My Top Twenty: "Winner Takes It All" - ABBA

Song: "The Winner Takes It All"
Artist: ABBA
Album: Super Trouper (also on ABBA Gold)
Year: 1980
Label: Polar Music
Highest Billboard Hot 100 Position: #8
Players: Agnetha Fältskog - lead vocals; Anni-Frid Lyngstad - background vocals; Björn Ulvaeus - songwriter, producer; Benny Andersson - songwriter, producer


Everyone knows who ABBA is, right? Swedish pop-masters Benny and Bjorn created perfect melodies and catchy hooks to be sung by pitch-perfect vocalists Agnetha and Anni-Frid to create little slices of disco-dusted pop magic. Despite having only four US top ten hits (including "The Winner Takes It All") ABBA has come to symbolize pop music at its peak, beloved in Europe and around the world for their unabashed mastery of the sing-along hook. From their biggest smash, "Dancing Queen" to the lesser known, but equally catchy, minor singles like "Does Your Mother Know" you can find all the hits on the stunning singles collection ABBA Gold, the band's biggest album in the US.

When the group disbanded in 1982, interest never waned much. The male members wrote the musical Chess with Tim Rice in 1983, Erasure recorded a cover EP called ABBAesque in the late 1980s, films like Murial's Wedding and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert used the songs as plot points and the Broadway sensation Mamma Mia! used 25 of the bands hits. Two ABBA cover bands have had great success, Björn Again in the late 1980s and A*Teens during the teen pop craze at the turn of the millennium.

I was first introduced to the pop goodness of ABBA when my sisters and I were given a box of 45 singles that had belonged to my dad and his siblings as kids. I was probably 13 or 14 at the time, and I was entranced by the bubblegummy pop sounds of The Archies and the disco singles by Donna Summer, Chic and ABBA. It was "Dancing Queen" and the b-side "That's Me" and "Fernando" whose b-side I can't recall, and I was hooked. When I was 21 I bought ABBA Gold and was terrified everyone would think I was really gay for liking them. Little did I know, there is a lot more to being gay besides loving a Swedish pop outfit. It was then I discovered "The Winner Takes It All" a tender breakup ballad that uses classical themes for the lyrics. "The gods may throw a dice/their minds as cold as ice" has a Shakespearean quality, the heartbreak so evident in "Somewhere deep inside/you must know I miss you/but what can I say/rules must be obeyed" And why shouldn't it ring so true? The song was written during the divorce of Agnatha and Björn, and when at the end Agnatha cries out "No self confidence/but you see/the winner takes it all" it just hits you right in the gut. And while Mamma Mia!'s Donna manages a happy ending after performing this song, it's only right that Brits should vote this heartrending classic as Britain's Favorite Breakup Song.