10. Dancing on my own

Queen of the heartbreak bop

A comment last week from Chris about a song that made “heartbreak seem jolly and danceable” (and a very good song it is too) reminded me that I’ve yet to write about one of the heroines of the upskirt decade — so this week, we’re having an all-in tribute to Robyn. The first time I heard Robyn, I was intensely hungover on the Sunday of a music festival in December 2007, awake early and in that fragile state of clarity which means you’ve still got all your suffering ahead of you. I ate a bacon sandwich and I drank a cup of tea, and then I rested my head on the arm of the sofa in the holiday camp chalet and let the television happen in front of me. And that’s when I saw this song (although not this performance, I don’t think):

I guess I was feeling susceptible to melancholy right then. But even if I hadn’t been on the comedown from a 48-hour party with three hours on public transport ahead of me, I think this song would have got me. It’s all melodrama — “Maybe we could make it all right, we could make it better sometime/ Maybe we could make it happen, baby/ We could keep trying, but things will never change,” she sings, strings surging underneath, the delivery more resigned than bitter. This is a breakup song, but it sounds like it’s never going to be over for her. “I don’t look back/ Still I’m dying with every step I take,” it goes.

The realisation here is not just that the relationship is finished, but that it might never really happened at all. Was the person she’s addressing always only ever stringing her along? Were they with other people? Maybe she is a love she’s nurtured on her own, and she’s never dared do more than imagine it reciprocated. Anyway, she still has something she wants: “And it hurts with every heartbeat,” she sings, and the pain is as constant — and as treasured — as the love she can’t have.

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Robyn specialises in scenarios that are kind of weird. “Dancing on My Own” — used brilliantly on the Girls soundtrack in 2012 — sounds defiant on first listen, but the story it tells is unsettling. The narrator is emotionally burdened: “There’s a big black sky over my town.” Why? Because the person she’s into is out with someone else: “I know where you’re at, I bet she’s around.” Like in “With Every Heartbeat”, her feelings are the centre of our world, but the centre of her world is someone else who she can only watch. “Call Your Girlfriend” sounds adorable, but is truly sociopathic, as she explains to a lover exactly how they should dump their partner for her.

At her best and most intense, Robyn is a passenger on her own emotions. I love her 2009 collaboration with Röyksopp, “The Girl and the Robot”, which is about being in love with someone who, for a change, is not in love with another woman, but who is obsessed with work. (When this came out, I excitedly played it to a friend who very politely said: “That sounds like Cathy Dennis playing with New Order?” Which it does, and which is a good thing.) Five years later, they reunited to make “Do It Again”, in which she addresses someone she shouldn’t be with but can’t keep away from: “We should not be friends/ We’ll just do it again,” she sings, her voice edging towards frantic. You don’t want this feeling to stop. When the song ends, I compulsively hit repeat.

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The quintessential Robyn state, in other words, is a gorgeous lack of volition. Which means robots are a theme she comes back to over and over. On the 2005 album Robyn, there’s “Robotboy”; on Body Talk from 2010 there’s “Fembot” (“pull up in docking position,” she implores, and I can’t absolutely say it’s entirely unlike Adam Buxton’s “Dirty Robots” song). This isn’t just a random affection — the technology that gave noughties pop music much of its specific sound, and that gave producers more control over performers than they’d ever had before, also blurred the line between human and machine. Pitch-shifting put vocalists straight into the uncanny valley.¹

And Britney used pitch-shifting more inventively than anyone. Or, the people she worked with used it on her — as she moved towards the horizon of 2008, and then into the Shroedinger’s decade that followed (when the question of whether she was puppet or protected was still a question), it became absolutely central to her performances. On “Work Bitch” it contributes to the metronomic authority with which she delivers her hot Randian mantra; on “Scream and Shout” with Will.i.am, it sounds like the restraint she’s fighting against. (The song builds towards climax but never allows release: the girl is always trapped in the robot.)

But Britney’s best autotune is on “Piece of Me”,² the lead single from Blackout. It’s a song that, on release in 2007, seemed to herald a new and in-control Britney after the umbrella, after the headshave, after the divorces. It’s part invitation, part threat: she’s offering herself up to be consumed, and she’s offering her attackers out for a fight. But the voice she sings with is not quite her own. She’s manipulated, processed, part instrument. The lyrics say she’s back, but musically, she’s disappearing into an electonic blur. And who’s singing the bionic backup vocals? It’s Robyn, the fembot herself. The helplessness of limerance, the helplessness of fame — they sound a lot alike.

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I’ve just started researching the noughties porn industry, so pray for this newsletter and your spam filters. Fancy giving me some respite from my Girls Gone Wild hell? Comments and replies always very welcome.

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Gimme, gimme more…

• I’m on the Stories of Our Times podcast this week, talking about interviewing Perez Hilton. This means you can hear some snippets of the interview, including me — in my standard ultra-professional style — being simply amazed and delighted that Hilton had heard of Loose Women.

• I was really sorry to hear that Greg Gilbert of Delays — a band who deserved to be much bigger than they were — died a few weeks ago. That interview is from 2019, and catches him at a strange moment between shock (he had received his cancer diagnosis and knew he was unlikely to live much longer) and determination (he was making new art, and planning for a future that included his own imminent death).

• I wish the video for my favourite Delays song didn’t look like playing a level Sonic while microdosing. (And why is there a random woman in a bikini? Why not, I guess. Noughties gonna nought.) A song like this deserved the full Michel Gondry paranoid disintegration fantasia treatment. Hit play below and close your eyes: “And tell me… our last night on Earth is for living/ And tell me… is that, is that love?”

1. Janelle Monae was also pretty into robots, though hers have an afrofuturist angle and an honestly quite-hard-to-keep-track-of mythology inspired by Metropolis.

2. I feel like at some point I learned the difference between autotune and pitch-shifting, or that there’s a reason the thing we call autotune isn’t actually autotune, but I’ve forgotten it now just like I’ve forgotten how the credit system and probability work.