Opinion | Think You Don’t Like Something? Try Listening Closer
It’s important to admit when you’re wrong. And though I once bristled at the notion that there could ever be such a thing as a “wrong” musical opinion, I have since come to accept that there is, in fact, such a thing. I know because I had one: I was colossally wrong about the song “Dancing Queen” by Abba.
For years, I believed this song was terrible. I sat around and analyzed its terribleness with my friends. We mocked its earnest crooning, its synthesizer-heavy melody. And we went on mocking it for years. And the whole time I was wrong. So, so wrong.
It feels good to come clean. I’m even a touch proud of myself for having eventually come to my senses (unlike some of my aforementioned friends who are still lost in their wrongness, the poor souls). To me, looking back, the weirdest part is that I was ever able to hate something so clearly irresistible.
I blame my misguided hatred, at least in part, on the era in which I grew up. The mid-1970s, when “Dancing Queen” came out, was a time when there were strict lines being drawn between cultural camps. Punks. Hippies. Deadheads. Each group was a sovereign nation, and there was little exchange between them.
As a kid who identified firmly as a punk, this tune was situated deep in enemy territory, at the border of pop and disco. And as such, it didn’t really had a chance with me.
There was something else going on, too. I was a kid, and at that particular nanosecond in geological time (from about the mid-70s to the late ’80s), kids simply hated stuff. Movies, TV shows, books, politicians: In every category, what you hated seemed to say more about you than what you liked.
In particular, my group of friends and I despised a lot of music, and by extension, the morons who would dare admit that they liked something we hated. Music. Can you believe it? It seems hard to imagine now that a group of tweens could be capable of conjuring vein-bulging fury at the mere mention of the band Styx. But we were. And we did.
Why did we feel this way? Mostly, I think, because hating certain music gave us a way of defining ourselves. Our identities were young and indistinct, and drawing a firm line in the sand between the music we liked and the music we hated gave us a sense of self. It told us, and the world, who we were.
Liking punk rock made us unique. (I won’t get into the subgenres, schisms and sects that created their own punk micro-tribes.) By the same token, not liking punk rock gave purpose to kids who wore Foreigner T-shirts and carried giant combs in their back pockets.
The divisions we created were, in hindsight, embarrassingly small-minded. And I sometimes wonder if these youthful skirmishes over musical taste weren’t a kind of early foreshadowing of the embarrassingly small-minded culture that now pervades our country. Were people of my generation so good at dividing ourselves into factions based on stupid, insignificant differences that we simply never stopped doing it? Someone smarter than me has probably mapped the parallels between Journey fans and X fans and the current binary of political right and left. Or if no one has, someone should.
I’d like to think that I’m more mature now. I’ve worked hard to open my mind and keep it open, but at the time that “Dancing Queen” came out, I was still too young to see beyond the borders of my beloved punk-rocker identity. So this song ended up getting a double whammy of my scorn — the first hit being the initial “disco panic,” and the second being the more evolved and curated hatred that guarded the borders of my punk identity from anything that didn’t clear the low, low bar of punk music.
When “Dancing Queen” first came out, disco as a genre was derided by practically everyone I knew (with the exception, perhaps, of people who liked to roller-skate), for the simple reason that the music was haunted by the specter of a feared and reviled adjective: Disco music was “gay.”
At the time, I didn’t even know what that word meant. In my young mind, it just meant “bad.” And it was years before I understood that part of the hatred and mockery and derision directed at disco then was rooted in deep homophobia.
All I knew was that everyone in my orbit — especially the men — treated disco, and the culture it was reputed to promote, as something legitimately wrong. It wasn’t just corny, it was a world-destroying force that we must all unite against.
The fervor was hard to parse as a child. Add to this the fact that, musically, disco was a technology-embracing reinterpretation of Black American musical forms that, as a movement, seemed to be utterly ignoring the traditional American racial divide, which made some people very uncomfortable, and, well, it was just too much ignorance for even the most confident and sensitive child (which I was not) to sort through and reject.
Even after disco’s subsequent failure to destroy “our” “way of life” — Abba’s exhilarating pop perfection languished in a roped-off part of my brain.
I can still recall the exact moment I finally saw the light. I was grocery shopping one day when I heard a familiar melody, and it was as if I was hearing it for the first time. I stopped and just listened, reeling with how exuberantly sad it was. “Having the time of your life!”
Standing in the produce aisle, staring up into the overhead speaker (not even stoned!), I had my version of a come-to-Jesus moment. A come-to-Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid moment.
Over time, several other artists that had previously been exiled were also later re-evaluated and accepted — Neil Young comes to mind. Believe it or not, my idiot friends and I once rejected his entire catalog as hippie drivel. But Mr. Young picked the lock on the cage we’d put him in with the single most irresistible force in our young male minds: an electric guitar played at an irresponsible volume.
But no other artist inspired as dramatic a shift in me as Abba did. To this day, whenever I think I dislike a piece of music, I think about “Dancing Queen” and am humbled.
That song taught me that I can’t ever completely trust my negative reactions. Even these days, if I don’t like something, I make a mental note to try it again in 10 years.
Melodies as pure and evocative as the one in “Dancing Queen” don’t come along every day, and I mourn every single moment I missed loving this song. Playing it again as I write this, making up for lost spins, I feel overcome with gratitude for its existence.
It feels really good to stop hating something. And music is a good place to start. Because while records don’t change over time, we can, and do. Better late than never.
Jeff Tweedy is the singer and guitarist of the band Wilco and the author of “World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music,” from which this essay is adapted.
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