Lucy Vickery

A literary-critical analysis of Abba’s ‘Waterloo’

[OLLE LINDEBORG/AFP via Getty Images]

In Competition No. 3205, you were invited to supply a rigorous literary-critical analysis of a well-known pop song.

Thanks to Oliver Hawkins, who drew to my attention J. Temperance’s real-life analysis of Boney M’s ‘Daddy Cool’ (The New Inquiry, 2015): ‘We may paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari and state that “it is within capitalist society that the critique of ‘Daddy Cool’ must always resume its point of departure and find again its point of arrival.”’ Which gives a sense of what you were aiming for. Fiona Clark’s dissection of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ hit the spot: ‘Arguably, the “poor boy” or “Little silhouetto” embodies the quintessentially paradigmatic figure of the Pharmakos or scapegoat, whilst merging with the composite anti-hero, Scaramouche-Figaro-Beelzebub…’ As did David Shields, David Silverman and Bill Greenwell, who were unlucky losers.

The winners below pocket £30 each.

Lost ‘on a dark desert highway’, Dante enters a labyrinth of corridor and courtyard that ‘could be heaven’ or ‘could be hell’. Not only is God dead, his spirit unavailable ‘since 1969’ and his forsaken Purgatorio supervised by a banal regency of ‘Captain’ and ‘Nightman’, but Nietzsche himself is stabbed with ‘steely knives’ when the hedonists ‘gather for their feast’, but with thematic futility ‘they just can’t kill the beast’. The vision is Spenglerian — Der Untergang des Abendlandes: no locus more decadent than a hotel; no land more sunset-stricken than California. Finding himself among ‘pretty boys’, Dante flees an avaricious Beatrice, ‘Tiffany-twisted’ with ‘Mercedes bends’, in the hope of finding ‘the passage back to the place I was before’; a desert Inferno is preferable to this ceiling-mirrored Möbius strip of deadly sins, where ‘you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave’. Nick MacKinnon

In ‘California Girls’, the Beach Boys’ foregrounding of das Ewig-Weibliche (femininity reduced, in Beauvoir’s words, to a ‘vague and basic essence’), co-opts intersectionality via simultaneous objectification of women and display of anxious male vulnerability.

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