"I'm always going to feel like this person on the outside looking in," Robyn recently told Popjustice. The Swedish singer and songwriter has no fear of pop: A platinum seller in her own country, Robyn cracked the Billboard top 10 in the late 1990s working with famed teen-pop producer Max Martin. As the daughter of a couple who ran an independent theater company, however, Robin Miriam Carlsson is also a woman who enjoys doing things her own way.
Robyn, first released in Scandinavia five years ago on the newly liberated singer's own Konichiwa label, ultimately led to a UK #1 hit, a tour with Madonna, and Snoop Dogg remix spots. Major labels turned out to be a necessary evil, but the deal's on Robyn's terms now. "It's pop music, you know?" she told us earlier this year. "It's entertainment and at the same time it has to mean something to me. I like dealing with that balance."
With Body Talk Pt. 1, the first of a potential three new albums tentatively scheduled for 2010, Robyn doesn't just walk the line between what she has called the "commercial" and "tastemaker" realms. She obliterates it. Immaculately produced, fantastically sung, and loaded with memorable choruses, this eight-song effort has plenty to please everyone from post-dubstep crate diggers to teen tweeters-- often at the same time. Like most of Robyn's best tracks, though, from mid-90s teen-pop hit "Show Me Love" to "With Every Heartbeat" a decade later, Body Talk Pt. 1 is capable of not only appealing to many different people, but also touching them emotionally.
"Play me some kind of new sound/ Something true and sincere," Robyn begs on "None of Dem", a dark, tense, early-morning type of dance track featuring Norwegian electropop duo Röyksopp. She's not being hypocritical. Opener "Don't Fucking Tell Me What to Do", a talky electro-house tirade against electro-age anxieties, really isn't like anything else in the singer's discography. "Dancehall Queen", her so-wrong-it's-right collaboration with tastemaking Philadelphia DJ/producer Diplo, may have purists grumbling at its 1980s dancehall synths, subwoofer wobble, and "Sleng Teng" shoutout-- the title's sideways allusion to ABBA appears to have gone generally overlooked-- but "I came to dance, not to socialize." It's here, dancing, with a chorus that Santigold and Gwen Stefani might kill for, that Robyn is free from all the worries that are "killing" her at the album's start.
Robyn reintroduced Robyn as a Missy Elliott-loving badass. Body Talk Pt. 1 texts that persona into the 2010s. Most similar to songs like "Konichiwa Bitches", "Cobrastyle", and "Curriculum Vitae" is first preview "Fembot", a Klas Åhlund co-write that flips the script on Robyn's track for Röyksopp's 2009 Junior. On "The Girl and the Robot", Robyn was the neglected lover "asleep again in front of MTV." Here, to wonderful effect, she's a "scientifically advanced hot mama."
But Robyn seems most comfortable watching from afar as somebody else goes home with her prize. Dancing, the narrator's escape on "Dancehall Queen", becomes a prison of her own making on the album's emotional peak, "Dancing on My Own"-- a clear descendant of Robyn's girl-loses-boy, boy-ties-Ms.-Whatshername's-laces classic, "Be Mine!". With unadorned piano and strings, "Hang With Me (Acoustic Version)" is closer to "Be Mine! (Ballad Version)" and hits similar emotional notes: You say you're just friends, well that's OK, but don't you dare "fall recklessly, headlessly in love with" her. If she's sitting on a killer dancefloor version of this one, good luck.
In an album full of songs that manage to be both specific and universal, "Cry When You Get Older" might prove to be the most enduring: a prom song, a graduation song, an end-of-summer-camp-PowerPoint song. Dudes like Max Martin and Peter Bjorn & John meet at parties and brag about what great melodies they've written, Robyn told us a couple of years ago; this is one worth bragging about. The lyrics are conversational, the synths respond, and there's a Prince reference to go with a Smashing Pumpkins' "1979"-like perspective on teenage ennui. Everybody in the back, quote it: "I lost all my faith in science/ So I put my faith in me."
Body Talk Pt. 1 ends painfully soon, but at least it ends with a pair of tracks focusing on Robyn's soulful voice. In addition to "Hang With Me", there's "Jag Vet En Dejilg Rosa", a Swedish traditional song the singer performed over Björn Yttling's piano accompaniment in a 2007 tsunami memorial. Here she's backed by bells, and her touch is lighter. Robyn's vocals aren't only about singing; they're also about untranscribeable details like the little flutter when she sort of smiles at herself on this slow song, or her goofy ad libs between lyrics on faster songs. Above all, Robyn puts herself on the line-- loses her cool for the sake of emotional connection-- like few other contemporary vocalists.
In 2000, a guy I know e-mailed Robyn about singing technique. In her reply, she gave detailed advice about maintaining his jaw muscles, hips, back, tongue, and vocal chords. "But the most important thing," she wrote, "is to be happy, and I don't mean that you always should be in a good mood. Because all the emotional stress that you feel is reflected in your body and can easily affect your voice-- which is a good thing if you take care of it. Because it is a tool that will help you get to know yourself and remind you when it's time for you to look inside for answers." Head and hips are both important, but the heart is still the strongest muscle. Bring it, Body Talk Pt. 2.
