about ABBA

my childhood love...

I guess it’s not less familiar to you,  ABBA lovers, that these days you can see online  lots of promotional clips of tribute to ABBA shows.  It hurts my eyes and my ears, that band fulfilled my musical youth when hardly nothing else existed for us . It was the Romanian rural ’90 so to speak, when  a tape recorder first enterd our home and stayed there for 3 decades now. The first tapes ever recorded were ABBA albums, my uncle loved that band and somehow, like in a ‘’full of benefits dictatorship’’ so did we.

'The best of' album played over and over again as we played voleiball in the summer, as I was swinging on and on in the swing father made for  us kids, as we worked in the small garden inside the yard.

When a decade later I started singing, as a twist of nature, by no means faith or fortune, I realized I needed no rehearsal in singing songs I heard like.. three times a day every day for some good years (of course i was also studying mom!)

And now, this feeling of absurd  slaps my eyes as i see what has become of my greatest band  in the  eyes of mases. 
Dear ones, ABBA it’s not a cheap dancing band,  they didn’t perform in underwear or shinny tights made of plastic. What were they wearing was well built, part of a big mass project. They wore things tipical for the late ’70 early ’80, yes, glam was included and I can recall some purple and blue tight suits, but that was for a show only or some videos, not generally available.

And the music….the compositions..the voices….Agnetha Fältskog, the blond one for you all to undersand, played Mary Magdalen in Jesus Christ Superstar prooving her vocal qualities. Nope, she was not an accountant with great legs performing  for fun. They were professional, and even though they reached mass success, quality didn’t seeze to appear in music, lyrics and maybe the most important, vocal technique and orchestration.

What I see it’s pure kitsch, real shame  to those who claim to like ABBA; never a tribute, not in a zillion years.