That was before any of Body Talk PT 1 was out in the open, except for “Dancehall Queen.” Now that we can hear, first hand, how age and gender show up across her album, it’s easy to say that no one’s addressed aging and being flawed on the dancefloor so well since, erm, last week, when James Murphy did it. People expect things of you,” Robyn told us in her Progress Report interview.
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“I just wanted to detach myself.“I think being a woman, especially when you turn thirty, it puts perspective on a lot of things, you know. “I was always forced to conform to the structure of the major industry,” she told Reuters about the era. If she sounded unenthusiastic, it’s because she was.
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Her music from that era is almost unrecognizable today: cookie cutter 1990s R&B out of the TLC playbook. Fifteen years before “Dancing on My Own,” Robyn shot to stardom in Sweden as a teen star thanks to a boost from the omnipresent Max Martin, a producer who has worked with everyone from Britney Spears to Kelly Clarkson to Ariana Grande. In her pointed studies and critiques she forged a direct link between Laurie Anderson’s “Big Science” and the robots of the future.īut arguably Robyn’s biggest impact has nothing to do with music and everything to do with her push for artistic autonomy. Vincent, Janelle Monae or Poppy toyed with mechanized identity, Robyn found power and weakness in automatons: she used them to not only reflect her desires but to comment on the fetishization of women. Her prophetic obsession with robots - as heard on the songs “ Robotboy,” “ Fembot,” “The Girl and the Robot” and many more - feel even more prescient today, years after she first recorded them, in a moment when the cyborgification of women online has led to feminized tech like Siri and Alexa being integrated into everyday life and fembots fronting viral Instagram accounts and pop careers. While Robyn has made the dance floor more human, she’s also made it more robotic. Other dance floor confessionals, like Tove Lo’s “ Habits,” Dua Lipa and Martin Garrix’s “Scared to Be Lonely,” Cabilla Cabello’s “Crying in the Club” and Halsey’s “ Alone” can also be read as direct tributes in their attempts to demystify the allure of the female pop star. Lorde called the song “perfect” and cited it as an inspiration for her 2017 hit “ Green Light,” which similarly melds bitterness with euphoria. Looking back, the song seems like a harbinger of a wave of female musicians writing unabashed pop music that explores the uncomfortable, unglamorous and sometimes unstable parts of their lives, breathing pathos into party settings. It breathed a frenzied energy into scenes in “Gossip Girl” and “Girls” and was embraced by the queer community (and others) as an anthem of self-expression. Robyn took the song on Saturday Night Live in 2011, spinning in circles, vogueing, catching her breath in long gasps the song, ostensibly about stalking an ex on a night out, quickly become synonymous with a cathartic rejection of expectation and conformity. Of course, the crown jewel of these tortured singalongs is “Dancing On My Own,” a five-minute maelstrom released in 2010. For years, she’s been putting out club bangers that refuse to conceal her sadness: “Crash and Burn Girl” narrates a mental breakdown over a pounding bass drum, while the seemingly haughty “Don’t Fucking Tell Me What To Do” is actually an anxious electropop millennial answer to “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” Robyn has struck a nerve with audiences around the world because she cares too much. “She’s just, like, the epitome of effortless cool,” Katy Perry said in a New York Times interview in 2015.
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On the outside, Robyn’s crisp white haircut, piercing blue gaze and couture outfits give off something of an aloof ice queen aesthetic. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, than the pop world has been flattering Robyn for some quite some time. Indeed, she was one of the central architects of this pop moment. But Robyn's not following the trend here - she helped start it. It’s been eight years since Robyn released her last album, “Body Talk,” and in the interim it seems like a whole generation of inheritors has emerged, each one specifically engineered to mimic and embellish her once-unique sensibilities.Īt first glance, it might seem like Robyn’s heartfelt and brilliant new single, “Missing U,” fits squarely into the current era of bright synthesizers and depressive lyrics. Her words about the synthetic imitator could apply to several fleshier ones as well.