The Women Who Made Me: Robyn
The Women Who Made Me is an extremely personal series that deconstructs my relationship with the music of the most foundational female icons in my life. The first piece details Robyn, the dynastic and dynamic Swedish genius who led me into my most passionate love affair: damn good pop music.
To whom do you credit your prowess, your lust for life? Who lit your fire? Growing up, my view of music was framed by a filter that deemed options appropriate or not. Typically this filled my life with the voices of country legends, past and present, singing about heartbreaks and bar fights and mistresses, of wanton feelings and tepid upbringings. These songs were no more wholesome than whatever else I was missing, so I started asking for more.
At the time of my introduction to electronic music, I was seven and my friend’s dad was into Moby. We would dig through his record collection and play albums according to their album covers — Moby had a few eye-grabbing numbers. This process led to a few great rushes from experiencing different music (remember the first time you heard N*SYNC?) but I still wanted something…more. I wanted to control the experience, find new music on my own.
My self-procurement began when I heard “Somebody Told Me” on Chicago’s 103.5 KISS FM. I loved the synthesizer breakdown between the first chorus and the second verse more than anything. The consistency of the singles from The Killers’ debut album lit a fire that decided I needed to purchase the album of every artist whose single I liked on the radio. Kelly’s “Since U Been Gone” was incredible. I was all over that. The album? Got Mom to cop it at Target. This concept I’d previously considered lame as shit known as radio suddenly opened an entirely new world for me to discover. I purchased Gwen Stefani’s Love. Angel. Music. Baby. by myself and was too cool for school. Then I got an iPod.
Music discovery exploded and I spent everything I had on searching for something new. Robyn first appeared to me as the iTunes free music video of the week for her Christian Falk collab “Dream On” (no relation to Aerosmith, none, whatsoever). Clothespins for earrings were suddenly just so right and I had this really elemental moment when I was immersed in the track. Her voice was so delightfully sweet bouncing atop a beat that made me want to fight for her immediately. I must’ve replayed it a hundred times.
I bought up all the Robyn I could afford with my iTunes gift cards — “Show Me Love” to “Cobrastyle” and “With Every Heartbeat”. I didn’t understand her background, really, or where she’d come from, as her music played her to a slightly more androgynous side of femininity, and her label obscured her past by delaying the release of her second album outside of her native Sweden (songs contained lyrics referencing her abortion, cited by RCA Records in their blocking of My Truth’s U.S. release).
Konichiwa Records, her own label, roared to life out of rage in 2004, and Robyn dropped her self-titled fourth album in 2005 — a few years before I would stumble upon her and five years before she released the earth-shattering Body Talk trilogy. She was making a fresh start in a career that had amassed her hits and international recognition, skewing her sound to the electro and dance sides of pop, paving the way for her culture-shaping hits still to come.
She got into my head in such a way that she shaped my outlook over most of pop music in general. Her sound was a multiplex; so dynamic that it resembles the environment that every single song creates. Her sound is as restricted to one song as Prince’s is. Every look presents a fresh take on the star you’d known before, and each listen opens the mind of a new audience, ready to be swept off their feet with bliss, or heartbreak, or any Robyn-ified emotion she embodies — it’s all extremes.
Honey blossomed in 2018 to wild acclaim, providing absolutely none of Body Talk’s expansive qualities, maximalist arrangements, or glittery sparks, instead presenting reformed and refined subject and sound. Robyn occupies a space much smaller and her music gets bigger because of it, songs strung out to cocoon the listener in a honey glaze while they drift off in a daydream. It’s fun to get lost (as long as you still don’t end up heartbroken), but it’s really impressive to see what she accomplishes with the release of this record. She’s providing a safe haven in sound, advocating for peace and love in a direct way and addressing our collective humanity, calling us out for, well, dying. And hurting each other. Robyn’s lyrics have always been a call to arms for the lonely individual, the one who knows to follow their intuition and is often shunned. She keeps that individual rolling as she recounts her experiences, building the album in the order that the songs were finished. This gives the album an unreal quality of fluidity, each song related to the one before and after, mimicking the thoughts running through her mind.
In the eight years between Body Talk and Honey that Robyn spent a considerable amount of time contributing to the work of other artists, fostering growth and ingenuity and promoting her native Sweden to a fresh set of eyes. To grow with her as a fan for eleven years and to experience two new albums in that time could have been testing, but only if the music faltered. Each Robyn song is perfectly crystallized in its period of her career but retains zero semblance of tiredness. Timeless describes entirely too much of her catalog and new generations easily gobble up her material, finding new solace in the nooks and crannies of the impeccably complex production.
I think of Robyn spinning around in a zone completely her own, of course in a warehouse, belting “Call Your Girlfriend” and getting down for her own damn self. I feel such a shoulder to lean on in this woman, in this sound, and in this broken heart. “We never get what we deserve,” she cries on “In My Eyes” knowing well that’s emotional, irrational and hardly true. Robyn worked to build her own destiny from the ashes of an abandoned record deal and when I saw with my own eyes a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden scream the chorus to “Dancing On My Own” a capella as Robyn broke down in tears on stage, I knew at that moment that some of us get everything we deserve.
