![]() ![]() If we had to pick one ABBA song, we picked the right one. But perhaps thanks to that same sense of snobbery that John McCain encountered, it’s the only ABBA song that ever hit #1 in the US. It’s about loving rock music, but it’s not a rock song. It’s about dancing, but it’s not really a dance song. But you are goddamn motherfucking right about ABBA. You’re John McCain, and you are catastrophically wrong about so many things. ![]() Oh ABBA, how terrible! Blah blah blah.’ How come everybody goes to Mamma Mia? Huh? I mean really, seriously, huh? ‘I hate ABBA, they’re no good, you know.’ Well, everybody goes. I’ve got to say that a lot of my taste in music stopped about the time I impacted a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane and never caught up again.”īut you also know that ABBA rules, and you’re happy to tell Walter Isaacson this: “Now look, everybody says, ‘I hate ABBA. You allow that your cultural experience is pretty particular: “If there is anything I am lacking in, I’ve got to tell you, it is taste in music and art and other great things in life. He asks you, “What were you thinking?” You’re John McCain, and you’re not going to take any of this shit from Walter Isaacson. You oblige, and you name that song, ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” as your favorite song of all time.Ī few weeks later, the historian Walter Isaacson tries to snark-attack you about your pick. More than three decades later, you are running for president, and somebody from Blender magazine asks you to name your favorite songs. They stack melodies on top of melodies, rising on the music like currents of air. Those voices celebrate youth even as they mourn its loss. But there’s an undercurrent to them, too, a sort of bone-deep melancholy. The music is bright and effervescent, and the voices are almost rapturous with joy. Two Swedish women are singing, in imperfect but somehow also perfect English, about a 17-year-old girl on a dancefloor. Music has changed, and you weren’t around while that was happening. You don’t pay a lot of attention to music. You cheat on your wife, who you married before your capture. You remain in the Navy, go through physical therapy, take command of a training squadron. You’re unmoored, not sure how to return to American life. While they were happening, you were being tortured. You missed the cultural upheavals of the ’60s. And after five and a half years, when the war finally ended, you returned home to a country that had fundamentally changed. So instead, you were tortured for years, beaten at regular intervals. But adhering to the military code of conduct, you refused release, since other soldiers had been kept prisoner longer than you. When your father was named commander of all the American forces in the Vietnam war, your captors tried to send you home. You spent two years in solitary confinement. You were interrogated, beaten, denied medical care. ![]() The soldiers who took you prisoner crushed your shoulder with a rifle butt and bayoneted you in the groin. ![]() You ejected from your plane, broke two arms and a leg, then landed in a lake and almost drowned. When you were 21 years old, you were flying a bombing mission over Hanoi, and a missile shot your plane down. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. ![]()
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