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Global ABBA: Markets and Margins
ABBA: popular music history has yet to witness a more lucrative band who do not speak English as their first language. As some of the industry’s surest beneficiaries of the 1970s expansion of global capitalism, their border-crossing success rode on their fluency in common vernaculars, dispersed manufacturing, neo-colonial extraction, attention to regional markets, tax finagling, income diversification and the concoction of long-running money-spinning musical commodities that demand little ongoing labour from their original performers. Communist Eastern Europe during the Cold War (1947-1991) was one territory where few acts from the other side of the Iron Curtain accrued sizeable profits, precisely because these national economies severely limited the entry of goods from the capitalist world. The tactics ABBA wielded to bypass these restrictions exemplify the diversification and speculation that came to characterize neoliberal manoeuvring.
But, of course, by nimbly surfing these various new waves in how money and music could be made, ABBA won themselves a truly global fanbase, some of its most loyal members women and gay men. Outwardly, the band personified straightness (two sensible-seeming heterosexual couples) and mainstream approval, making them unlikely magnets for marginalized communities. Many attribute the appeal to how ABBA’s outré costumes or misfired early lyrics now register as camp. While this may be the case, attention to what they crafted in the recording studio – the melancholic uplift of their compositions, its fragility sheathed in “synthetic” textures – along with the homosociality of the team’s working methods and visual imagery, honed a sophisticated queerness that exceeds simpler interpretation via camp alone. Similarly, an insistent feminism radiates from ABBA’s choice not to tour as extensively as most other bands of their stature. Films such as The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Muriel’s Wedding, as well as the Mamma Mia! franchise, capitalize on these popular politics of everyday liberation, yet more grist to the mill of ABBA’s enduring allure and the revenues it generates.
Kay Dickinson convenes the MA in Creative Arts and Industries at the University of Glasgow. Her studies of music include Off Key: When Film and Music Won’t Work Together (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) and Fernando – A Song by ABBA (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2025).
- Speaker
- Dr Kay Dickinson
- Hosted by
- University of Aberdeen
- Venue
- King's College - KCF22/Microsoft Teams
- Contact
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Please contact Dr Christina Ballico if you would like the Microsoft Teams link for this session: christina.ballico@abdn.ac.uk.