[MUSIC] Ace of Base, "The Sign"
Jul. 2nd, 2015 04:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI'm a bit sad today. Not an hour ago, I found out that my venerable RCA CD/tape player no longer plays CDs.
I've had it for two decades. It was with me in Charlottetown; it eventually came with me to Toronto. Maybe it can be fixed, maybe it cannot, maybe it is just not worth the effort. It was, admittedly, a device I used less and less over the years, as I transitioned to playing music off my computer. The last time I used it was a couple of months ago, when I played the superb 2003 maxi-single of Yoko Ono's "Walking on Thin Ice".
What was I wanting to play today? Ace of Base's 1993 debut album, something I found yesterday discarded on the side of Bathurst Street along with their followup and two French-language novels I wanted to read.
Specifically, I wanted to hear "The Sign".
I'm perfectly willing to agree with the casual evaluation of Ace of Base's music, that it was a sort of lowest-common-denominator Europop that was briefly fashionable international in the early to mid 1990s and the commercial counterpoint to other more challenging and innovative movements. This is entirely true.
Is this all that there is to the music of Ace of Base, though? I could note, if you're interested in the sociological implications, that Ace of Base's hits arguably inaugurated the current era of Swedish domination of the international pop charts. (Well, that and Roxette in the late 1980s.) Ace of Base counts.
More to the point, Ace of Base counts to me. Along with the aforementioned Roxette, Ace of Base was the first pop music group with albums I owned, actively seeking them out and buying them with my money. I was attracted to the music for good reasons: it was popular, it was cheerful, it was catchy, it came from the world outside. The music of Ace of Base did, and does, make me happy. Surely it's unfair to condemn anything that can do that.
I've had it for two decades. It was with me in Charlottetown; it eventually came with me to Toronto. Maybe it can be fixed, maybe it cannot, maybe it is just not worth the effort. It was, admittedly, a device I used less and less over the years, as I transitioned to playing music off my computer. The last time I used it was a couple of months ago, when I played the superb 2003 maxi-single of Yoko Ono's "Walking on Thin Ice".
What was I wanting to play today? Ace of Base's 1993 debut album, something I found yesterday discarded on the side of Bathurst Street along with their followup and two French-language novels I wanted to read.
Specifically, I wanted to hear "The Sign".
I'm perfectly willing to agree with the casual evaluation of Ace of Base's music, that it was a sort of lowest-common-denominator Europop that was briefly fashionable international in the early to mid 1990s and the commercial counterpoint to other more challenging and innovative movements. This is entirely true.
Is this all that there is to the music of Ace of Base, though? I could note, if you're interested in the sociological implications, that Ace of Base's hits arguably inaugurated the current era of Swedish domination of the international pop charts. (Well, that and Roxette in the late 1980s.) Ace of Base counts.
More to the point, Ace of Base counts to me. Along with the aforementioned Roxette, Ace of Base was the first pop music group with albums I owned, actively seeking them out and buying them with my money. I was attracted to the music for good reasons: it was popular, it was cheerful, it was catchy, it came from the world outside. The music of Ace of Base did, and does, make me happy. Surely it's unfair to condemn anything that can do that.
