But that isn’t what football is.
It isn’t. It changes more often than any sport we have. Football was Nixon’s favorite sport, but it was Hunter S. Thompson’s favorite, too. Football coaches will try anything. They’re gonzo. In the 1970s, teams only used a 3-4 defense13 if their defensive personnel was flawed. During the early eighties, that assumption changed; the new objective was to cover the field with as many linebackers as possible. Suddenly, nobody was playing a 4-3 except Dallas. But then the ’85 Bears hammered people with their 4614 defense, so every coordinator decided he had to create his own bastardized version of the 46. As a result, the only teams that still played 3-4 were the ones with defensive flaws, exactly how things had been originally. Every innovation is seen as a positive innovation, even if it has a negative result. Throughout the 1980s, the hot trend in the NFL was barefoot place kickers. A few guys even punted barefoot. It retrospect, this was probably the strangest fad in football history (it was the sports equivalent of peg-rolling your Guess jeans, which was going on at about the same time). There is absolutely no reason that kicking a football without a shoe could be better than the alternative, particularly when one is outdoors in the dead of winter. But this is what people did. Someone tried it, so it must be worth trying. When my friends and I played four-on-four football at recess, we would remove our moon boots and kick the Nerf pigskin with raw toes, even when the ground was blanketed by nineteen inches of snow. We thought we were being tough. We were actually being liberal.
2B “In those days football seemed the almost perfect sport and it seemed unlikely we could ever get enough of it,” David Halberstam wrote in 1974, alluding to the NFL games he had watched with Gay Talese during the LBJ administration. “What we really rooted for was the game itself.” Interestingly, the title of the magazine essay this comes from is “Sunday, Boring Sunday: A Farewell to Pro Football.” Halberstam was bemoaning (what he considered to be) the sad decline of pro football during the seventies, a supposition that now seems totally wrong in every possible way.15 A more prescient statement comes from something Halberstam wrote in 2006, again reminiscing about watching Johnny Unitas and Frank Gifford on black-and-white TV sets over twenty-five-cent beers: “Nobody needed to sell the NFL to us. We could see how good it was.”
I am thirty-seven years old. I now like football more than I ever have, or at least as much as I ever have since those wonderful days in fourth grade when I’d take off my moon boot to kick barefoot in the snow. I never thought this would happen. Never. I always assumed that my interest in football would wane over time, just as it has for everything else I was obsessed with as a kid. For a few scant years, this did seem to happen—my interest in pro sports decreased during the height of my college experience, and I missed one Super Bowl completely.16 But since entering the workforce in the summer of ’94, my obsession with football has risen every single autumn. I love watching it and I love thinking about it. And I want to understand why that happened. I assume it is one of three explanations or—more likely—a combination of all three: Either (a) the game itself keeps improving, (b) the media impacts me more than I’m willing to admit, or (c) this is just what happens to men as they grow older. I suppose I don’t care. I’m just glad to have something in my life that is so easy enjoy this much. All I have to do is sit on my couch and watch. It is the easiest kind of pleasure.
My wife is awesome, but she hates football (as wives are wont to do). Every game seems the same to her. I will be watching a contest between Kent State and Eastern Michigan on a random Thursday night, and she will say, “Go ahead and watch that game. I will just sit here and read this magazine featuring a plus-sized black female TV personality from Chicago.” Two days later, Georgia will be playing LSU for the SEC championship. Now she will want to rent Scenes from a Marriage. “You want to watch football again?” she will ask. “Didn’t you already watch football on Thursday?” Every game seems the same to her. And I can’t explain the difference, even though the differences feel so obvious. And I don’t want to explain the difference, because I always want to watch Kent State and Eastern Michigan, too. They are as different to me as they are similar to her.
I don’t know what I see when I watch football. It must be something insane, because I should not enjoy it as much as I do. I must be seeing something so personal and so universal that understanding this question would tell me everything I need to know about who I am, and maybe I don’t want that to happen. But perhaps it’s simply this: Football allows the intellectual part of my brain to evolve, but it allows the emotional part to remain unchanged. It has a liberal cerebellum and a reactionary heart. And this is all I want from everything, all the time, always.
Q: As a woman, did that offend you?
A: What do you mean? Why would it offend me more as a woman?
Q: I don’t know. It just seems like this issue has a rather obvious feminist component. Doesn’t being a woman change how you think about things?
A: Personally, I was more offended because of my Irish heritage.
Q: Really? How so?
A: End of interview.
ABBA 1, World 0
1 Sometimes it’s hard to tell if things that happened in your life only happened to you or if they happened to everyone. Every formative incident feels normal to the child who experiences it, so sometimes it takes twenty-five or thirty years to realize a particular event was singularly bizarre. For example, it took me a long time to recognize that being institutionally taught to dislike disco in my second-grade social studies class was deeply weird—unless, of course, this was a totally normal thing that happened to everybody in America who was born in 1972 and attended a public elementary school. I still can’t tell.
Once or twice a month (and usually on a Friday), my social studies class would not read from our textbooks. Instead, we were given a publication called the Weekly Reader, which was like a newspaper for four-foot illiterates. It concisely covered the entire spectrum of current events, most notably the eruption of Mount St. Helens, the ongoing success of NASA, and whatever was supposedly happening in women’s sports and national politics. For some reason, one of the exposés tackled by the Weekly Reader in autumn of 1980 was the rising unpopularity of disco, punctuated by “Disco Demolition Night” at Chicago’s Comiskey Park during the summer of ’79 (news cycles were slower in those days). Disco Demolition Night was a promotional event where a bunch of intoxicated baseball fans blew up Village People albums with dynamite in center field. Things, as they say, did not go smoothly. Thirty-nine people were arrested in the subsequent riot, which actually seems like an amazingly low number considering the stupidity of the original idea. There was an allusion to this in the Weekly Reader (or at least in the fake Weekly Reader I’ve created in my memory), and it went on to explain how disco was this insidious, unserious social force. This story was evidently written to convince me and all my eight-year-old friends to continue playing kickball instead of frequenting discothèques. Along with the article was a photograph of four people with comical pants and uncommitted expressions. They were described as “The Disco Group ABBA”: They were beards and teeth and natural breasts and whiteness. I suppose my feelings about them would be best described as “mixed,” inasmuch as I wasn’t sure if they made me bored or hungry for cookies. Part of me still wonders if this actually happened. Maybe it took place during that academic year I was involved with the Dharma Initiative.
But now—obviously—I am older. I have my own beard and my own comical pants, and I am sitting at a computer listening to “The Winner Takes It All” for the two hundredth or three hundredth or seven hundredth time, and I find myself continually shocked by how profoundly adult this song is. The chords are sonically limitless. The lyrics refer to judicial proceedings and express uncomfortably specific details about the end of love: I can think of no other pop song that examines the self-aware guilt one feels when talking to a person who has humanely obliterated your heart.
I don’t wanna talk
If it makes you feel sad
And I understand
You’ve come to shake my hand
I apologize
If it makes you feel bad
Seeing me so tense
No self-confidence
The message of “The Winner Takes It All” is straightforward: It argues that the concept of relationships ending on mutual terms is an emotional fallacy. One person is inevitably okay and the other is inevitably devastated. There is a loser who metaphorically stays and a winner who literally leaves, and the individual leaving takes everything with them. Like virtually all of ABBA’s music, “The Winner Takes It All” was written by the two male members of the group, Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson. The vocals were sung by Agnetha Faltskog (she was the blond one), who divorced Ulvaeus in 1979 after moving out of their home on Christmas night in ’78. “The Winner Takes It All” was released as a single in 1980. Ulvaeus has claimed that the song is not an autobiographical depiction of his failed marriage to Faltskog, but that’s hard to believe when one considers the original title of the song was “The Story of My Life.”
When thinking about ABBA, this is the song to think about.
2 “When the eighties were over,” Scandinavian ABBA historian Carl Magnus Palm wrote in 2001, “it was clear that none of the former ABBA members had any relevance whatsoever in the international pop landscape.” This statement isn’t false, but it’s wrong. I suppose it’s true if you use the word relevance like most people who regularly write about music, but it’s false if you think about how the world actually operates. As a rule, people who classify art as “irrelevant” are trying to position themselves above the entity; it’s a way of pretending they’re more in step with contemporary culture than the artist himself, which is mostly a way of saying they can’t find a tangible reason for disliking what something intends to embody. Moreover, the whole argument is self-defeating: If you classify something as “irrelevant,” you’re (obviously) using it as a unit of comparison against whatever is “relevant,” so it (obviously) does have meaning and merit. Truly irrelevant art wouldn’t even be part of the conversation.
Since at least 1979, AC/DC has been allegedly irrelevant. When the Knack and Nick Lowe were hot, Angus Young seemed oversexed and stupid. AC/DC was irrelevant in 1984 because they lacked the visual impact of less-heavy metal acts like Dokken, and they were irrelevant in 1989 because they weren’t releasing power ballads about teen suicide. They were irrelevant in 1991 because of grunge. They were irrelevant in 1997 because they weren’t involved with the mainstreaming of alternative culture. They were irrelevant in 2001 because they weren’t implementing elements of hip-hop into their metal. When they played Madison Square Garden in 2008, the always likeable New York Times critic Jon Caramanica opened his review like this: “All the recent talk of how AC/DC is due for critical reappraisal? Ignore it.” As far as I can tell, AC/DC has been irrelevant for the vast majority of their career. And this has played to their advantage. Judging the value of any band against the ephemeral tastes of the hyper– present tense always misinterprets its actual significance. Moreover, any act lauded as “especially relevant” (and any critic1 preoccupied with hunting whomever that’s supposed to be) is almost guaranteed to have a limited career, simply because so much of their alleged value is tied to an ephemeral modernity they only embody by chance. The reason AC/DC will leave a larger, deeper footprint than virtually all of their competition is because they’ve never been relevant or irrelevant; they make music outside of those parameters. This quality is rare. It’s also a hard truth for creative personalities to accept. There’s a scene in the 2004 Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster where guitarist Kirk Hammett is upset over the band’s unwillingness to let him play a conventional rock guitar solo on their new record. Hammett argues, “Can I say something that I think is bullshit? This whole fucking [notion that including a guitar solo] dates the whole thing? That’s so bullshit. Because if we don’t play a guitar solo in one of these songs, that dates it to this period. And that cements it to a trend that’s happening in music right now.” When this exchange occurs during the film, everyone in the audience giggles. It seems like Nigel Tufnel logic. But Hammett intuitively understood something the other guys in Metallica didn’t want to accept: The mere recognition of an extrinsic reality damages the intrinsic merits of one’s own reality. In other words, it’s a mistake to (consciously) do what everyone else is doing, just as it’s a mistake to (consciously) do the opposite.
According to the aforementioned C. Magnus Palm, the members of ABBA were irrelevant at the end of the eighties, presumably because they were (a) not creating singles that were on the pop charts, or (b) not overtly influencing the work of people who were (like Madonna and Paula Abdul). That’s one way to look at it. But a better way is to view ABBA in 1989 like AC/DC in ’99—they were neither germane nor extraneous. They were not attempting to replicate or refute anything else that was happening in pop; they were living in ABBA World, where ABBA Music is the only sound that exists.
3 It’s difficult to say anything new or insightful about ABBA, mostly because they’ve already absorbed every possible criticism and accolade that a musical act can entertain. They first became famous after winning the televised Eurovision Song Contest, which is sort of an Old World precursor to American Idol; it took them three tries, but they finally won in ’74. Across Europe, that TV appearance raised their profile but immediately shackled them with a credibility deficit that was solely a product of the medium (thirty years later, Adam Lambert would relate). Still, the group had a natural narrative and a romantic appeal (two strange men writing songs for their beautiful girlfriends to sing), and all the songs were immediately accessible and ridiculously well crafted. Initial U.S. reviews were almost entirely positive—the Los Angles Times called their debut “compelling and fascinating.” By 1975, ABBA was the most popular band in the Western world, eventually having at least one number one single in fifteen different countries. And this, somewhat predictably, was roughly the same time dismissing ABBA became the only acceptable stance for anyone serious about culture. The core complaint (from the most predictable sources) was that ABBA records sounded like collections of commercial jingles. In retrospect, this criticism is as misdirected as it is uninspired: By erroneously tying “Waterloo” to advertising, it somehow implied that ABBA were capitalist stooges who wanted to sell something beyond the music itself (in truth, it was the TV commercials who wanted to affect people as easily as ABBA, not the other way around). Much like the Carpenters, ABBA became representative of a musical aesthetic so distant from the edge of rock that clever people weren’t even willing to expend energy hating them. The Sex Pistols openly despised Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, but they punished ABBA by paradoxically stealing their material—after hearing ABBA’s “S.O.S.” on the radio, Pistols bassist Glen Matlock copied the riff for the song titled (not coincidentally) “Pretty Vacant.” As is so often the case in mainstream pop, the fact that ABBA made simple songs that were not political or antiestablishment positioned them as vapid. ABBA’s dissolution in 1983 was scarcely noticed by the American media (not even the Weekly Reader cared), and any reasonable person could have concluded that their legacy was already carved into Swedish limestone. But (of course) it wasn’t. The core audience for ABBA did not waiver throughout the next decade; the popularity of their most memorable singles (particularly “Dancing Queen”) expanded despite minor FM radio exposure. When the compilation Gold came out in 1993, every college girl who dressed goofy played it whenever she pretended to be drunk. In 1994, Janeane Garofalo’s character in Reality Bites needed ABBA to define her quirk, while Priscilla, Queen of the Desert needed ABBA to invent gay Australians. The first artist listed in the 1995 Spin Alternative Record Guide was the traditionally unalternative ABBA; that same year, MTV’s Kurt Loder gave an interview to Playboy and mentioned he “missed ABBA a lot.” By the end of the twentieth century, it was far more contrarian to hate ABBA than to l
ove them.
Now, who was “right” among these factions (the original ABBA supporters, their antagonistic detractors, or the modern revisionists) is not important to me. I have no interest in convincing anyone they need to download Voulez-Vous posthaste, because I am post-taste. But what is compelling is how this polarizing trajectory occurred. The pattern is certainly not unique to ABBA; it’s not unusual to see artists who are (a) initially appreciated before (b) falling out of favor, and then (c) returning to prominence after the fact. But it’s more pronounced here: The highs were crazier and the lows were grosser. What makes this arc even more noteworthy is that the group itself did not seem actively involved with any of these machinations (the members will retrospectively talk about how they were perceived by the media and by fans, but they scarcely seem to care). They appear uninvolved with the rest of the world; throughout the 1990s, Faltskog did not even own a home stereo. And this natural disconnect is the central reason ABBA has succeeded over time—and it’s something I noticed through other people before I realized it on my own.
Eating the Dinosaur Page 13
