Say what now? Decoding Abba’s lyrics in 2021

There’s a reason they’re still karaoke favourites. Few songs released in the last half century are as lyrical , yet easy to sing as Abba’s. The whole bar can join in. They’re fun for everyone.

It’s what helped the four Swedes (Agnetha Faltskog, Bjorn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Anni-frid Lyngstad, now all in their 70s) sell over 385 million records in the eight years they were together as ABBA (1974-1982). Forty years after their last album, Abba has announced a new one, Voyage, due out in November 2021.

The music is unlikely to disappoint; fans will likely get the same easy rhythms and lyrical twists that, most recently, lit up box offices in Mamma Mia! and Mamma Mia! 2. But will the lyrics be any more cogent? What, after all, is a “dancing queen”? Why must money money money, be funny, in the rich man’s world?

These strange idiomatic expressions passed fans by. They sang along. Without asking why. And rather than being a distraction, the perplexing foreign syntax had quite the opposite effect — it made the songs seem catchier and more compelling. Perhaps this was because, like some nursery rhymes (Ring a Ring o’ Roses), the fact that they meant very little to the listener made them easier to rote-learn.

Perhaps, unlike …Ring o’ Roses, their descriptive, matter-of-fact way of spelling out their message transcended the obvious language barrier and turned a been-there-done-that sentiment into something new.

Lyrics, like all forms of poetry, can be hard to get just right. They can get too selfreferential, too dream-like, too trite or too tacky. With Abba, it wasn’t what they were saying so much as how they were saying it.

English is second language to all four band members, and they wrote their own songs. So the lyrics pay little heed to conventional grammar or usage. The band put the words where they felt most right, and the results were a unique and alien rhythm all their own.

Their Eurovision-winning song, Waterloo (1974), goes: “At Waterloo Napoleon did surrender / and I have met my destiny in quite a similar way”… “The history book on the shelf / is always repeating itself.” Why the book, why the shelf? Why this placement of the verbs?

Their atypical use of the language would be mirrored by the Scandipop bands that followed in their wake, from Swedish duo Roxette in the late 1980s to Swedes Ace of Base in the early 1990s and Danish band Michael Learns to Rock (MLTR) later in that

decade. A close look at the lyrics reveals scores of lines a primary school English teacher would mark all over with red ink.

In one song, MLTR exhort the listener to “Paint My Love” (1996) without ever explaining how. In another hit, Sleeping Child (1993), aside from the rather baffling chorus, there is the verse: “If all the kings and all the leaders / Could see you here this way / They would hold the Earth in their arms / They would learn to watch you play.” And yet parents around the world still swear the song captures exactly what they feel, even if they would put it differently.

Ace of Base left millions confused with All That She Wants (1992). The phrasing (“All that she wants / is another baby / she’s gone tomorrow…”) made it seem like the woman in question was determined to accumulate a rather large family; but of course, if you really listen, you can tell that’s not it.

Roxette’s biggest hit would leave anyone who paid attention befuddled .

It Must Have Been Love (1986) has a very uncertain chorus, but also contains the lines: “Make believing / We’re together / That I’m sheltered / By your heart / But in and outside / I turned to water / Like a teardrop / In your palm.”

In their collective defence, Ace of Base band member Ulf Ekberg told Abu Dhabibased newspaper The National in 2011: “We just try to make it understood by a world audience. Because of this focus on lyrics, some of the American songs are complicated and can sometimes be not much fun. While for us… so we have feel-good melodies and simple lyrics so everyone can have fun.”

Which is not to say that Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, Pink and Katy Perry make perfect sense. “Hit me baby one more time” remains confusing on several levels. The record label saw fit to take “Hit me” out of the title, but Baby One More Time (1999) does little to help explain the song.

But then again, in a rather twisty turn of events, that song — and numerous other British and American chart-topping hits — was written by Swedish writer-producer Max Martin, much in demand for his high success rate.

He wrote the Ariana Grande single Break Free too, and in 2014 she tussled with him over grammatical errors in the lyrics. But she eventually gave in and sang lines that went “I only wanna die alive” and “Now that I’ve become who I really are”. Because in the world of pop, you don’t correct a Scandinavian, you just sing along.

I only want to die alive / Never by the hands of a broken heart / I don’t wanna hear you lie tonight / Now that I’ve become who I really are ARIANA GRANDE, courtesy Swedish writerproducer Max Martin, in the 2014 song Break Free