The ABBA Experiment

Conclusions to be drawn from the experiment:
Too large a helping of any performer's music--even a great one--can be annoying: After listening to three straight hours of James Brown several years back, I found myself twitching on the floor as if I'd just been struck by lightning. It's no surprise, then, that the ABBA oeuvre left me with a deep-seated fear of Scandinavians that will probably require years of therapy to overcome. But it also confirmed for me what is arguably the single most important law of pop music: Everything comes back. Laugh if you like, but a quarter-century from now, music stores (or their computer equivalents) will be filled with newly available, meticulously annotated recordings by Britney Spears, 'N Sync and lots of other acts ridiculed in their day but praised to the skies decades later.

When you listen to them, though, don't do it all at once. I don't need that kind of guilt.