Chronique

tomewing:

alexmacpherson:

Rich Juzwiak nails why I’m not down with Robyn at all. In short:

• Grating appropriations of urban culture;
• Inability to convince of any emotion beyond “aren’t I cute!”
• Weedy beats
• General hypocrisy of the whole “Robyn is a different/better kind of pop star” stance

These are handily arranged in order of decreasing wrongness!

1. “Urban culture” is not a special flower: don’t be so precious. (OK, this is me being too harsh. What I mean is that “urban culture” - by which Lex and Juzwiak mean a bit of hip-hop slang in the lyrics and the occasional excursion into that well-established subgenre swedish reggae - comes entirely pre-appropriated in this case: this kind of pidgin hip-hop is almost certainly absolutely 100% authentic as far as young people in Stockholm go, as it is in every suburb everywhere pretty much. The appropriation bus left a very long time ago.)

2. She does have a limited voice but uses it well, and on the Body Talk albums she gets across sadness, generosity, cheekiness, boredom, a range of nuanced emotions well beyond just cutesy (she does do some of the cutesy stuff too, I grant you)

3. This is fair - though there’s a lot more going on in the rhythms of some tracks (“Include Me Out”, for instance) than the piece admits. But mostly on these records she’s making synthpop not club music - so the shift to treble is a feature not a bug. Fair enough not to like that, of course, but I don’t think she’s aiming for “strong beats”.

4. This is an ongoing issue really. Robyn gets celebrated for her independence, autonomy, etc. and compared to, say, Kylie, she seems to experiment more. She’s closer to Lady Gaga, but Lady Gaga is better and far more successful, so using Robyn as a counter-example to “pop” is problematic. And if you widen the scope to include R&B, Country, Brit- or Indie-pop and she has no less/more control over her destiny than Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Lily Allen or Neko Case (most of whom have made records better than my favourite Robyn track). And that’s even before you start thinking about how much those ideas are projections by the audience, how important they are anyway, etc. There’s enough to like about Robyn without going overboard on her special-ness.