Weekend super jam: ABBA

For the lack of any jams last week and it being already Sunday, I decided to make it up by a super jam. Which means basically that I will ramble on a bit more than usually. And there are three songs. Mainly because I felt I have to set myself a limit so that it wouldn't be too exhausting for a random reader.

I've come to realise not everyone loves ABBA. There's nothing everyone loves but ABBA seems to be rather polarising. For me they've kind of always existed. It's something you don't really form any opinion on or live without. Like air. Or water. Or maybe something less vital, but to be honest I don't want to imagine my life without it. I had always kind of known and heard them and when I started to get more into music, around the age of twelve or so, ABBA became my favourite band. Maybe because I had a friend whose parents had a nice record collection she could make use of. Later on we found a ton of other stuff but ABBA was a nice stepping stone to what we saw as an adult music world (we took it rather literally for we started to listen to music mainly adults did).

Like always with all my big interests, I became rather obsessive. This being time before really having an access to the Internet just like that and the Internet actually functioning the way it does today, there were basically only the albums, a concert I had taped on VHS on TV and some random pictures. We were somewhat boy crazy at the time so we were kind of bummed the guys in the band didn't really seem that attractive to us. So we poured all our love for the women. Because both, Frida and Agnetha were divine.

We were constantly dishing on which had a better voice, who had better outfits (well, some times it was a choice of less awful), who was more beautiful and who we would rather be. Probably more likely which one we would rather marry, given that we were pretty much in love with them and despite then acute boy craziness, both ended up playing more or less for the other team. It was a bit problematic actually, because we both preferred Frida. She was brunette. She was a good dancer. She had a really sweet smile, her voice was lower and she could draw really well (in some CD booklet there were some drawings). If we were belting Winner Takes It All from the bottom of our hearts in the school day afternoons and pretending to be them, we would take turns in being Frida and Agnetha as both wanted to be Frida and neither was really a blond nor a brunette (I really looked most like Björn to be honest). I would wear my mother's old embroided blouse and we would totally do the singing into different directions. Like this:

Frida looked so beautiful here we would have lengthy discussions on it.

Let's fast forward to 2008 when Mamma Mia!, the film, came out. (That itself is such a triumph of older women that I won't even go there.) But after I'd seen it I really wanted to take a trip down the memory lane and fangirl like I had years earlier. And now I could have a nice YouTube session and watch stuff I hadn't seen before! So I ran into this some performance that was kind of... an eye opener. I'd always been a Frida-girl and I had never felt any need to reconsider choices I made in my early teens. But then I watched this video and I suddenly I got what all the fuss on Agnetha was about. I mean Frida's super hot here, too, but there's just something that made me want to take a chance on Agnetha in the heartbeat. Maybe it's the boots and the blazer. Maybe it's the way she moves. Or actually it probably is the way she looks at the camera when singing ”'cos you know I've got / so much that I wanna do / when I dream I'm alone with you”.

Like, please tell me more Agnetha!
(I apologise for the poor quality but it's the best I coud find.)

I may not be that hardcore with my fanatic feelings nowadays but still my heart really beats to the rhythm of golden pop/disco tunes from the 70's. So let's end this with this rather... shall we say interesting, video for my favourite ABBA song, Eagle. And these super adorable gifs. Because you probably could see it coming: I ship it!

 

  Jeez. (Gif credit.)