January 04, 2010
top 25 songs of 2009: song 4
"Show Me Love (live)," Robyn. Strictly speaking, this song is at least a dozen years old, and was already a hit in the US, peaking at number seven. In its original form it bears almost the full lineage of modern Swedish pop: produced by Cheiron Studios founder Denniz Pop and his protegé Max Martin, it was written by Martin and Robyn herself, then about 17, who would be the proof of concept for arguably the most successful pseudogenre in history (especially if one uses the metric of biggest opening sales figures, where it dominates the category). Its lyrics could at times be spoken by the genre itself to its planned audience, announcing its global intentions and making its demands: "this love I got for you could take me round the world — now show me love." In short, "Show Me Love" is teenpop's DNA and battlecry both.
For all that, Robyn managed to fall into a narrative even deeper than teenpop: little girl lost a l'industrie. Her teendom timed out; purgatory followed. Failed at old sound, failed with new sound, dropped from primal teenpop label Jive in 2004. Started own label to release peculiar sweet-tart electro, started hanging out with Swedish hipster acts like Teddybears and Kleerup, recorded EP, and in 2007 got a Universal distribution deal for full-length Robyn, which would easily make the sugarhigh! Top 10 albums of the decade. It's like Bjork for music lovers. Oh snap.
What then to do about those old hits, now as old as their target audience had been? Robyn is not the first to confront this problem, though precious few return from child stardom to be thrilling artists as adults. And precious fewer take the aesthetics of youth as an explicit problem to be worked through, rather than rejected (we see that all the time, cf. Vanilla Ice's metal phase). Adult hipster Robyn is that rare bird, an intentional sublation of herself — rescuing what remained charged, and returning it as something deeply different, antagonistic exactly insofar as the earlier material has been preserved. This is a narrative of artistic development itself, of course, though rarely is it played out so clearly in a single artist. And this is what's striking about Robyn, this and the songs.
So it's only right that in performance starting with the recent tour (sugarhigh! concert of the year 2008) Robyn would return to "Show Me Love," not as a joke and not as a concession to her audience, which doesn't actually require that of her. But return to it changed, as if stripped clean by the sandstorm of a dozen years: just a minimalist series videogame series of bleeps with a hint of steel drum to the intonation, and an unadorned direct vocal style — all of which renders the song "more serious," sure, but also brings forward without apology the brilliance of the writing, the nuanced torque which interlocks the verse and chorus: an arrangement that shows the song doesn't need an arrangement, doesn't need orchestration and dance and etc, that it is a beautiful and delicate love song after all, that it was always the real it was faking, and thusly do the years yawn and collapse.
There are several live recordings of reasonable character — though the best of them, on AOL Sessions, is not always available. A hi-rez version was finally included on the U.K. version of Robyn last year; Amazon actually blocks US residents from downloading it, even if you'll pay! Friend-of-the-blog Rob White downloaded it for us, at cost of 99 pence, and sent it along. That was in early 2009, hence the song's appearance here.
Posted by jane at January 4, 2010 03:10 AM | TrackBack