Retrologies: From the ABBA museum to prog rock

Retrologies

From the ABBA museum to prog rock

by Lars Kaijser and Sverker Hyltén-Cavallius

The other day we went to the ABBA museum in Stockholm along with a group of heritage studies students, in order to discuss popular music as a form of cultural heritage. The museum opened in May and has attracted a lot of visitors. Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA has been a prime mover in the establishment of the museum and has together with the other band members donated and lent several items, from hand-written notes and instruments to clothes. These fragments, together with the sound of ABBA’s music, images of the rural musical circuit of the Swedish 1960’s against a birch forest backdrop and a selected home interior of band members, together form a home-woven fabric of a recent Swedish past.

The deal table of manager Stickan Andersson with five identical chairs around, and the room in the Stockholm archipelago where for example “Fernando” was composed, completes the image of an un-hierarchic, informal and nature-loving Sweden.

ABBA has been a part not only in the creation of a late modern Swedish cultural heritage, but also in a transnationally disseminated popular imagery that throws Scandinavia into the kind of exotic gaze that we call Borealism (originating in the empirial European self of countries such as Germany and France). A visit to the ABBA museum and the adjacent Swedish Music Hall of Fame enables one to reflect on the variety of what could be described both as a Swedish sound, an affective register and as a set of Swedish musical pasts.

In our project we look at different sets of fragments – what we refer to as retrologies - associated to the Swedish progressive music scene of the 1970s. ABBA and the progressive movement, once extreme opposites on a national popular music continuum, today seem to tell similar stories of a mythic bygone Sweden. 

Below is a picture of the authors at the ABBA museum