A literary-critical analysis of Abba’s ‘Waterloo’

In Competition No. 3205, you were invited to supply a rigorous literary-critical analysis of a well-known pop song.

Thanks to Oliver Hawkins, who drew to my attention J. Temperance’s real-life analysis of Boney M’s ‘Daddy Cool’ (The New Inquiry, 2015): ‘We may paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari and state that “it is within capitalist society that the critique of ‘Daddy Cool’ must always resume its point of departure and find again its point of arrival.”’ Which gives a sense of what you were aiming for. Fiona Clark’s dissection of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ hit the spot: ‘Arguably, the “poor boy” or “Little silhouetto” embodies the quintessentially paradigmatic figure of the Pharmakos or scapegoat, whilst merging with the composite anti-hero, Scaramouche-Figaro-Beelzebub…’ As did David Shields, David Silverman and Bill Greenwell, who were unlucky losers.

The winners below pocket £30 each.

Lost ‘on a dark desert highway’, Dante enters a labyrinth of corridor and courtyard that ‘could be heaven’ or ‘could be hell’.