12tone
Уровень B2· 1209 слов
on April 6th, 1974, two married couples from Sweden took the stage together at the 19th annual Eurovision Song Contest. they began to play a song called Waterloo, which somehow used Napoleon's famous defeat as a metaphor for falling in love,
and that is how most of the world met ABBA. and it was an auspicious beginning: Waterloo wound up winning that year's contest, leaving millions of new fans wondering what the band would do next. but after some follow-up singles failed to perform, they were starting to look like
just another one-hit wonder. but ABBA wouldn't go away that easily. they kept at it, clawing their way back to the charts with songs like Mamma Mia and Fernando and establishing themselves as, if nothing else, a respectable pop act for the European market. and then, on August 16th, 1976,
a new single dropped, and it dropped like an atomic bomb. it tore through the charts, hitting number 1 in 16 different markets, and forever established ABBA as one of the greatest pop acts of all time. that single, of course, was Dancing Queen. let's take it apart.
(tick, tick, tick, tick, tock) before we get started, if you want to see my next video a month early or just watch this one ad-free, those are both live now on Patreon. there's a link in the description, more on that at the end of the video.
the song starts like this. (bang) and immediately, I want to talk about production. part of the genius of ABBA was the way they fused traditional Europop sounds with new styles and techniques coming from America, and at the time, the big thing in American pop production was the Wall
of Sound. developed by convicted murderer Phil Spektor, the wall of sound involved layer after layer of instruments, filling up the mix with a lush, delightful bounty of timbres.
ABBA's producer, Michael Tretow, described the philosophy as trying to give as much music as possible for the money. and you can see that in Dancing Queen: including the members of ABBA, the song features 23 musicians, playing not just the typical rock complement of guitar, bass,
drums, but also piano, synthesizers, a second guitar, additional percussion, and, of course, a full string section with 9 violins, 3 violas, 2 cellos, and a contrabass. it's a bit crowded. now, we could go through every single one of those parts, and like, yeah, we're gonna do that,
I can't help myself, but I actually think the best way to explain the wall of sound is by zooming in on what has to be ABBA's greatest weapon: the vocals.
like many of the band's biggest hits, Dancing Queen features a sort of dual-lead, with the entire thing sung together by Agnetha Fältskog and Frida Lyngstad. in the choruses, they sing in harmony: (bang) but for the verse, they drop into unison. (bang) and you could argue
that makes the second voice unnecessary. after all, it's not adding anything new harmonically, melodically, or rhythmically. but that argument ignores perhaps the most primal form of musical information: timbre, the character and quality of the sound itself. and specifically,
