Word: abbas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...summoning L&S, Randy Newman, Roy Orbison, Jimmy Webb, Jim Steinman and the whole Brill Building contingent. Every once in a while rock turns up onstage as part of an oldies package: Tommy, Leader of the Pack and, in London, compendiums of songs by Buddy Holly, Barry Manilow and ABBA. Smokey Joe's Cafe is one such package, snazzy and tightly wrapped. It's just three decades late. With Leiber and Stoller's help, there could've been a riot goin' on-on Broadway...
...communist thinker simply has a different kind of following now. He's the band Abba, not En Vogue. Marxism these days has appeal "in an odd sort of retro-manner," says Jedediah S. Purdy '97, an editor of Perspective who has studied Marx. "One might use the fashion metaphor that it is equivalent to showing up at a party in your '71 easy rider biker gear. It's a cachet of anachronism...
Take the narrator of the opening story, Accountant. Outwardly, as Abba Roth tells us, he is the picture of upwardly mobile success: "We live in San Rafael, California, and I work at Priebe, Emond & Farmer, the San Francisco firm, where I have worked since the last days of the Eisenhower administration. At one time or another we have owned a Shetland pony, dug a swimming pool, leased a summer cottage at Lake Tahoe, and given generously to the Israel General Fund . . ." Inwardly, he is trying to come to grips with an irrational act of petty theft he committed against...
...reminiscing: the Seventies. We had Saturday Night Fever (mine) and the soundtrack to "Reservoir Dogs" (also mine). We had Tarek's Tracy Chapman. We had Amanda's "mushy tape," the stuff our high-school dances were made of. Most alarmingly, we had Sean's prized cassette of Swedish supergroup ABBA's Voulez-Vous...
...think the whole world went bad when ABBA broke up," Sean said, then paused. "The Reagan Revolution came along soon afterwards...