1. Introduction
[1.1] A-ha and me—we are like those people who hook up with their childhood sweetheart again in their second half of life. They never forgot each other, even if they married others and had children with them.
[1.2] And yet, when it comes to music, I have always remained single. There were a few flirts, but nothing serious. Only for A-ha did I watch all interviews available on YouTube, including those on Norwegian breakfast television of the 1980s and hours of live concert footage—and all within the course of one year, starting in fall 2018. I finally had to catch up with thirty years of the band's history. For such a long time I had hidden the feelings for my true love so deeply that I did not know anything about them myself. Now I'll make amends and get as close as possible. At the end of this year of binge-watching A-ha videos and reading every interview with the band members I could find, I went to see my first A-ha concert in Bremen, Germany, where they performed as part of their world tour. Even before the event I had bought another ticket for their show in Hamburg (postponed because of the pandemic to May 2022). I'm looking forward to it as I will be even closer to the stage than I was the last time.
2. "Take On Me": A-ha is introduced
[2.1] When I tell friends and colleagues about it, they laugh. They stop when I make it clear I'm serious and not acting out some postcool retro-quirk. But very few people know what they are laughing at. The only A-ha song they remember vaguely, if at all, is "Take On Me," the first and biggest hit of the most successful Norwegian band of all time, number one in the charts in 1985 in eleven countries, including the United States, not missing from any 1980s sampler. Even better known is the accompanying video. In it, singer Morten Harket (cheekbones, rascal grin, hair) crosses boundaries between a cartoon world and the real world to be with his girl. It was clicked on YouTube more than one billion times; only three other songs play in the same league.
[2.2] But A-ha isn't a one-hit wonder. They recorded ten studio albums together, and many of the shows on their now-suspended tour are sold out. Sometimes I try to explain their continued popularity. Be assured that A-ha was never a boy band, as many think because they were so incredibly pretty, but were capable instrumentalists and songwriters.
[2.3] But of course, it's also a matter of taste. What I find beautiful about A-ha's music seems pompous to others. Some productions are so overdone that the melodies get lost in the sound carpet like a kitten in a flokati. Anyone who measures the quality of music by the degree of its gruffness cannot like A-ha. Too melodious and too perfectly arranged but so complex that few songs are catchy at first listening. So far, I have found each album daft until my ear got used to it. As if this wasn't enough, there's this voice. Morten Harket is not a singer but a vocalist. He uses his exceptional vocal chords like an instrument. He can sing very deep and very high, and it's crystal clear and very soft at the same time. This inevitably expresses a longing and sounds always larger than life, like a grandiose gesture, which is shamelessly used in the chorus to play on the entire range of emotions.
[2.4] Not only the music but also the lyrics express a yearning. The recurrent theme is transience: life, relationships, feelings. Often it is about solitude or about an individuality that has to assert itself to another. A-ha is "dance music for the soul," it says in a quote in the band biography by the Norwegian journalist Jan Omdahl (2010). That's right, they do have groove. But A-ha is also existentialist whining on a high musical and often lyrical level—and therefore teen music in its purest form.
[2.5] Interestingly A-ha is often referred to as "adult pop"—as a way of upgrading it. As if pop could ever be grown up and would not be silly as well as deadly serious, maudlin and megalomaniac! Just like a teenager. Maybe that's one of the reasons why I, in my mid-40s, rediscovered the love of this music. When more doors close or are already locked, the view shifts back from the outside to the inside. Who am I and for how much longer?
3. Adult fans: Do not desire, mention Dostoyevsky
[3.1] Now it's not just about the music. For instance I also like to listen to the British musician Tracey Thorn and even read her autobiography. But her Twitter account leaves me cold. On the other hand, I check the Twitter account from the fan page aha-live.com almost every day for the "latest news on Magne, Morten and Paul," and I have a photo of the first as a screensaver on my laptop. Magne Furuholmen, who is widely known as the keyboarder in the band and one of its two songwriters, is my hero because I attribute qualities to him that I would like to have: fearlessness and a presence in everything he does. Music, visual arts, projects, projects, projects. It helps that he can answer the most stupid questions by journalists quite smartly and with Norwegian niceness. And, hey, he looks almost better at the age of fifty-eight than at the age of twenty-three.
[3.2] That's idealization. Something like that was alien to me so far. When my hairdresser—twenty-eight Bryan Adams concerts in twenty-nine years—told me with a glazed look and not for the first time how he had once brought her to the stage and she was out of it for the next three months, I was surprised she did not whisper. Or make fun of herself. Why wasn't she embarrassed? Didn't she know that adults can only be fans as in experts? For men, especially, fans are experts preferably in something that has to do with muscles and sweat. Not too nerdy, not too gay. Soccer, sure, and if music, better rock than pop. Guitars are harder than keyboards. For example, ten years ago, a Spiegel author wrote about how he was only able to acknowledge his liking of A-ha when they sounded more like a rock band.
[3.3] Most importantly: Adults don't have a soft spot for strangers. They do not desire, they know a thing or two. The Literaturhaus Berlin (2018) understood that, in its announcement of a discussion by contemporary writer Jan Brandt for A-ha's debut album with their intellectual proximity to major writers, asking "What influence did Dostoyevsky have on the oeuvre of the band? What role does Norwegian Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun play?" Yeah, which one, I would like to ask the fifteen-year-old alter ego of Paul Waaktaar-Savoy, who wrote a good many of the songs as a minor in an Oslo suburb.
4. "Wild Boys" providing some theoretical background
[4.1] Female fans of male musicians have a hard time being recognized as experts. They are presented—by the mostly male music critics—as victims of their lust. This is what the American media scholar Tonya Anderson wrote in an essay in 2012 on "Female Fandom and the Politics of Popular Music," which summarized her doctoral thesis. Anderson had interviewed adult fans of the British '80s band Duran Duran. Almost everyone she questioned is ashamed of their passion, either because they, according to their testimony, have heard enough stupid commentaries—especially from men—or realized that "their favourite pastime is considered immature and inappropriate." Particularly shameful are the sexual fantasies about encounters with the stars.
[4.2] Like me, Anderson had a late coming-out as a fan because she was early on aware of just how uncool it is. She describes how she watched her friends see Duran Duran on television, screaming and drooling. She looked at them, embarrassed and confused at the same time, because she noticed how she had developed a crush on the singer. I felt the same way. I envied my friend Birte her A-ha T-shirt, but I would never have admitted it. I confided only in my diary how "super geil" I thought the band was. Recently I found an entry where I wrote about my crush on Magne Furuholmen in 1988. I had forgotten that it had started so early and only remembered that I fancied the singer Morten Harket, just like everyone else did, something that I didn’t mention in the diary. That may also have been because I was disturbed by his steaming sexuality. I was still getting used to my own.
[4.3] Anderson attributes the devaluation of the female fan to "a deep-seated historical fear of everything related to female sexuality." As a result, it would become pathologized. A stadium with tens of thousands of shrieking women and girls may seem more threatening to some than the same number of raucous male soccer fans. Anderson recalls that women were banned from reading novels in earlier centuries for the same reasons.
[4.4] However, the interviewed Duran Duran followers are anything but passive victims, she says. "One of the pleasures of teen pop for women is that it gives them free license to objectify men." For adult women—that's the conclusion of her research—their desire is more nostalgic than an actual one. Sticking to or rediscovering their fandom, she says, helps them to reconnect with the positive sides of their teenage selves. Especially in difficult times this could be a resource. The beloved band functions as a "transitional object," a term from psychoanalytic object-relationship theory. The object—a blanket or a cuddly toy for a baby—is a source of emotional warmth in times of uncertainty.
5. Applying theory: A-ha as a cuddly blanket
[5.1] Following her argument, I realize that A-ha has been my cuddly blanket since I was twelve. Hunting High and Low was my first record, bought with pocket money in the Famila market in March 1986. It marked a musical emancipation from my parents. They did not listen to anything bad; quite the contrary, they gave me Leonard Cohen and Simon and Garfunkel. But A-ha wasn't handmade music, no songwriting stuff, but—at least then—bubbling synth pop. My parents didn’t know what to make of it. A-ha was mine, like my first boyfriend, excluded from their sphere.
[5.2] And indeed, my passion for the band unfolded when I had just come out of a serious crisis and had to reorganize a great deal of my life. I do not know if in a different constitution I would have noticed the posters announcing an A-ha concert in Uelzen. Hicksville Uelzen! I wasn't any smarter than my laughing friends and colleagues and thought A-ha was a group of has-beens, who like circus ponies continue to trot in circles when the tent has long been dismantled. Next stop: Opening ceremonies for furniture stores.
[5.3] I should have known better. At the beginning of the first decade of the twenty-first century, also in a crisis, I listened a lot to two A-ha-records released at that time—and even bought a few of the earlier ones, which I had thrown away some years later while tidying up. The truth is: I forgot A-ha twice for several years. I took no notice when they split up in the early '90s, then reunited, split up again, this time for real, only to release a new album in 2015 and play an unplugged concert on a Norwegian islet in 2017. The there-recorded acoustic version of "Take On Me" was the first thing I heard from A-ha after a very long time. I was blown away, and touched that they had just kept on, even though I had denied them for so long. What a blessing I had not come too late and could do more than just bury my old withered love.
[5.4] I am ready to scream.
6. Maintaining the crush
[6.1] This text is an altered version of an article that was published in a German daily a few days before the concert in 2019. While I was writing it, I lost my interest in A-ha once more and stopped watching all those videos. Time and again I still listen to their music, often when I feel the need for comfort. I have come to understand that acknowledging my fan persona had been part of a healing process. However, on the evening of the concert in Bremen I met my hero for an interview. My crush on him has since only grown, and I value it as something that gives me strength. This stands in contrast to the widespread belief that crushes are immature and an indicator of unhappiness.
[6.2] When I looked for literature on the term Schwärmen, which is German for "having a crush," I found that there are only four studies on the topic, all done by psychologists. One is from 1934, the others from the past decade. They completely overlook how fans—teenagers and adults alike—have crushes on stars, and they do not examine the role of shame or nonsexual fantasies. Likewise the practice of having a crush is ignored by fan studies scholars. There's also nothing on its psychological function. My hypothesis is that it's a kind of trance. I intend to verify this by conducting interviews with people who experience crushes, and I have published the first results of my research in the German magazine Psychologie Heute. I am looking forward to exchanging ideas with anyone who has something to say about the topic, be it from their own experience or academic work.
7. Acknowledgment
[7.1] Thank you to Tonya Anderson whose research on adult female Duran Duran fans not only provided theoretical background for my hitherto undirected musings but also helped me embrace my identity as a fan.