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Podcast: New Books in Popular Culture
Episode: Kay Dickinson, "Fernando: A Song by ABBA" (Duke UP, 2025)
Description: Since its release in 1976, ABBA's song "Fernando" has been loved by fans around the globe both for its sing-along chorus and its revolutionary spirit.
In Fernando: A Song by ABBA (Duke UP, 2025), Kay Dickinson takes readers from Sweden and Chile to Australia and Poland, tracing the complicated ways the song could express support with anticapitalist and Third World liberation struggles while remaining an unrepentant commodity.
A song about freedom fighters was unlikely to become a pop mega-hit, yet as Dickinson demonstrates, ABBA's lucrative, longstanding appeal rests on their ability to bridge contradictions within everyday life....