Angeleyes

I've often had an interesting relationship with Swedish 70s and early 80s "superpop" group ABBA. My dad was my first exposure to music, of course, and while ABBA wasn't really his kind of thing, he did have one compilation album of theirs which we listened to quite a bit. Probably because my mom and us kids kinda liked it. This was The Magic of ABBA on vinyl, and you can follow that link to see the tracklist as well as the booklet that came with it, and all of the pictures, etc. Sometimes in the years since, I've gone through moods where I thought ABBA was merely a fad of the times and that their music wasn't something I was particularly interested in, but I've never really let go of a fondness for it. In more recent years, I've come to deny that opinion entirely, and I now think that ABBA were one of the most truly talented groups of songwriters/performers ever to come out of the pop era. Certainly better than the over-rated Beatles (don't get me wrong; I don't think the Beatles were bad. I just think that they're not that great.) Much of their music is truly timeless. Not too long ago I discovered Abbacadabra, which took a great number of the ABBA songs out of their late 70s sonic context and re-performed them as cover versions in a 90s dance-pop or Hi-NRG. This cemented that view; the songs themselves are great. And frankly, that late 70s sonic context isn't so heavily funky and disco that it sounds bad even now; it's actually pretty timeless itself.

On top of this, the puerile and evil yet sadly kind of charming musical Mamma Mia! also shows that the songs really have legs outside of their context. I've said about the movie version of that before:

So making a musical using their songs wasn't a bad idea, by any means.  Although a handful of songs feel forced, most of them work pretty well given the story structure.  And the movies themselves are fairly charismatic and charming most of the time too.  I laughed.  I felt emotionally tugged.  I had a good time.

Which is why, of course, the Mamma Mia movies are so dangerous.  Because underneath that charming, likable surface is a grab bag of civilization destroying content.  All of the characters are broken and dysfunctional, engaging in behavior that is irresponsible, immature, depraved, debauched, frankly kind of retarded, and to make it all worse, the movie romanticizes exactly all of those things.  I've flippantly (although completely accurately) summarized the first movie by saying that it's the story of a washed up older ho and her bratty princess syndrome daughter jerking around a whole bunch of different men, who for reasons that are completely inexplicable to the audience, they put up with.  The story is awash with r-selected feminism (but I repeat myself) tropes, including the "empowered" women who, like I said, always come off more as bratty and bitchy than powerful.  As always, feminists covet the alleged social and political power that they think men have, but haven't the foggiest notion of the responsibility that that power entails, or where it comes from, or how to maintain it.  It's nothing more than the ability to indulge their narcissistic fantasies, which ultimately, this movie is.

The men are all inexplicably beta, and pine after women in a way that makes no sense, especially because these women make no effort to be attractive, really—in fact, they go quite a long way towards trying to make themselves off-putting and unlikable.  Everybody gives up their dreams to go chase after women that, in many cases, they haven't seen in years or even decades.  Somehow these men still cling to romantic notions after decades—which is clearly nothing more than projection on the part of the women writers (actually, I notice that out of three writing credits two of them are men.  Biologically, at least.)

Nobody should ever watch this film and feel that the characters are anything other than pitiable, broken people, engaging in ridiculous behavior.  As much as I thought the movie was kind of charming, I most certainly do not recommend it.  Do yourself a favor and just go buy ABBA's Gold and More Gold collections on Amazon and listen to them instead. (ed. Since I wrote that I see that a "three disc" version (also in mp3) with 59 songs has come out. This is probably pretty much all the ABBA a normal person would ever need.)

In any case, I had a strange thing happen after I really got into ABBA again and decided that it was kind of criminal that I hadn't loaded up my huge music collection on my phone with more ABBA that I discovered the song "Angeleyes." While it sounded strangely familiar, I had no real memory of this song. This is very bizarre, because I see that it's on the album that my dad had. Somehow, my memories skipped over that song, which is very strange because it's one of my favorite ABBA songs now. Exactly how it came to be that I remembered every single other song on the album except that one mystifies me, especially now that I consider it such a good track.