As predicted (ah, the loneliness of being right) “rockism” is back. I take a contrarian, post-modern approach. There isn’t good or bad music, there’s music you like or don’t like, and it is determined by the social context and individual factors. Any grumble I had about Abba wasn’t about their being good or bad (“Waterloo” and “Ring Ring” I like, “Fernando” I don’t), but the RECEIVED WISDOM that they are great succeeding the prior view that they are rubbish. Received wisdom is the problem. When I am preached at by Pete Wylie or Stuart Maconie, i find myself drawn to early Whitesnake as an example of “rock in rebellion”.
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/music-theatre/2018/04/abba-back-and-so-are-snobs-rock
ip33 says
If you don’t mind me saying so I think you’ve got the wrong end if the stick. It isn’t whether you think ABBA (or anyone) are good or bad, it’s the notion that we should feel guilty for liking them. The thought that anyone should feel guilty for liking anything us a strange and fairly recent invention I think.
You shouldn’t feel guilty about liking anything. Except Olives or Piers Morgan.
Rigid Digit says
I like Olives, and feel no guilt.
Piers Morgan is a c*nt though
Gatz says
Well I like Pier … Pi …. It’s no use. I can’t even type it. Pass the olives.
Vincent says
So I don’t have to feel guilty about listening to skysupertrampozrictentaclescardiacsbudgiewhitesnakeshalamarcussrap? PHEW!
That said, I defend my right to point and laugh at Runrig and Nickelback fans.
Who said any of this was rational?
fentonsteve says
I have and enjoy an album (or possibly two) by The Scottish Band. And I don’t care who knows it.
Nickelback are shite, though.
Sitheref2409 says
I have more than one. I have most of their oeuvre.
Mike_H says
The turning point for ABBA appreciation might well have been right back in 1977, when the “Hits Greatest Stiffs” compilation was released with one side of the inner sleeve recommending 16 albums from other labels and showing pictures of them.
An obvious parody of the way most mainstream labels used to promote other items of their catalogues, but the 16 recommendations were
“Abba’s Greatest Hits”,
“Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers”,
Mink De Ville’s “Cabrietta”,
Dave Edmunds’ “Get It”,
The “Fool’s Gold (Chiswick Chartbusters)” compilation,
Lee Dorsey’s “Yes We Can”,
The Rumour’s “Max”,
Elvis Presley’s “Sun Collection”,
The Ramones’ “Leave Home”,
Nick Drake’s “Five Leaves Left”,
MC5’s “Back In The USA”,
Little Feat’s “Sailing Shoes”,
“Blondie”,
“Steve Winwood”,
“Rock ‘N’ Roll With The Modern Lovers” and
Captain Beefheart’s “Troutmask Replica”
so not entirely an exercise in irony.
duco01 says
Interesting post, Mike. I wasn’t aware of that inner sleeve list.
One tiny thing, though – Lowell George was such an incredibly cool dude that he omitted the ‘g’ on the end of “Sailing”. The Little Feat album in question is called “Sailin’ Shoes”.
Sewer Robot says
Maconie’s piece is mostly spot on – meant as a nails-on-blackboard reaction to the dismissal of ABBA because it’s pop, and pop with “birds”.
A note to the author, though -mentioning Shane MacGowan in the past tense is folly, he will outlive us all.
But you are also right, ip: there is such a thing as the orthodoxy flip, and its great weakness is the way it is usually absolute. Thus ABBA swing the whole way from Europeans making tinny pop that whiffs of discos and your parents’ record collection to being indisputably the foremost songwriters of the 1970s, when the truth is somewhere in between. (See also The White Album is the epitome of hubristic indulgence, directly to blame for 90% of the sh*ttest records of the last 50 years or a work of staggering genius with not a single note too many)
Vincent says
“Orthodoxy flip”: there will be 3 more from them later.
Lodestone of Wrongness says
But really, does anyone care whether music is hip or unhip these days, days when every piece of music ever made is available at the push of a button or “Alexa, play me Joni Mitchell 1972 to 74”? We like what we like and who cares if I think Abba are shite or that A Tribe Called Quest are amazing? Nobody, that’s who.
Moose the Mooche says
Wrong. Q Tip has just seen this comment and jizzed in his red cords.
No wonder he needs crazy prophylactics.
Mike_H says
But these writers.
They’ve got to write about something or other, else they’d be out of work.
Maconie’s a pleasant enough chap and a mostly-good writer. Except he was considerably off-beam in the chapter of his otherwise-excellent “Hope And Glory” book, where he wrote about bikers muscling in on the Wooton Bassett repatriations of KIA military personnel from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The bikers I saw there when my nephew was repatriated were from The Legion Riders, all ex-servicemen members of the British Legion, who played a large part in greeting mourning relatives and explaining procedures, where people should stand in order to put wreaths on the hearses when they briefly stopped etc. They were there in an official capacity and very helpful.
Moose the Mooche says
His Jarrow March book is a lot more balanced than that sounds.
Mike_H says
Like I said, one little bit in an otherwise excellent book.
People make mistakes.
Vincent says
I think Stuart maconie still cares about unhip and hip.
Mike_H says
It’s a fairly exclusively male thing, I think.
It gets ingrained in most of us a little after puberty and then we hopefully grow out of it.
bungliemutt says
I wasn’t aware that there was ever a ‘prior view’ that ABBA were rubbish. True, they were always a bit naff, but I don’t think it’s revisionist to suggest that their music has suddenly been reinvented as the work of geniuses. Even at the height of their popularity there was always a grudging acceptance that they wrote some pretty darn good songs. The silver jumpsuits were laughable in the seventies – now they are merely camp or nostalgic (or both).
I’ve always liked them anyway – there I’ve said it. SOS gave me shivers just as much as anything great I’d heard before or after.
Black Celebration says
I think it was Shakin’ Stevens who observed that people remember not what you say, but how you make them feel. I think this is true for most people out there.
I was chatting to a lady once who told me she was going to see ACDC and was really excited because she has been obsessed with the band all her life. Niw, I like talking about music and will take any opportunity to do so, so I asked which songs she liked best. She named Highway to Hell and Thunderstruck as her favourites but I could tell that she would struggle to name many more. For her, it’s being there among the crowd and the noise and the euphoria and the excitement and there’s nothing wrong with that.
With the acts I am obsessed with, I think I could stroll onto Mastermind, take the seat and answer every question correctly about them without needing to revise. As I have aged, I have realised that this isn’t the way most people enjoy music – as if you are to be interrogated any minute.
Moose the Mooche says
Ten-shun!! What was the Portuguese b-side to The Meaning of Love, soldier?
Black Celebration says
er, Obekorn (It’s a small town)
Well that’s what it was when I bought it in Woking. Not familiar with a different Portugese B-side…
Moose the Mooche says
Oh dear, how civilian!
Black Celebration says
Dammit Moose you actually got me checking discogs for the Portugese pressing and I find that my previous answer still stands. So stick that up your antlers and, er, smoke it (?).
Moose the Mooche says
Made ya look! Made ya look!
GCU Grey Area says
A lot of people felt let down by Shakin’ at Glastonbury, a few years ago. Refused to do ‘Green Door’, despite the fan who’d lugged a green door with him, and was clearly visible from the stage.
Black Type says
Yeah, he was trying to reinvent himself as a serious, sober artist having just released an ‘authentic” back to basics album. Was interviewed on 6Music just before Glasto, and came across as really po-faced (I could see him through the radio 😉). Idiot. An opportunity lost.
dai says
I love pop music and as far as I was concerned Abba made some of the greatest pop music of the 70s, thus some of the greatest pop music ever. I realised this at the time as a teenager when I heard things like SOS, The Name of the Game, Knowing Me Knowing You and Take a Chance on Me on Radio 1. Glorious life affirming pop music.
Subsequently I recall them being out of fashion at the time amongst many and this continued well after their demise. Girly music. I shared my admiration of them with a friend in a heart to heart one night and when Gold came out in 1992 we both sheepishly bought it the week it was released. We probably felt a certain degree of guilt. There then followed Bjorn Again, Muriel’s Wedding, Mamma Mia etc and now everyone in the UK owns a copy of Gold *
* this is a well known fact
Blue Boy says
‘There isn’t good or bad music, there’s music you like or don’t like’. Really? Of course we should all be free to like whatever the hell we want without being sneered at. But I think the notion that everything’s the same, it’s just a matter of personal taste is madness. I may prefer Boney M (no idea why they were the first band to pop into my head, but there we are) to Bach, but I am quite prepared to go out on a limb and say that Bach’s music is significantly better.
Mike_H says
There are a few Duke Ellington quotes on the subject:
“You have to stop listening in categories. The music is either good or it’s bad.”
“There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.”
“If it sounds good and it feels good, then it IS good.”
“Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It’s not an occupation or profession, it’s a compulsion.”
Moose the Mooche says
I’m very taken with Elvis’s description of all of the different types of music he liked or performed as “gospel”. Very Christocentric view of the world perhaps, but that’s how he saw things and I respect that.
MC Escher says
“Bach’s music is significantly better [than Boney M]”
Better how? The way it makes you feel? Or because it has more chords / modulation and so on?
I would contend that you just cannot say that music A is “better” than music B. I prefer Boney M when I’m dancing, and Bach when I’m in the bath.
Blue Boy says
I’m not particularly technically equipped to analyse the music, but I’d say that a typical Bach piece has much greater musical richness and depth, which I find more rewarding, compared to Ra Ra Rasputin. I may indeed prefer listening to the latter some of the time but that doesn’t make it as good.
Of course Bach being better than Boney M is still only my subjective opinion, not an objectively provable fact. But if we dismiss the idea that there is some sort of empirical range of quality in music, literature etc, then essentially we are saying literally everything is as good or as bad as everything else, and I just don’t buy that extreme relativism. The canon which tradionally has been built up by an accretion of informed opinion is deeply flawed as a concept, which is why some artists can be ignored for literally centuries and then suddenly discovered. But it still has some value as an indicator (not definitively so, of course) of intrinsic quality.
duco01 says
Boney M asserted, of course, that Rasputin was “Russia’s greatest love machine”, but I’d say that J.S. Bach had a good claim to be Leipzig’s greatest love machine, as he fathered no fewer than 20 children. One wonders how he had the time to write the B Minor Mass, the solo cello suites, the St. Matthew Passion, the Extremely Temperamental Clavier and all the other gems…
Blue Boy says
Well played, sir!
MC Escher says
A good definition of “quality” in an art work is how it affects you emotionally. I can’t think of a better definition in fact.
So Boney M in a disco is “better” art than Bach, because I want to get down with my bad self, and vice versa for a different emotional state (relaxing in a bath for example).
If that is relativism then so be it.
I think maybe music is a special case. I can’t imagine what emotional state I might need to be in to prefer the works of Dan Brown over those of Hilary Mantel.
Blue Boy says
Perfect example. Lots of people will prefer Dan Brown, and good luck to them – absolutely nothing wrong with that. Brown is certainly the better writer of page turning thrillers, and if you’re in the mood for something which doesn’t require much thought.But even though I accept that these things are tricky to define, I would say confidently Mantel is overall the greater writer.
Not sure that music is a special case. Just as sometimes only Boney M will do, so, I guess, sometimes all you want is some Dan Brown.
Lodestone of Wrongness says
Bah and Humbug. I live by the dictum that you like what you like but Dan Fucking Brown is not a page-turning thriller-writer: his writing is utter tosh, awful beyond the realms of awful. Hilary writes like an angel, unfortunately a pretentious angel who reinvents history to make things “interesting”. Quality? I would read a million of Ms Mantel’s stories rather than Dan’s bollox in much the same way that anyone with a hint of taste dismisses Abba.
Moose the Mooche says
How exciting! Can we hear from deram about the Clash now?
Sitheref2409 says
Comparing Boney M and Bach is like comparing Usain Bolt and Mo Farah and asking who the better runner is.
But Dan Brown? He can’t write. The Government health warning on a pack of ciggies is better written than anything he managed. He created one semi decent book, and has been living off that. I’m not a snob; I read a ton, fiction, non fiction, high brow, low brow.
I will be dead and buried before I let anything by that simplistic halfwitted incoherent buffoon over my threshold.
MC Escher says
And just when me & blue boy were approaching a polite consensus .. 🙂
Blue Boy says
Ha – I’ll drink that! Si is of course talking bollocks in his first para but I can’t really disagree with the rest of it….
retropath2 says
Heresy, and as well known, and received as fact by all on the last time I stated it, tinny bing bang bong bubblegum candy floss then and tinny bing bang bong bubblegum candy floss now. All this flimmy flam revisionist cock. Stick to yer guns, you waverer slackers! @disappointmentbob ain’t here to give you detention no more…….
dai says
retropath2 says
(He he, just wanted to reprise my tbbbcf line, if I’m honest)
In other news….
deramdaze says
I’ve yet to come across one snobby reference re: Abba since last week but have read about five or six people (including, bizarrely, an editorial in the Telegraph I think) referring to snobby attitudes as their initial reaction to the recent news about the two new songs.
Must make it hard to enjoy the music if the first thing many people pick up on is “hey, I bet X,Y or Z is/are being really snobby about this.”
Tahir W says
Yes who are these snobs? Damn them. Let’s go get the bastards!
deramdaze says
I’m one, come and get me, though I tend to target the no-hit acts … not the likes of Abba.
The clue is in the term ‘popular’ music and in that Abba can’t have been said to have failed or moved the goal posts (a.k.a. the Maconie era music press).
Sniffity says
You want snobby reference? Try this…
https://dailyreview.com.au/abba/74180/
I think he’s serious…for example…
“Their popiness was everything I loathed about modern music and its osmotic relationship to the charts. ABBA were all shine and no substance, from costumes to lyrics. Perhaps, and I’ll concede it’s entirely possible, I was playing the contrarian, basing my green knowledge on the firm belief that if it’s that successful then it cannot possibly be great art. And I was then just starting to dig down into the roots of rock/folk/blues looking for the deeper meaning.
When I heard ABBA, there was no deeper meaning. It was glitter and be gay. Even the sorrowful moments were like a breeze across the water.”
retropath2 says
Lovely article, thought I. Echoes my feelings entirely.
deramdaze says
O…..K….. but I don’t, as a rule, use the Australian Daily Review on an … erm … daily basis.
I know, I’m a fool to meself.
Hawkfall says
I’m not sure he knows what osmosis is, mind.
#sciencesnob
Twang says
I’m with you Vincent. Pete Wylie FFS. As if I give a flying one for his opinion about anything. Anyone using the term “rock snob” needs to have a look in the mirror. As Zappa said, “everyone in this room is wearing a uniform and don’t kid yourselves”.
Tahir W says
The only music snobs I know about are diehard prog types. But wait! I look down on prog, so that makes me a meta-snob. Oh no!
Moose the Mooche says
Looking down on prog? All those bald patches. Must look like a pebble beach.
fentonsteve says
What I want to know is, will Bjorn Again be doing the new tunes when they visit Cambridge in December?
Mike_H says
Rockism is a thing of the past. Late ’70s, ’80s, ’90s & early noughties.
Now we have Popism to contend with. Disdain for anything that doesn’t make you jiggle.
Sewer Robot says
Jiggling is the best!
Moose the Mooche says
“Rockism is a thing of the past” is a quote from Schoolly D’s I Don’t Like Rock’n’Roll.
*note to self: check this*
atcf says
I don’t dislike Abba because I’m a rock snob. I dislike them because I often find the production overwhelming – it’s like being force fed a full packet of Angel Delight, too much of a good thing. Couldn’t you flip the question? Isn’t there a certain snobbery in refusing to see that other points of view are available?
I’ll give them ‘The Winner Takes It All’ though…
Mike_H says
True.
Confectionery vs. savoury stuff.
In my musical tastes I’m much more fond of a chunk of vintage cheddar than a bar of chocolate, but sometimes a Kit-Kat is just what I need.
retropath2 says
Not even Angel Delight, more the cheaper option of Instant Whip, fast whipped with a manual whisk or spoon, leaving sickly gravel at the bottom.
Tahir W says
It’s the pretty much total absence of what have become three virtues of modern music: blue notes, syncopation and improvisation. In other words it’s the perfected form of what all pop would have aspired to be without black America.
I remember thinking how good Abba sounded in Muriel’s Wedding. Then after the movie they sounded just as bland again as they had before.
Hmm, it’s all got something to do with context, he wonders vaguely.
Black Celebration says
The thing is too many people think that liking music is easy – so it’s OK to say that they are a “nut”, a “number 1 fan” or “totally obsessed” with a band, as if they are talking about a favourite pudding or variety of cheese.
Moose the Mooche says
Liking music is absolute hell.
Mike_H says
We suffer. We really do.
We’re so lucky to have this support group to help us struggle along.
Tahir W says
Yeah much better not to listen to the shit. Rather just read and write about it.
Sniffity says
Could be a TV show in it: “My Music Collection Rules” or “Masterfan”
Mike_H says
The germ of a good idea there with “MasterFan”.
Competitive mixtaping.
Contestants have to produce a themed C90 mixtape of good audio quality, complete with artwork, from scratch in less than 6 hours. Using only tracks from vinyl or radio, recorded straight to tape.