ABBA (with Carl Magnus Palm)
Pop Pantheon
DJ Louie XIV
4.7 • 630 Ratings
🗓️ 21 April 2022
⏱️ 107 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
ABBA Scholar and author of 8 (!!!!) books on ABBA, Carl Magnus Palm, joins DJ Louie for an epic deep dive into the Swedish pop legends. First, Louie and Carl discuss the history of pop and "schlager" in Sweden and how the country's musical traditions helped form ABBA's music before tracing the pre-ABBA careers of the four members, Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, through the 1960s and how the group came together in the early 1970s, both as bandmates and romantic couples. Louie and Carl then break down how the "ABBA Sound" developed from the group's early recordings and their obsession with Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" and The Beach Boys' vocal-layering, ABBA's unique international ambitions, how the glam-rock nodding, Eurovision-winning "Waterloo" changed their career, the ways they continued to refine and expand their singular aesthetic on subsequent hits like "Mamma Mia" and "SOS", the darker and more wistful lyrical themes that began to surface on mid-period hits like "Fernando", the majestic ebullience of "Dancing Queen", their canny techniques for incorporating numerous pop subgenres into their work without ever losing their essential ABBA-ness, the powerful interplay of light and dark in their work, how the dissolution of the group's two romantic couples informed their more emotionally-complex latter period hits like "The Name of the Game" and "The Winner Takes It All", how the band came apart in the early 1980s, and how their legacy has evolved and changed over the last 40 years thanks to their greatest hits album ABBA Gold and the jukebox musical and film, Mamma Mia!. Finally, Louie and Carl rank ABBA in the official Pop Pantheon.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Pop Pantheon, the podcast where we completely overanalyze all of your favorite pop stars and then rank them in the official Pop Pantheon. |
| 0:19.0 | I'm your host, DJ Louis X 14th. |
| 0:21.6 | Hi everybody, so glad to have you back for another episode. |
| 0:24.6 | Before I dive in to this week's topic, a few quick housekeeping things up top. |
| 0:29.6 | First, tomorrow night, April 22nd is the premiere of my new party in Los Angeles. |
| 0:35.6 | It's called Gorgeous Gorgeous. I know you've heard me plug this before. And baby, it is sold out. Well, let me put it this way. The online pre-sale is sold out. We will have a limited number of tickets at the door. So if you couldn't nab your ticket in advance and you're in L.A. You should still come. Grab a ticket at the door. If you can get one, If you can't, worst case scenario, the venue has an amazing outdoor seating area that you don't need a ticket for. So definitely shoot your shot. You miss every shot you don't take. All right. I'm so excited for this party. It's going to be so much fun. So see you there. And also, there's going to be more of them. So I will keep you all posted on that. Now, I want to continue our great tradition of reading some spectacular reviews from this week. First up, this is from RR. RIPP 24, and the title is Found My People. Oh, I love that. All my life, I've been a low-key, amateur pop music nerd that has always obsessed over the behind the scenes, production, cultural and minutia that makes my favorite pop artists fly or flop. |
| 1:29.9 | Imagine the delight when I found a podcast that was right at my alley. |
| 1:32.9 | I've absolutely binged multiple episodes at a time and have loved every minute. |
| 1:36.4 | With that said, please, please, please give a Kelly Clarkson episode apart from an American Idol episode. |
| 1:42.6 | Dying to hear your thoughts on her musical highs and lows. |
| 1:45.9 | Welp, without saying anything, don't worry about it. |
| 1:50.3 | Okay? |
| 1:51.3 | Second is from Keith James Jones. |
| 1:53.8 | Get out of my brain. |
| 1:54.8 | This podcast is top tier. |
| 1:57.3 | The way it's put together and edited with music clips is amazing. |
| 1:59.7 | So much research and really good takes. It's like listening to your pals of a conversation about your favorite pop stars. I cannot recommend highly enough. Thank you so much, Keith James Jones. And finally, Anonymous listener number two never has a podcast catered more to my interests. I love the serious in-depth analysis and focus on music and media rather than gossip. We need more content like this. As a lover of music of all kinds, the episodes really get my mind running. Can't wait for the Taylor episode and regularly fantasize about being the guest on an Olivia episode. We're going to have to do that in like 2027. And then he says, edit, Rihanna double episode, one of the most cathartic experiences of my life. Girl, me too. Anyway, so thank you so much for your kind reviews, and please go leave more. The reviews really help the podcast get picked up by the Apple Podcast algorithm. You guys have been doing so great at that. I really, really appreciate it. It helps me so much. It's the best thing you can do to help the podcast out at the moment. I want to announce the winner of our review contest in that regard, and it is Usher. So we will be working on an episode about Usher, and that will be coming in the near future. Thank you to everyone that voted. I can't wait for that episode. Please follow us on social media at DJ L-O-U-I-E-X-I-V on both Instagram and Twitter and on |
| 3:09.0 | Instagram at Pop Pantheon Pod for all updates and cool graphics and all kinds of other fun stuff. Get in the Discord. The link for that is in the show notes and we'll also be on social media and check out all the Spotify playlist for every episode also on social media, also in the show notes and And without further ado, here is this week's episode |
| 3:25.2 | on one of the greatest pop acts of all time, the wonderful Abba. |
| 3:34.2 | We've talked a lot on this podcast about the dueling and intersecting definitions of pop. There's pop as in whatever kind of music is popular at a given moment, and then there's |
| 3:45.6 | pop, the genre, often glistening, perhaps deceptively light-seeming, hook-centric, broadly |
| 3:52.1 | appealing music characterized by familiar verse-chorus structures and emotionally broad tropes that are easy on the ears, |
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