The 2010 list of Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame inductees has been announced, and on it are several artists that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: Jimmy Cliff, Genesis, the Hollies, the Stooges. And then there’s ABBA. Wait, ABBA?
“I’m surprised. It’s quite wonderful,” Benny Andersson of the legendary Swedish group tells Rolling Stone. “I didn’t think this would happen, because we were a pop band, not a rock band.”
Actually, it shouldn’t be too shocking. ABBA-sampling Madonna found herself inducted two years ago.
The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame ceremony goes down March 15, 2010, at New York’s Waldorf Astoria. But as Andersson explains it, you shouldn’t hold your breath waiting for all four ABBA members to reunite and perform together. Or should you? More »
In order to celebrate America, Idolator will be taking tomorrow off. But before we close things out, here are a few stories we missed during this verifiably insane week:
• Hey, look! An entire AP story speculating about who might fill London’s O2 Arena in the wake of Michael Jackson‘s death that includes a) some Sun-sourced speculation about an ABBA reunion and b) the following fan reasoning for why Whitney Houston should perform instead: “”because they suffer the same pain and deal with the same demons: drugs.” Ay yi yi. [AP]
• To continue Great Moments In Quotes, here’s Nick Cannon on the speculation that his wife Mariah Carey is going to use her forthcoming video for “Obsessed” as a way to lampoon Eminem: “My wife doesn’t beef. She’s Mariah Carey. She’s not beefin’, she’s a vegetarian.” [MTV] More »
An Abba museum set for the Stockholm harbor–one where visitors could dance on stage with Abba holograms, ooh and ahh at replicas of the band’s dressing rooms, and engage in the always-crucial act of performing Abba karaoke–has been put on permanent hold, thanks to a real-estate dispute over the building where the museum was supposed to reside. The exhibit will probably turn into a traveling one, since the couple who conceived of the museum in the first place sold their rights to the Swedish pop titans’ likenesses to a Swedish event promoter. But it won’t be the same! More »
Abba’s Bjorn Ulvaeus has said in the past that he and his former bandmates don’t need reunion cash, and a recent concert arranged by the Kremlin would seem to bear that out: Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin had to fly in the British tribute band Bjorn Again in order to quell his Abba jones at a recent private concert. How private? How about eight guests?
What were the 80 most important musical recordings, artists, trends, events, and performances of 2008? What were the eight things this year that broke our hearts—or, at least, our ears? We’re happy to announce 80 ’08 (and Heartbreak), Idolator’s year-end overview. The list is below the jump.
In addition to choosing our 80 favorite musical recordings, people, places, movements, and events of the year, Idolator has also chosen eight of its least favorites of 2008. In the first Heartbreak, Kate Richardson looks at a movie that misses an opportunity to immortalize Sweden’s greatest pop group—and its greatest ’70s fashion plates—on the big screen.
One of the pleasures of following Popular, in which Tom Ewing reviews every No. 1 U.K. pop hit in order, is tracing careers-in-miniature–“tiny novels,” as Greil Marcus said of Robert Christgau’s 1980s Consumer Guide book. That’s especially true of Ewing’s ABBA write-ups. He obviously loves the group: Popular’s newest entry is on “The Winner Takes It All,” which Ewing gives a perfect 10, making them the only act to whom he’s given that score for two separate releases–the previous 10 was for “Dancing Queen.” (The other 10s so far have gone to Nancy Sinatra, the Beatles–for the double-A-side “Eleanor Rigby”/”Yellow Submarine”—Desmond Dekker, T. Rex, Kate Bush, and Blondie.)
Hands up, those of you who thought that the soundtrack to the big-screen adaptation of Mamma Mia!, starring Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, and Amanda Seyfried as people who just bust out into Abba songs at seemingly random intervals, would be this week’s top album. Anyone? No? Well, bully on you; the collection sold 131,000 copies, a 5% week-to-week drop that was enough to best both Miley Cyrus’ Breakout (102,000 sold) and Sugarland’s Love On The Inside (91,000 sold) for the top spot.
Why embark on a grueling tour made even moreso by the ravages of time when you can just watch the money from the licensing of your songs to jukebox musicals and fresh-faced kids roll in? Abba’s Bjorn Ulvaeus basically posited this question to the British paper The Telegraph when he told a reporter there that there was no way his band would come back for the dual purposes of cashing in and acting as a “cover band” of its older material. Of course, Ulvaeus let this little piece of principle slip in the context of promoting the movie version of Mamma Mia!, in which his songs… get covered by Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan. And as any shrewd businessman knows, outsourcing is the way to go these days.
