What's That Chirping?

By Richard Lacayo

In a certain mood -- the one you drift into, say, while placidly taking in old episodes of The Brady Bunch -- Abba can have its charms. Four pleasant Swedes chiming away in phrase-book English, their faces round and blank as aspirin: lower your resistance to chirpy pop marches, and in no time your favorite song is Waterloo. Drop your prejudice against Continental kitsch, and who can say no to Fernando? Disarm your critical faculties, and Abba lays claim to the squishiest chambers of your heart, the parts susceptible to Dancing Queen.

Is that enough to explain the Abba revival, which is well under way in Europe and surfacing fast in America? A greatest- hits collection, Gold, newly released in the U.S., has already sold 5 million copies in Europe, where it was No. 1 on Billboard's charts for months. Last year the glitterbug duo Erasure camped atop British charts with Abba-esque, a four-song CD tribute. Abba's following reaches even to the scowling fringes of grunge, something of a feat for a group that could make a smiley-face button look pensive by comparison. Abba impersonator Bjorn Again -- eat your heart out, Elvis -- keeps the torch burning in live performance. And at clubs last summer Dancing Queen found new life in a lengthy remix featuring a hefty bottom beneath a song that could otherwise be runway music at a Barbie fashion show.

Abba 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 (not that much of a plunge to begin with). Because the band -- composed of keyboard player Benny Andersson, his girlfriend (later his wife) Anni-Frid Lyngstad, guitarist Bjorn Ulvaeus and Bjorn's wife Agnetha Faltskog -- rarely toured, Abba could seem as featureless as a supermarket bar code. Even the name was an abstraction, an acronym made from the band members' first initials. Like IBM.

And like IBM, they were huge. After the breakup of the Beatles, no group sold more singles; Abba had more than a dozen Top 40 hits in the U.S. alone. Their mammoth international popularity just made them seem more ominous to rock purists. Could there be such a thing as a steamroller made of mush? For one thing, they had a way of making English sound like Esperanto. ("The judges will decide/ The likes of me abide/ Spectators of the show/ Always laying low" -- what does that mean, exactly?) And their famous choiring sound, exalted but weirdly anonymous, could have been the ambient hum from | some bland consumer Utopia, a room-temperature limbo of airline food and spandex and unisex haircuts.

At their height, their sound penetrated everywhere. (Nelson Mandela, who was a prisoner on Robben Island for their entire career, once called them his favorite group.) But by 1982 their marriages had done a Fleetwood Mac. Amid the discontents that followed, Abba twittered to a close. Bjorn and Benny went on to write the stage musical Chess, with its hit single One Night in Bangkok. Anni-Frid and Agnetha tried solo careers.

None of them have shown an interest in regrouping or doing much to promote the latest revival. Yet like the Doors, Queen and Led Zeppelin, Abba has proved to be one of those groups that will not die. Nostalgia for the 1970s, of course, is part of the reason, a yearning for the powder-blue jumpsuits and blow-dry shags of the Decade That Taste Forgot. For the youngest twentysomethings, Abba is nothing less than musical comfort food, a group they first encountered in day care, when lyrics like "Love is a tune you hummy, hum, hum" were of a piece with their world view generally. For baby boomers willing to go near them, Abba is also the McGuire Sisters -- melodic harmonizers, a refuge from rap and heavy metal. And Abba's disco side makes them easily adaptable as house music for dance clubs.

What may be the most powerful source of their appeal has nothing to do with music. Embracing Abba is a way for Generation X to repudiate the baby boomers and their wrinkled artifacts. No less a figure than Kurt Cobain of Nirvana has declared himself a fan. To a generation apt to think of McCartney, Jagger and Dylan as millionaires who once posed as rebels, Abba has the virtue of forthright artificiality, show biz without pretensions. In a shrewd reading of Abba's appeal to younger listeners, rock critic Barry Walters has pointed to "years of unavoidable, suffocating, hideous, '60s flashbacks by baby boomers in control of the culture machine." Yet because it so badly offended boomer taste, Abba also enjoys the cachet that attaches to outsiders -- even outsiders who have sold millions of records -- which helps to explain why the group has been taken up by gays and grunge rockers alike.

When authenticity becomes just another style and passion just another posture -- something that long ago happened to the '60s rockers -- shallowness starts looking good. As an antidote to the tormented cliches of Abstract Expressionist painting, Andy Warhol once offered a soup can, a weightless image to trump the sweaty exertions of the art-world generation that preceded his. It's possible to appreciate Abba the same way. As music, they'll do. But as ironic heroes to a different kind of counterculture, they'll do perfectly.