Review: Robyn, Body Talk
Robyn, Body Talk
My reaction to this album comes down to two points:
1. Yum, chilly, playful Euro-Pop! Love it!
and
2. Wait, why did every AV Club-reading music hipster fall head over heels in love with this album?
As someone who enjoys electro-pop, I totally enjoyed Body Talk, though once again it was something of a slow warm-up on my part. “Don’t Fucking Tell Me What to Do” immediately worked for me and I’m fairly sure “U Should Know Better” because the lyrics are hilarious and a Snoop Dogg cameo worked for the song for once. By the end of the month, I was appreciating most of the album with its references to “automatic booty applications” and the Vatican knowing not to fuck with Robyn. It also lacked that faux-American Idol melisma and fake soulfulness that infects Katy Perry-types and while it was artificial in the way that Ke$ha is artificial, it…didn’t suck?
I’m not sure how to explain just how much Ke$ha sucks: I mean, create this female man-child talking about her partying, Auto-Tune the hell out of it and stick a catchy produced beat underneath it. It is shocking yet bland. That’s great that you party at dive bars, Ke-dollar-sign-ha. It is great that you and your Pro Tools are keeping it real. Yet the only good things you have caused are the Glee version of “Tik Tok” because that whole scene was Ryan Murphy at his best, and then the Star Trek vid.
And why were they good? Because they recognize Ke$ha as the manufactured badness she is and set out to subvert the structure that made “Tik Tok” what it is.
By the way, THAT is why Ke$ha sucks. She is overproduced to be terrible and trite, the sort of disposable summer pop that you blast while you sit in the car on a road trip, painting your toenails or pre-gaming on the way to a club, and so egregiously and deliberately so (you can’t deny it’s made to be bad when Auto-Tune’s involved) that it feels like “Your Summer of 2010, Sponsored By Ke$ha(TM), Vitamin Water(R), and Four Loko(R)!”
But back to Robyn. She lacks that “LGBT ISSUES!” preachiness and self-conscious performance art through costuming that mars Lady Gaga[1]. Even on songs like “Don’t Tell Me What to Do,” which is a stylistic experiment of its own, it’s less overt. The laundry list of problems “killing” Robyn are generic and relatable, and can easily slip into “kick drum” while the electronic beat goes on.
On the other hand, and this is where my second point comes up, Body Talk is a superb example of pop and specifically, electronic dance pop. But that is what it is. Body Talk isn’t like, say, alternative rap/hip-hop where the subject matter changes from how much money Jay-Z has and how he is the best to the social problems of the African-American community. Robyn isn’t a genre chameleon, like, say, Santigold, who goes from pop to suddenly doing Siouxsie Sioux. Body Talk is also not a concept album a la Janelle Monae.
And that’s kind of what the reviews lead you to believe, that Body Talk and Robyn are more like, say, Sleater-Kinney, where the form is flawlessly mainstream but the content is relentlessly subversive.[2] Body Talk is a spectacularly fun mainstream pop album that happens not to be mainstream pop at the moment because the American music industry has regressed to 1988 and so would rather promote Katy Perry, Ke$ha, and endless clones of faux-deep guys with guitars. Remember, in 1988/89, Madonna was causing controversy the likes of which get-along Gaga would never manage with her “Like a Prayer” video and America could dig it. For some reason, Americans are…what? Too immature for Robyn?
I doubt it. I think what we’re witnessing when the hipster brigade is embracing good pop is a) the twenty-year bankruptcy of American music (we’re due for the next alternative rock shakeup), and b) the bankruptcy of “indie rock.” B is actually more important because A is cyclical and fits certain historical patterns. But the dirty secret is that alternative/semi-alternative music journalism is embracing albums like Body Talk and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy because indie rock has disappeared so far into its white, shoegazing milieu that it’s actually failed to find new nourishment to appropriate.[3] Indie rock is so “hipster” - middle-class white that isolates and gentrifies and reveres itself for obscurity and inaccessibility - that it’s rendered itself sterile.
Hence, Body Talk, which is doing fun (if non-revelatory) things with pop music, is a welcome escape from the barren landscape littered with Train, Ke$ha, and Vampire Weekend. None of which takes away from the album, but says a lot about the state of music reviewers.
[1] I admit that “mars” is a bit strong. Gaga is generally good to listen to, no matter how derivative she can be, but there’s a level of conscious artistry on her part that sometimes throws me out of the music.
[2] This is actually another place where Lady Gaga kind of fails. Declaring that we should love the gays because hey, they were “born this way” and “god does not make mistakes?” and setting it to the arrangement for Express Yourself? Not really subversive.
[3] I won’t take 100% credit for this theory, as it is also Dick Hebdige’s general theory about what happened to punk rock in the 1970s in his seminal work, Subculture: the Meaning of Style.
