What makes ABBA so irresistible?
"Friday night and the lights are
low ... "
No matter what you try, you can't shake it. In fact, once you start thinking about ABBA, you're a goner. Next thing you know, you've moved to this: "If you change your mind/I'm the first in line ... "
And like the lyrics to "Waterloo" remind us, you couldn't escape if you wanted to.
What triggers this phenomenon isn't always obvious, but it's no doubt about to happen on a widespread scale.
"Mamma Mia!," the film based on the Broadway musical built around ABBA songs, opens in theaters today. As people leave the cineplex belting out the tunes sung by stars Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth, the ABBA invasion will begin anew.
"Mamma Mia, here I go again/My, my, how can I resist you?"
ABBA's songs continue to endure as what scientists have dubbed "earworms" 35 years after the band's first album was released. Like those little bugs, the tunes burrow into our brains and keep hitting the repeat button.
Of course, what makes ABBA songs catchy is to an extent what makes most music memorable, from Bach to the Beatles to the Bernie & Phyl's jingle. But, says Daniel Levitin, author of "This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession" and associate professor at McGill University, there are some individual factors.
"For one thing, the way their songs are performed and produced, quite apart from the underlying composition, gives them an overall catchy sound," says Levitin, a musician and former producer whose forthcoming book, "The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature," further explores the music-mind connection.
The multitracked harmonies of singers Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad awaken the part of our brains in which our inner caveman is still enjoying a Paleolithic hootenanny with the rest of his clan.
"If you look at the evolutionary biology of the species and the chemical reactions we have to events in the world, for tens of thousands of years when we as a species heard music we heard groups singing it, not an individual and not an individual standing on a stage," says Levitin. "So the ABBA model of the multiple voices or the Edwin Hawkins Singers singing 'Oh Happy Day' is much closer to stimulating these evolutionary echoes of what music really is, fundamentally — closer than, say, Frank Sinatra or Miley Cyrus."
Recent comments
To Steve. Yes I saw them at concert. Must have been
around 1978...
Susy | July 25, 2008 at 6:33 a.m.
The photo caption is incorrect. Agnetha is the blonde, Anifrid(...
Fleur | July 21, 2008 at 9:53 p.m.
Yeah, I still listen to & love ABBA. I'm 40 & listened to them...
Earworms | July 21, 2008 at 12:58 p.m.
