By Brennan Carley In 1998, Britney Spears traveled to Stockholm to record songs for her debut album, …Baby One More Time, with producers like Max Martin and Rami Yacoub. She was one of many stars at the time who ventured to the Swedish city to capitalize on the words and sounds of its burgeoning pop scene. Months later, at a dance school only a few miles away, a team of record label executives convened to audition a group of 100 teenagers for a project they called the “ABBA Teens,” an homage to Sweden’s most popular musical export. That year, ABBA were celebrating their 25th anniversary as a group, though they hadn’t released new music in nearly two decades. Beloved by an older generation of Swedes, ABBA were known around the world for their outrageous (and tax-evading) costumes, as well as their massive hits like “Dancing Queen” and “Waterloo.” Their songs hadn’t yet been repurposed into a long-running Broadway musical, which later inspired a blockbuster movie franchise starring Meryl Streep. ABBA weren’t, for lack of a better word, cool. But the ABBA Teens were meant to change that by introducing the foursome’s hits to a new wave of music consumers: pop-savvy pre-teens discovering their taste as they came of spending age. One name change later, the four singers chosen became the A*Teens. Their first album, The ABBA Generation, topped the charts in Sweden and sold over 2 million copies worldwide. But it was their all-originals follow-up, 2001’s Teen Spirit, that broke the group… Click below to read the full story from MTV News
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An Oral History Of The A*Teens, The ABBA Cover Band That Defined Y2K Pop
