It’s a cool linguistic fact that melodrama and melody both come from the same word. ABBA songs had both to spare
Illustration/Uday Mohite
Never mind a clever opening, after 40 years, ABBA released two new songs this week, ahead of a new album in November, met with loose-limbed joy, and haven’t we needed some of that?
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Despite their many hits, ABBA were never considered cool—they were even actively considered uncool. Their music was too maximalist, its pleasures plentiful, well-crafted, easy and somehow sincere–not a quality considered edgy. Disdained by cultural gatekeeping gents types, it’s not surprising that ABBA were loved by many to whom society showed no love—the gay men, plump, assertive women, the odd kids, as the film Muriel’s Wedding showed so tenderly. To be who you are when the world says you don’t belong, to love what arbiters of taste, yaniki ageing bad boys, disdain—require something. Maybe courage, maybe love. Sometimes they’re the same.
It’s a cool linguistic fact that melodrama and melody both come from the same word. ABBA songs had both to spare. Often told in first person, highly experiential, like personal essays in song, they brimmed with the passion of those who strove to find beauty in their un-belonging: dancing queens, pretty ballerinas, those without money, money, money, all saying take a chance on me. Told with visual and sensory detail, like scenes in a screenplay, they allowed you to inhabit a sensory experience, perhaps your own, while cushioned by chords like sequin showers, looping grooves, perfect for dancing by yourself. In one of my favourites (The Day Before You Came), you find the unlikely line “having gotten through the editorial no doubt I must have frowned” followed by the heart-stopping melodrama of “it’s funny but I have no sense of living without pain, the day before you came”.
Melodrama is thought to be tacky—but in a world where emotion and pleasure are considered somehow lesser parts of ourselves, to be reined in, and more so the pleasures and emotions of some kinds of people, melodrama is a generous and necessary form, as are film songs, also considered un-cool. Anyway, aren’t we all a bit tacky when emotional?
Hi to all K Drama lovers.
An era of snark has culminated in a pandemic. The world and time, both feel stingy. ABBA has arrived, somewhere between aunties and angels, with one break-up song and one make-up song. As if knowing we needed this, they sing “I’m like a dream within a dream that’s been decoded”, and it’s cathartic to have them sing on our behalf “Do I have it in me?” rather than confront alone the melodrama of our own, ‘do I have it in me to start over, to move on, re-draw the map of my future, fall in love again’ thoughts.
There is a ShahRukhness to the songs—bits of musical self-reference reminiscent of older hits—and a Main Hoon Na feeling.” “I’m now and then combined” they sing with overstated self-awareness and perfect unselfconsciousness, touching our throbbing desire–the need for time travel. To go back to a lost time, to be lost in an old day-dream of the future. If they can come back, what else could?
The soaring chords, a benign Gothic libidinally, liberatingly excessive. The twinkly grooves are perfect for dancing with yourself, convenient in these lonesome times, while dreaming of when we’ll be dancing together again.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com
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