Word: abba
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...into the age of rock. Or maybe it wouldn't have mattered, given the stodgily conservative tastes of Broadway's geezer audience. The Rocky Horror Show lasted less than a month in 1975. And Chess was a 1988 Broadway flop, though Rice and the composers from the pop group ABBA wrote a spectacularly varied and vigorous score that included One Night in Bangkok, the last show tune to make...
...best think about it. Someone once said that composing is nothing more than remembering a tune nobody else has ever thought of. If that's true, Erasure has done a brilliant service to the world by remembering these sublimely silly songs. (I don't know anything about ABBA; they were before my time--the name occupies as murky space in my cultural memory, associated through Scandinavian-ness with the Wassa Bread my anorexic babysitter used...
...doesn't really matter that I can't remember ABBA's music on my own: Erasure is there to help. Listen to "ABBA-esque" once, and you'll know the tunes backwards and forwards. These songs are so infectious you'll feel like they've been floating around in our collective unconscious, just waiting for someone like Erasure's Andy Bell to give them voice. They sound like nursery songs, and they have the same simplistic, joyous appeal...
...baby I was stuck"). But forget them-Bell does. The high point of the album comes on "Take A Chance on Me," where he leaves the lyrics behind and babbles a blissful "ba ba ba ba." And the concept is hilarious: Erasure is just a latter-day incarnation of ABBA, after all--they're both gooey, disco-ey, selfparodying pop groups. Thus this album is self-parody to the second degree at least. It's a tongue-in-cheek overdose of corn, and it's cool...
...ABBA-ESQUE...