If you love ABBA, you are probably thinking that since they broke up in 1982, they probably don't have a lot of music videos for you to watch. Well, you'd be wrong. Very wrong. ABBA has music videos for pretty much their entire singles catalog - we have 32 videos in our database for them, spanning from 1973 to 1982. Considering MTV didn't come along until 1980, that's pretty amazing.
Most of their early 1970s music videos are understandably very simple and similar - almost all of them involve a performance in ridiculous clothing in front of a white screen with painfully choreographed moves. The thing is, not a lot of artists were doing these in the 1970s and compared to other music videos floating around at the time, these were very well done. The videos helped them gain fans in places like Australia, which had the pre-MTV music video show Countdown to showcase the clips.
Impressively, a few of these videos still hold up today, 35ish years later. Today, we're watching one that I think is a great example of an ABBA music video that still looks good in 2013, 1978's "Take a Chance on Me".
Like most ABBA videos, "Take a Chance On Me" is made up of a few visual themes that repeat throughout the video. One of them in the Brady Bunch-style tiled image we see in the intro, another is the scenes where Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson are sitting in chairs. However, most of the video is taken up by performances by Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, the front ladies for ABBA.
It's clear that by 1978 ABBA was starting to hit their stride with music videos and were getting more comfortable with making and being in them. For comparison, take a look at 1975's video for "Mamma Mia", which is ridigly choreographed and feels like everyone thought the whole video was going to break if they didn't do certain moves at certain times.
But "Take a Chance on Me" has a very different vibe. Stylistically, they've gone wild with camera movement and are clearly more comfortable with a looser, more impovised style. Actually, the camera almost never stops moving, and neither do Agnetha and Frida, who seem to be actually having fun. Instead of ABBA all performing in a line, shots have some depth and compoisiton. ABBA isn't actually really performing at all - the male members of ABBA have shed their instruments (which were ever-present in earlier videos) and appear essentially as background actors in this video.
And then there's the styling. Early ABBA videos have some of the most unfortunate wardrobe choices of any music videos I've ever seen. My favorite is Frida's dirty white pajamas in "Mamma Mia", but there are so many to choose form. "Take a Chance on Me" makes the bold move of putting the ladies of ABBA in clothes that were not meant to be worn on stage, and it makes a difference.
There is definitely some odd stuff going on (Agnetha and Frida's insistence on constantly winking at the camera is awesome until it starts making us feel weird), but "Take a Chance on Me" is a suprisingly well put-together video for its time. It's a video that still holds up today, marking ABBA as one of the great pre-MTV music video pioneers.
What's that? You wish the English synthpop duo Erasure covered "Take a Chance on Me" in the 1992 and then made an homage video for it in drag? It's your lucky day!
