FERNANDO: A Song by ABBA, a breath of fresh anticapitalism for Yuletide refreshment

FERNANDO: A Song by ABBA
KAY DICKINSON
Duke University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Kay Dickinson outlines how ABBA’s mega-hit song “Fernando” could express support with anti-capitalist and Third World liberation while simultaneously becoming an icon of global capital.

Since its release in 1976, ABBA’s song “Fernando” has been loved by fans around the globe both for its sing-along chorus and its revolutionary spirit. In Fernando, Kay Dickinson takes readers from Sweden and Chile to Australia and Poland, tracing the complicated ways the song could express support with anticapitalist and Third World liberation struggles while remaining an unrepentant commodity. A song about freedom fighters was unlikely to become a pop mega-hit, yet as Dickinson demonstrates, ABBA’s lucrative, longstanding appeal rests on their ability to bridge contradictions within everyday life.

Five decades later, “Fernando’s” rousing calls for freedom continue to resonate with gay liberation movements and other social struggles, demonstrating how a song can be both revolutionary and an envoy for global capital.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: We interrupt our dive into the shallow, luxuriantly populated waters of consumer capitalism to clamber, just briefly, onto the rock of social responsibility. Never fear, we're still dabbling our toeses into the lovely warm consumerist dreamworld! ABBA was hugely commercially successful, and never pretended that was not the point of "Fernando."

Gotta meet people where they are. If the people do not want to listen to you, your message is unheard. This is a profound insight I try not to forget but regularly do...just look at my blog's viewership numbers.

This tune burst onto the scene like a cannonade from the Crimean War. It was *everywhere* and it was not just Anglophone-famous. It's about regular fighters in the 1910 Mexican Revolution. It is hard to think of a more anti-oligarchic, anti-capitalist popular uprising than this one was. (It failed; let's save that discussion for another time.)

In ABBA's earworm-y tunefulness, they made the record industry (and themselves) quite a lot of money around the world...this tune's popularity in Hispanophone countries seems self-evident, but there are layers and levels to the popularity of the song that differ from market to market. Author Kay Dickinson explores some relevant examples of different reasons for a Swedish group's Anglophone product resonating in places you wouldn't expect.

It's worth noting that this is a popular history, not a musicological tome. I could read it for hours at a stretch without resorting to the dictionary. I was also that immersed and that invested in the subject matter. My car's radio sound is still the way I "hear" this song when earwormed by it...it's tat powerful...and that should say it all to a prospective buyer. Gifting or self-gifting, this is a book perfectly timed...fifty years ago is still alive to many of us...and perfectly aimed at the interests of those nostalgic, those curious, and those seeking some reminder that participating in and benefiting from capitalism does not require one to surrender one's soul. Speaking of which, some photos would've bounced this into five-starhood...