ABBA/YMMV

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• Americans Hate Tingle: Not *hate* exactly but still a difference in appeal - North America: pretty successful, but just another group. Rest of the World: popularity rivaled that of the Beatles.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: On the flipside, they were especially successful in Japan and Australia. Just take a look at the massive, screaming crowds in ABBA: The Movie. Ironically, "Take A Chance On Me", their second most popular song in America (after "Dancing Queen"), didn't even crack the top ten in Australia.
  • Then again, at the time ABBA was most popular worldwide, Fleetwood Mac had the prime position in the North American market, so to speak, on melodic, harmonic pop. It was pretty hard for anyone to compete against the Mac at the time of Rumours. For that matter, the parallel between the two groups in terms of couples that broke up but kept on working together is pretty eerie...
• Angst? What Angst?: Frida
• Broken Base: Agnetha fans vs. Frida fans. Because two women can't possibly get along with each other.
• Cargo Ship: "Dum Dum Diddle". Some guy/violin.
• Common Knowledge:
  • "When I Kissed the Teacher" is considered a song about a Teacher-Student Romance, which falls under Values Dissonance in the 21st century. But all the song discusses is how a student has a crush on her teacher and kisses him in the middle of him re-explaining an exercise in the lesson, and he is shown to be just as shocked as the students.
  • "ABBA made disco tracks" or "ABBA is a disco band" is another one, when the band mostly did 1970s' pop music and occasionally followed trends. While ABBA made a disco album ("Voulez-Vous") their most famous disco track is "Dancing Queen", a song released years before from the Arrival album.
• Ear Worm: Just about every song.
• Even the Girls Want Her: This is often the discussion when it comes to Agnetha and Frida, though the former tends to meet this more often than the latter, though she has some female admirers as well.
• Funny Aneurysm Moment: Any music video of the band in an automobile like "Tiger", "Money, Money, Money", and "That's Me" seems hard to watch after one considers the fact Agnetha almost was killed in a bus crash in 1983, with a minor concussion despite the force of the impact was enough to threw her into a random field.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • You need to listen to "Knowing Me, Knowing You" carefully and checked out what happens afterwards to the group.
  • The music video of "Under Attack" ends with the band members walking out of the warehouse into the daylight, reminiscent of an "And the Adventure Continues" ending, but would later become the last time the world would see ABBA together until their album Voyage in 2021.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The "alright, alright, alright, alright" from "So Long", which would later become Memetic Mutation attributed to Dazed and Confused (by extension, Matthew McConaughey) and OutKast's "Hey Ya!"
  • The song "Nina, Pretty Ballerina" from Ring, Ring is about a shy woman who wows night club crowds with her dancing every Friday night. Almost 40 years later, the movie Black Swan starring Natalie Portman was released, which was about a trainee ballerina with self-esteem issues called Nina.
• Internet Backdraft: Criticism of this group is near impossible due to the fans.
• Iron Woobie: Frida
• Magnum Opus: Arrival and/or The Album.
• Memetic Mutation: Keep in mind that many ABBA memes are only known within the fandom.
  • ABBA: The X
  • "What does kinky mean?"
  • "Sweaty, obsessive fans."
  • "How can I answer to that?"
  • The idea of listening to "Dancing Queen" when you're seventeen-years-old is a common one outside the fan circle. YouTube comments to the videos usually mention they're listening the night before their seventeenth birthday or that they cannot listen to it now they've turned 18.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Some fans blast Voulez Vous for being more disco-oriented.
• True Art Is Angsty: Many critics who diss ABBA tend to sing praises for The Visitors.
• Vindicated by History: The more pretentious type of rock critic (and rock fan) liked to deride ABBA during their heyday as being little better than bubblegum pop; as Bjorn pointed out in a 2002 Australian interview, "for the main part of the group's lifespan, the critics despised us". These days, a lot of people appreciate the group for their musical and vocal craftsmanship, and for their innovation in the field of music video (see Trope Codifier).
• What Do You Mean It's Not for Kids?: Sure, their songs are all love-and-peace-and-some-more-love and the kids love to sing along with them. But:
  • "Honey Honey" is really about sex, so much that in the version heard in Mamma Mia!, when the lines "you do your... thing" and "you're a dog-gone beast" are sung, the singer is clearly enjoying herself.
  • "Voulez-Vous" is about a consensual one-night stand.
  • "The Winner Takes It All" is about divorce.
  • "Does Your Mother Know" is about trying to invoke the Jail Bait Wait, in the sense that a legal minor is all but throwing themselves at the singer. Very much not kid-friendly.
  • "Hey Hey Helen" is about a woman whose has recently left her husband for an unspecified reason. It is implied that he was abusive to her. Her kids miss their father, but she never wants to see him again. The song essentially is trying to help them all cheer up. This is quite a dark meaning for such an upbeat tune and it is not surprising it was just an album track.