The pop band Bono said was better than the rest
From day one, Bono always believed in the power of great rock and roll.
Although a lot of people may have seen what he was doing as laughably pretentious every time he made a record, you couldn’t deny that he seemed to believe that U2 could do just about anything they set their mind to whenever they played together. But in terms of songwriting, he was mature enough to admit when the pop groups were outdoing pretty much anything that the rock crowd could do.
That said, it’s not like rock and roll is reserved for the half-assed songwriters or anything. The greatest tunes to ever appear on the charts have been from rock and roll bands, and it usually takes a song like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ or ‘Stairway to Heaven’ for people to realise the kind of genius that the charts can do when everyone gets behind something that sounds catchy. And it’s not like Bono was immune to a few great pop tunes.
Because if we’re being completely honest with ourselves here, The Beatles were a pop group much more than they were a rock and roll outfit. They had the same influences that a band like The Rolling Stones did, but when listening to their melodies, they fit perfectly on pop radio while still being able to transcend what the pop sphere could do, whether that was going into psychedelic territory on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ or giving people strange detours on albums like Sgt Peppers.
But if The Beatles had shown everyone what pop songs could be like, it was only a matter of time before that started to turn into an assembly line. Every single record company only sees dollar signs when they look at the greatest artists in the world, and while there were more than a few cynical bands that were made to profit off of the pop formula, it takes a band like ABBA to show everyone what great pop music can sound like when people put a little passion into it.
Sure, the Swedish giants were the exact opposite of what rock and roll was supposed to be, but it’s a challenge to get almost any of their songs out of your head when you hear them. Whether they were playing ‘Dancing Queen’, ‘Take A Chance on Me’, or ‘SOS’, their entire mentality was about making perfect pop tunes, and while there was a lot of sugary production behind it, Bono couldn’t help but see past all that when he first heard them.
This was an example of pop geniuses on display, and Bono would have been a fool to say otherwise, saying, “I didn’t have the courage to own up to [ABBA] when I was 16 and in the middle of punk rock. There’s a bit of macho, well, I didn’t want to own up to ABBA. But I tell you what, they are just better songs. You can’t be empirical about everything in art. But sometimes [the] songs are just better.”
And it’s hard to really argue when looking at the sense of competition that they had at the time. As much as bands like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd dominated the 1970s, it’s not like they could compete with their level of hooks, which probably rubbed off on Jimmy Page when he eventually recorded pieces of In Through the Out Door at ABBA’s personal studio in Stockholm to get the sounds he was looking for.
But when looking at ABBA’s contribution to music, people aren’t going to be reminded of the petty fights that rock fans wanted to instigate. They were simply here to make the best pop music that the world had ever created, and it’s hard to deny that the world seems a little bit brighter thanks to every single record they made.
