their craftsmanship and mournful writing. Take it from no less an authority than Max Martin: “I’m a sucker for the melancholy,” admitted the legendary pop producer in a 2001 interview with TIME Europe. “I guess that’s one of the things, coming from [Sweden]. If you listen to ABBA… it’s always sort of melancholy.” Ulvaeus and Andersson had figured out the balance as early as “S.O.S.,” ABBA’s first major international hit after “Waterloo.” It sounds like Faltskog is singing the first verse from the bottom of a well; her loneliness and desperation are so thick, you can almost reach out and touch them. When the chorus finally arrives, its warmth is palpable until, all of a sudden, it’s not: “When you’re gone,” Faltskog chirps, “How can I even try to go on?” The contrast is stark, and it’s irresistible.

As the division of labor between Andersson and Ulvaeus became clearer later in the band’s discography—the former handled most of the music, the latter wrote the bulk of the lyrics—the divide between subject matter and sound became even more pronounced. The tumult of the band’s personal lives began to subtly leak into their art: “Knowing Me, Knowing You” and “The Winner Takes It All” are crushing glimpses at marriages in disrepair, sung by adults who know they can’t help but carry on with their lives. Relatively silly cuts like future booty-call anthem “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” are marked by quiet urgency: “Half-past 12/And I’m watchin’ the late show in my flat all alone/How I hate to spend the evening on my own,” Faltskog moans. Even “Dancing Queen,” the band’s most purely joyous moment, can’t fully give itself over to pleasure. It’s a celebration of impermanence. You may be young and sweet now, but you won’t be 17 forever.

Erlewine wrote that greatest hits have a way of “sand[ing] away the artists’ quirks,” and the same is true for Gold. Polygram’s decision to detach the album’s sequencing from the arc of ABBA’s career makes it harder to appreciate the band’s gradual transformation. The silly, glammy Swedes who galloped onto the stage at Eurovision took over the world, stormed the disco, and finished their career making their saddest, strangest music yet. (The new ABBA music reportedly recorded as part of a 2018 reunion has yet to materialize). And yet Gold still conveys the one thing you absolutely need to know about the band: For about a decade, these four Swedes cracked the code on pop music.

Buy: Rough Trade

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