Museums, part 3a: The ABBA Museum

[My husband, Tim, felt that the ABBA Museum deserved a post of its own. Herewith, is a guest post.]

If you visit Seattle, take the underground tour, visit Smith Tower, take a Duck Tour, go to the Market. If you come on a weekday, go to the Starbucks on the 40th floor of Columbia Tower.

And if you visit Stockholm, see the ABBA Museum, an experience the likes of which you will never have outside of Sweden. 

Mamma Mia! The ABBA Museum was bright and noisy — from the ticket line at the beginning, down into the Waterloo Eurovision exhibit:

Right through to Jim Henson’s Creature Shop’s Muppets appearing in The Last Video:

They had lots of ABBA costumes and an exhibit about costumes — and the costumes were pretty wacky. They had a room full of gold records - and gold cassette tapes, if you can believe that.

Shiny things everywhere!

I did learn a few things, though.

For instance, all the members of ABBA were established pop stars when the group formed. They all had professional gigs and some recording contracts before they started performing together.

They were doing music videos (then called “promotional films”) long before they became hip - and even required - in the late 1970s.

There was an exhibit about ABBA’s recording studio and how they worked together, trying out different lines and tunes and finding things that work as songs. Apparently, the order of battle is that the male members of the group wrote the songs and the girls did the singing - and the girls’ voices were instruments of music, like other instruments.

Which brings up an interesting point — do pop songs need to make sense?

“Dancing Queen” would never have been written by an American pop band (or British, I suspect). Teenage girls do not refer to themselves as “Queens,” you do not look for a place that “plays the rock music”, and what you’re doing is not “jive.”

Or take my get-drunk-and-fix-your-resume-song, “Super Trouper.” Nobody would say “super trouper.” I don’t know why. They just wouldn’t. And being bummed out that you’re on a concert tour where everybody screams and adores you — that is so far beyond being a First World Problem (FWP) that words fail me.

Nevertheless, I guarantee you, play this song on a loop and drink some red wine, and you’ll be ready for a new job.

But never mind — the ABBA museum has music and gold records and lots of other shiny things and it’s fun and you should go! Yes, YOU— because, dig it — you’re the DANCING QUEEN (oh yeah!)