I am terrible at music criticism. I just don't seem to have the genetic code to really look at music and explain why I like and dislike something. Its an incredibly frustrating mental block - sometimes I read a piece that seems to nail so precisely what I love about a song and wish I could write something as precise.
Tom Ewing runs the Popular blog on the site FreakyTrigger, which is dedicated to writing about every UK number 1 in history. He is currently up to The Housemartin's Caravan of Love from 1986, but I wanted to highlight the piece he wrote about Dancing Queen from a while back. This is one of the very few disco pop war-horses which seems to unite everybody in admiration, no matter how grudging. Tom's take, on why the song is so special, really gets to the heart of it;
It’s not envious, or regretful, or bittersweet – it’s a more generous ache, the recognition that “having the time of your life” is literal, that this moment might be as good as it gets, but still being warmed by the moment’s incandescence. “Dancing Queen”, like “Teenage Kicks”, is one of those songs that captures the feeling that being young, dancing, loving is also to be living more intensely and wonderfully than anything else
His blog is defintely worth spending a while flicking through.
