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.
I’m happy I can admit it, maybe even a touch proud of myself for not digging in my heels and hating this song for even a second longer than I had to (unlike some friends I know who are still holding out). To me, looking back, the weirdest part is that I ever felt I had to hate something so clearly irresistible.
In a way, I blame the time and place where I grew up. The mid-1970s, when “Dancing Queen” came out, was a time when there were very strict lines being drawn between cultural camps. As a kid who liked punk rock, this tune was situated deep in enemy territory, at the intersection of pop and disco.
I am, perhaps, a bit skeptical by nature, but scanning the horizons of my memory — seeing what I saw around me from about the mid-70s to the late ’80s — I’d say there was something else going on, too. I was just a kid. And in that particular nanosecond of geological time, kids hated stuff.
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 preteens 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 indistinct, and drawing a line in the sand between what we liked and what we hated made our young hearts feel whole.
Liking punk rock made us unique. (I won’t even get into the subgenres, schisms and sects that created their own punk microtribes.) 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 embarrassing. I have sometimes even wondered if these youthful skirmishes over musical taste weren’t a childhood version of the current situation our country now finds itself in. 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 have a more mature perspective 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 identify myself as anything, much less something as boldly outlined as “punk rocker.” So this song ended up getting a double-whammy of scorn — the initial provincial disco panic and then the evolved and curatorial hate that guarded the borders of my sense of self from anything that didn’t clear the low, low bar of punk music.
Let’s talk about that first wave of disgust a bit. Initially, hating this song and Abba in general didn’t really feel like a choice. Gagging at the mere mention of this sweet little quartet was just being, you know, normal. And at the time that “Dancing Queen” came out, it wasn’t hard to hate a disco song, anyway; disco was despised by practically everyone I knew (with the exception of the kids who liked to roller skate).
Basically, meaning that to all of the males older than me in my extended family sphere, disco (and, by extension, the culture it was reputed to promote) had taken on the profile of something legitimately wrong. A world-destroying force that we must all unite against. So it was easy at the time to say, “OK, I’m not even going to listen to that music because that music sucks!”
And of course, most of this provincial hand-wringing really revolved around one adjective I’d never heard applied to music: Disco was “gay.” And to 9-year-old boys who didn’t know any better, “gay” meant “bad.”
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 self-possessed child (which I was not) to sort through and reject.
And so because of all of the societal forces at play and because of my own weakness, I never allowed myself to like it. Even as I got older — and 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.
Other exiled artists were later re-evaluated and accepted — Neil Young comes to mind. Believe it or not, my 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. Abba’s status as other, though, felt safely and permanently decided.
Finally, years later, after I’d started trying to write songs, I found myself staring at an overhead speaker in a grocery store aisle (not stoned!) just reeling at this familiar melody and how exuberantly sad it was. “Having the time of your life!” It was a real “come to Jesus” moment. A “come to Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid” moment.
Before that day, I, along with many others, had denied myself an undeniable joy. Countless fantastic records and deep grooves were dismissed and derided out of ignorance. But of course, this song and this music was always going to win eventually. Because it’s just too special to ignore forever.
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. I was burned so badly by this one song being withheld from my heart for so long. I try to never listen to music now without first examining my own mind and politely asking whatever blind spots I’m afflicted with to move aside long enough for my gut to be the judge. And even then, 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.
So if you take anything away from this, I hope it will be this recommendation: spend some time looking for a song (or a book or a film or a painting or a person) you might have unfairly maligned.
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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