ABBA O'Riley

Tonight I would like to blog about the song "The Winner Takes It All" by ABBA. Again.

I have had a thought that I need to commit to paper. Well, by paper, I mean "the internet", since it's 2010, and I have a better chance of ending up in the Library of Congress through blogging than through any other creative profession.

Aww, here goes:

When I was a senior in high school our AP English teacher gave us a summer assignment in which we had to read and make notes on two novels in preparation for an essay quiz given during the first week of class. I selected Moll Flanders, which was hilarious, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which kind of kicked off an "I am Stephen Dedalus" phase that lasted through a series of pretentious and obnoxious college admission essays. Well, I guess it worked out better than having an "I am Moll Flanders" phase, which didn't happen until I was 22.

Anyway, the edition of A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man that I had bought had a foreword analyzing some of the major themes of the work, which in general I always thought was a stupid idea, talking about the novel and giving away all the major symbolic points before you even start reading it. Because it was a stupid idea I don't really remember anything about it except that the author of the foreword kept harping on the idea of chiasmus and how central it was to the novel. Chiasmus is the Greek word for an ABBA form. So if you say something like,

Apologise,
Pull out his eyes,
Pull out his eyes,
Apologise.

as James Joyce does on one of the first pages of Portrait, that's chiasmus. He does it all over; my old dog-eared copy tells me that he also says "The clouds were drifting above him silently and silently the seatangle was drifting below him" moments before Stephen's epiphany. Apparently also this represents the central conceit of the book, how in creating a "portrait of the artist" the artist, surrounded by his society, looks into a mirror and creates a mirror image of himself with a mirror image of society behind him and--well, you can look this up on Google Books, since they own all writing now, or something.

So lately I have been singing the song "The Winner Takes It All" a lot, for a bunch of reasons, many of which involve Meryl Streep. The more I sing it the more I get to analyzing the chords and the melody and Agnetha's intonation and the lyrics and the whole idea behind the song. I've come to the conclusion that even though some of the lyrics are a little out there in an English as a Second Language Rhyming Dictionary sort of way, as a whole they make a great narrative, contain some beautiful images and metaphors ("no more ace to play") and have a kind of intricate rhyme scheme that nevertheless feels completely natural in the confines of a pop song. Until you try to sing it yourself and really think about what it means, you don't quite realize how well it's written, how the rhymes work, how the phrases vary in length but come off as just the unpretentious confessional speech of a Swedish woman. It's kind of beautiful.

And, well, just take this passage from the second verse:

I was in your arms
Thinking I belonged there
I figured it made sense
Building me a fence

Building me a home
Thinking I'd be strong there
But I was a fool
Playing by the rules.

And, well, look there. Thinking, building, building, thinking. There it is. Right there. Chiasmus. Your ABBA form. In ABBA. It all comes full circle. Yes.