Riaan C wrote:
Bob Dubery wrote:
ABBA. Bjorn was responsible for one of the great moments of pop sadism when he wrote "The Winner Takes It All" and then got Agnetha to sing it.
Great observation! I had thought of that before. "
Tell me does she kiss ... like I used to kiss you?" Pure sadism. Its fashionable to knock them - but as pure pop art, pure perfection. Has stood the test of time. Twenty plus years later still hummable, memorable and being discovered by whole new generation.
There was another one a little later...
"
...And so I dealt you the blow
One of us had to go
Now its different, I want you to know
One of us is crying
One of us is lying
In her lonely bed
Staring at the ceiling
Wishing she was somewhere else instead
One of us is lonely
One of us is only
Waiting for a call
Sorry for herself, feeling stupid feeling small
Wishing she had never left at all"
Of course it is quite possible that the songs were not personal or not even informed by Bjorn and Agnetha's divorce. These things do get misconstrued sometimes. Richard & Linda Thompson's album "Shoot Out The Lights" is supposed to be the break-up album par excellence - because the couple got divorced just after it's release and then embarked on a famously stormy tour. But the reality was that the songs all predated the breakup of the marriage (and Richard Thompson meeting "the other woman"), so the argument doesn't hold up but you can't stop people coming to that conclusion.
Whilst I make the joke about "sadism", I think it most likely that Bjorn was just writing out of what was going on in his life rather than deliberately trying to spring a black joke on his ex wife.
I think artists sometimes accept these things a little differently than those outside do. Louden Wainwright seems to have taken a few potshots at ex-wifes and even his kids by Kate McGarrigle in some of his songs. His daughter Martha famously responded with a song entitled "BMFA" (short for "Bloody Mother ....ing Asshole") but they all seem to get on OK in the real world.
Round about the time Richard & Linda's first child was born Richard wrote the notoriously bleak "End Of The Rainbow"
"
I feel for you, you little horror
Safe at your mother’s breast
No lucky break for you around the corner
‘Cos your father is a bully
And he thinks that you’re a pest
And your sister, she’s no better than a whore
Life seems so rosy in the cradle
but I’ll be a friend, I’ll tell you what’s in store
There’s nothing at the end of the rainbow
There’s nothing to grow up for anymore"
But daugher and mother never took it personally, and Richard Thompson seems to be a perfectly happy guy who adores his kids when he's not writing dark, miserable songs.
Songwriters seldom seem to explain what their songs mean if it's not blindingly obvious. I can't say I blame them (and I don't believe that Randy Newman hates short people).
