
Jump ahead two years and ABBA’s The Visitors was most emphatically my album (returned twice because
it kept skipping during “One of Us.” But Super
Trouper, the biggest selling album of 1980, was the album that my father
bought and seldom listened to, while my sister, three years younger, and I ate
it up like roast beef after a famine. To this day, I can easily lip sync most
of it, even the songs I disliked.
Super Trouper was
not my favourite ABBA album. That was, you guessed it, The Visitors, ABBA’s mic drop, their last waltz, something to decode
and obsess over. Having discovered Super
Trouper among my father’s collection rather than buying it myself, it took
a while for it to work its way into my consciousness. I was first pulled in by
the cover. Dressed all in white, Benny, Bjorn, Freda and Agnetha were circled
by an array of moody circus performers, swathed in dim amber light. The
superstars had come off stage to be worshipped and to cavort with their adoring,
though much lesser, co-performers. The young man holding the torch in the
foreground seemed ready to lead everyone to darker places. It wasn’t quite
sinister or sexual, but hinted at both.
The first single was “The Winner Takes It All,” but this was
the era of albums, where you made up your own mind what the best tracks were. Plus
“The Winner Takes It All,” about a divorce, had mature subject matter. Adults
seems to get tense when it played. It was not “fun” ABBA the whole family could
share, though eventually we discovered that campy enactments of the lyrics
could be quite delightful.
As a family, the consensus that the best song was “On and On
and On.” Its chorus and honky-tonk piano were grounded in rock and roll, which
my parents appreciated. But the story-telling lyrics that gave me great joy
caused them some consternation. The word “Hell” was not appreciated by my
mother. I can see now that the words painted too vivid a portrait of urban moral
contingency. The party where the world unfolded was not one you’d want your
kids at. “I was at a party and this fella said to me/Something bad is
happening, I’m sure you do agree/People care for nothing, no respect for human
rights/Evil times are coming, we are in for darker nights.” But at 12, I was
starting to appreciate the idea of a cold, smartass comeback. “I said I was not
exactly waiting for the bus” seemed like the perfect answer to “What’s our
situation, do we have some time for us?” even though the sexual connotations of
the question went way over my head.
The title track, too, was alienating to someone who wasn’t a
global citizen. The chorus’s chugging bass was fun to crank loud, but who wants
to listen to the complaints of a planetary superstar?
The Super Trouper song
that totally alienated my parents was the one my sister and I loved the most. Or,
I should say, most loved to perform. “Me and I” was not just a song, but a
theatrical production. The opening synths seemed like explicit instructions to
a stage manager where to direct the spotlights, which we, as super troupers,
could walk in and out of as we pleased. The relentless beat made it easy to synchronize
our moves, the wobbly bass created it a sense of suspense that covered missteps
and unsuccessful improvisations.
Growing up in a rather sheltered rural environment, I had
little awareness of mental illness until I was in my late teens. So my pure
delirium at lines like, “Part of me is acting while the other stands beside/Yes,
I am to myself what Jekyll must have been to Hyde” was independent of the
cultural presentation of split personalities. But I must have heard the Bee Gees
in the “Hy-y-Y-Y-HYDE!” My parents must may have been turned off by the song’s
disco influences, too far from country or rock and roll, in it. Or maybe it was
just the silly behaviour it brought out in their kids that made them tell us to
turn the song down and stop making the whole house shake with our jumping.

With its jet-setting ennui, Super Trouper was not an album for kids, nor was it an album for
adults who considered “Mamma Mia” the pinnacle of ABBA’s achievements. But for a 12 year old yearning for something to expand his world, it was worth rooting through the kitsch to find something unapologetically modern, cosmopolitan and curious.
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