The musical group ABBA was recently inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I kid you not. The always-wonderful Michele Catalano has the best take on it.
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The musical group ABBA was recently inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I kid you not. The always-wonderful Michele Catalano has the best take on it.
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Why would anyone be surprised to find ABBA in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? They qualify by any reasonable measure of success. They had huge albums and number 1 hits, and “Dancing Queen” could well be called the disco anthem.
ABBA at one time was the most popular music group on earth. If that doesn’t get you into the Hall of Fame, what does?
I’m not much of a music snob, I know people love to look down their noses at ABBA, but then again, I think the Monkees had some great songs and deserve to be in the R&R Hall of Fame themselves.
Why the ABBA hate Dean?
I think it’s just a matter of whether you believe “rock and roll” includes “pop” or not.
Because ABBA is the single most concentrated force of evil ever on this Earth, blasphemer!
;-)
No, dude, just read the link. I agree with Michele. I don’t hate ABBA. I just don’t think they belong there. Swedish Music Hall of Fame, OK. Pop Music Hall of Fame, OK. Maybe one or two of their songs sort of qualify as rock (maybe “Waterloo”), but barely. Might as well put Pavarotti or Pat Matheny or someone like that in there.
What rock music did they really do? What rock musicians looked to them for inspiration? I can see crossover artists and early pioneers from other genres who influenced rock (like a Les Paul or a Hank Williams Sr.) but otherwise: huh?
Dean, you can’t be serious. ABBA was perhaps the leading force in Disco worldwide. If you are going to argue that disco isn’t Rock, then I guess you’ll be kicking the BeeGees out of the Hall of Fame as well as dozens of other groups.
Was “Penny Lane” a rock or a pop song? How about “Your Mother Should Know?” Or “Feeling Groovy” or “Daydream Believer?” Or “Piano Man?”
ABBA was a leading force in Rock music in the 80s. I hated it, I mostly didn’t care for the whole era of “singing mice” that dominated that era, but I’m not going to snark on them just because I like more bass and rhythm in my songs.
There are plenty of groups in the R&R Hall of Fame today that have less claim to the honor than ABBA does. ABBA ruled the world for several years in the 80s.
I don’t think I’m snarking on them. In truth I’m a bit of a fan; I really like songs like “Take A Chance On Me” (which I once heard described as a great wheezing whirling flashing carnival machine that you just can’t stop feeding quarters into).
Bee Gees, borderline really. They actually did start as a pop/rock group. But I’d pretty much exclude disco by definition.
And no, I don’t think any of the songs you listed are rock and roll songs. If those were those artists’ typical output, they wouldn’t belong there either. But the artists who did them did real rock songs and were also directly influential on future generations of rock performers.
I think they’re watering it down to the point where if it’s music you like, you can just call it rock and roll.
Dean, I’d argue that they’ve been watering down the definition of “rock and roll” since the early 60s. Much of what is now considered “rock and roll” bears very little similarity to what I think of as rock and roll, and that goes for the “hard” side as much as the “soft” side.
Musical tastes are a completely subjective thing.
I like ABBA. I’ve always liked ABBA. And I’ve always liked disco, though I did get a bit tired of it during the late 70′s. Your tastes may vary – and that’s okay because adult American citizens are allowed to disagree about such things. (…at least up until now. After this weekend, I don’t think any of our freedoms are safe anymore.) However, anyone who tries to argue that disco is not a form of rock-and-roll is just being goofy.
When I was young, about the time the Beatles started getting really weird, this form of music was called “bubblegum”. It was much looked down upon by the white-noise, hard-rock, purists. But it was very popular nonetheless.
The roots of the disco style go all the way back to the Bee-Bop 50′s. Listen to a group like the Everly Brothers and then listen to ABBA. You can tell.
I think disco pretty arguably has rock influences but it isn’t rock, though I freely grant that these things always bleed around the edges. But, just like country music also shares roots with rock, and you can say that some early country music pioneers were strong rock influences and thus deserve recognition as part of the rock story, they aren’t the same thing. That’s why you could put, say, a Hank Williams Sr. into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but Hank Williams Jr. just wouldn’t belong there.
While it is Wikipedia and thus hardly infallible, I think the Wikipedia entry on Disco pretty much gets it right; Disco has a ton of different roots, of which rock is one along with funk, jazz, soul, and latin. It’s otherwise a pretty well-defined genre with a very specific beat and meter (pretty instantly recognizable once you know it) and and designed for a very specific type of dancing.
The speed and the beat are almost always so nearly identical on disco songs even from wildly different artists, that disco records are hugely popular in dance clubs with live DJs doing live mixes of their own, because the songs can bleed just about perfectly into each other: the beat barely changes from song to song to song to song to song. Which isn’t true for your typical rock song.
So to me, I’m just saying, no, these guys weren’t a rock group. Not an awful group. Not an annoying group. Just not a rock group. I sort of doubt they’d be offended if someone said that to them either. It would be like accusing Julio Iglesias of not being rock and roll, to which I imagine his response would be, “Yeah, and…?”
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