ABSTRACT
The highly popular but much-maligned category of “Europop,” a broad genre of light European-produced pop-rock music, has become closely associated with the Eurovision Song Contest, and the 1974 contest won by the Swedish band ABBA with “Waterloo” is often credited as an early milestone in the popular appeal and global dissemination of Europop. Europop is often regarded as a shallow and slickly produced pop music, but pushing this investigation further reveals this genre’s easily de-ethnicized homogeneity, what Simon Frith identifies as its sound of “whiteness.” A case study of three versions of a 1970s Europop hit, “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep,” by the Scottish band Middle of the Road, the duo of Mac and Katie Kissoon, and Grégory Ken, a white French singer describing the feelings of an African immigrant in Paris, puts this song into a larger context of popular music and identity considering “the timbral politics of difference.”
