Is Dancing Queen Really ABBA's Best?
Fifty years ago this Sunday, on August 16, 1976, "Dancing Queen" went on sale as a single in Sweden. It remains the only ABBA song ever to reach number one on the American Billboard Hot 100, it was the last of three consecutive UK chart-toppers for the band in 1976, and it recently became the first ABBA track to pass two billion streams on Spotify. The birthday is being marked with a ten-inch pressing on sparkling vinyl, remastered at Abbey Road. Which makes this a good week to settle an argument ABBA fans have been having, with real heat, for forty years. Is it actually their best song, or only the one everybody knows?
The case against the obvious answer
Take the case seriously, because it is strong. Ask anyone who has listened past the compilation and they will not say "Dancing Queen". They will say "The Winner Takes It All", or "Knowing Me, Knowing You", or "SOS", or, if they intend to win the conversation outright, "The Day Before You Came". The reasoning goes: the great ABBA records are the late ones, written while two marriages inside the group were coming apart, and "Dancing Queen" is a disco song about going out on a Friday. It is also the most worn-out pop record in existence. Fifty years of wedding receptions, hen nights and film soundtracks have sanded it so smooth it barely registers as music. Even the reviewers of the day were unmoved: Robert Christgau graded Arrival a C, and Rolling Stone's Ken Tucker wrote the album off as "Muzak mesmerizing in its modality".
Listen to what the record is actually doing
The wedding DJs never noticed this part. "Dancing Queen" runs at 101 beats per minute, four to the floor, about as bright as a pop record gets. And it is sung entirely in the second person. Nobody in it ever says "I". Every line is addressed to somebody else: you can dance, you can jive, you are young and sweet and only seventeen. Then comes the line that gives it away, an instruction to look. Watch that girl. See that scene. There is a voice standing at the edge of the floor describing a seventeen-year-old to us, and it is very obviously not hers.
Now follow the tune. It keeps climbing, and the highest note in the whole record lands on "having the time of your life", so the happiest line in the lyric is also the one that costs the most to sing. Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad stack their voices up there and hold it, and something in the sound audibly strains. Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus built the groove from George McCrae's "Rock Your Baby", and began the sessions on August 4, 1975, a full year before the single appeared. Nothing about it was casual.
The crown
So, yes. It is their best, and the reason is precisely the thing held against it.
"The Winner Takes It All" is a magnificent record that announces what it is in its title. "Knowing Me, Knowing You" walks its singer through an emptied house in its opening verse. Those are ABBA being legible about pain, and legibility is the easier trick. "Dancing Queen" attempts the harder one: it hides a song about watching your own youth happen to somebody else inside four minutes so bright that half a century of dancefloors have played it without catching on. Writing something sad that sounds sad is craft. Writing one the world has filed as the happiest record ever made, which still lands when you finally hear it, is a different order of difficulty. It is the sole ABBA entry on Rolling Stone's 2004 list of the 500 greatest songs ever recorded, at number 171. That is not just fame accumulating.
Three songs, in this order
For anyone who is sure they already know this band.
- "Dancing Queen" first, with the words in front of you. The point is to hear a record you have heard ten thousand times as new information.
- "Knowing Me, Knowing You" second. It was the third single off the same album, out in February 1977, and it took them back to number one in Britain while sounding like the interior of a divorce. Melody Maker's Caroline Coon called it at the time: it "will become one of their best-loved".
- "The Winner Takes It All" third, from 1980. Björn Ulvaeus has said he wrote it drunk, in an hour: "the whole lyric came to me in a rush of emotion". When he handed the page to Agnetha Fältskog, a tear or two welled up in her eyes.
One hides it, one admits it, one says it out loud.
And play the album, not the hits. Gold: Greatest Hits is where "Dancing Queen" goes to be furniture, buried in a queue of other number ones that flattens all of them. On Arrival it is track two on side one, wedged between "When I Kissed the Teacher" and "My Love, My Life", with "Knowing Me, Knowing You" closing out the side, and the whole record runs a little over half an hour. That is the version worth putting on this Sunday.
