🍎 #100: Body Talk - Robyn

As we begin our re-evaluation of Apple Music's 100 Best Albums, we take a look at Swedish pop star Robyn's glistening and propulsive Body Talk.

Album Information

Artist: Robyn

Album: Body Talk

Genre: Electropop

Release Date: November 22, 2010

Connor Ferguson’s Take

Favorite Track: “We Dance to the Beat”

Rating: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️.5

Worthy?: Yes

Higher or Lower?: Higher

On my personal Top 100?: Absolutely.

Beginning Apple Music’s countdown with Robyn’s Body Talk feels like a personal sleight against me, because this album should be much higher than #100, in my opinion. I remember reading about Robyn’s 2005 self-titled record at the peak of its blog hype, but it didn’t really click with me at the time: I was only 13 when it was released in the United States in 2007, and Robyn’s cooler-than-you persona felt a bit icy to me. In August 2010 though, freshly heartbroken from pining for someone for two years after just coming out of the closet, I saw Robyn perform “Dancing on My Own” at the MTV Video Music Awards, and while Lady Gaga took home basically every major award that night, what I remembered most of that event was Robyn’s spare, emotive singing and dancing. Once I got a laptop for Christmas that year, and was able to burn all my own CDs, she quickly took the top spot in my car stereo’s rotation, bad dates and hard days at work and long nights spent studying and applying for colleges and scholarships soundtracked by her pop savvy. I became a complete and total Robyn acolyte. This reverence, of course, is thanks to Body Talk, Robyn’s masterpiece, an album jam-packed with reflection, invention, homage, humor, and most importantly of all, vulnerability.

A decade and a half past its release, it could be easy to look back at Body Talk and see it as somehow quaint: in an era of Lady Gagas and Beyonces and Keshas and Katy Perrys, who were all building larger-than-life concept albums and arena tours, Robyn’s approach to pop music (while no less bombastic) feels less pretentious, more homegrown, even with all the bells and whistles of the ‘80s throwbacks and dance trends she pulled into the aesthetic of Body Talk. The four-on-the-floor beats, the skyscrapping synths, the shout along choruses, these sounds are all threaded through the album’s fifteen tracks, sounds that were topping the charts and blowing out the speakers at clubs at the time. But Robyn’s wizened perspective on relationships, on the cannibalization of the star machine, on the cartoonishness of pop braggadocio, gives Body Talk a paradoxical softness and edge that compliments the bubbling production and lovesick tones of the whole project.

A few tracks come to mind here: “Fembot”, one of the most outrageous tracks, paints Robyn herself as a ready-to-please partner (“Initiating slut mode; all space cadets on deck”) but lays down the law just as quickly with a wink (“There's a calculator in my pocket, got you all in check”); the propulsive “Love Kills” has some fantastic takedowns of a jaded lover (“Stolkholm Syndrome in misery / there’s a penalty for love crimes”) but is more centrally guided by her warning her audience to protect one’s heart; and the teasing “Hang With Me”, one of Body Talk’s most dizzying tracks, sees Robyn friendzoning a suitor with her words, even though the percolating instrumentation reveals that her guard is certainly breaking.

Even when Robyn decides to lean more heavily into one side of the formula, the results are still noteworthy: on the rap-battle-esque “U Should Know Better”, Robyn responds to Snoop Dogg’s fairly cliche and expected sexual and drug conquests (though he’s in top form here) by establishing herself as the true knockout in the room, someone who is ready to throw down with the Vatican to abolish celibacy and institute a black Pope, stake her claim as a pop revolutionary in the music industry and its propensity to discard aging female artists, and comes to blows with the literal Prince of Darkness himself—and comes out victorious. Of course, pure and unadulterated sincerity balances the scales on Body Talk’s first single and opening track, “Dancing On My Own”, a perfect mission statement for the record, but I won’t dig too much into that one: it’s readily apparent that it’s one of the best and most important pop songs of the 21st century so far.

Instead, I’d like to focus on two facets of Body Talk that became more clear to me on this latest listen. First, I have to admit that, despite my adoration and personal connection to Body Talk, the album is not perfect. Filler as a concept is part of the history of pop music, especially in the industry’s favoring of singles over albums in the contemporary market, but a couple of tracks simply don’t shine as much as the others here. Most egregiously, the closer “Stars 4-Ever”, while pleasing, is peak 2010s affirmation pop, and it has not aged nearly as gracefully as the project as a whole; it’s a bit mind-boggling that it's included here when a handful of other tracks from the album’s innovative three-EP release strategy (“Cry When You Get Older”, “Criminal Intent”) would have made much more of an impression.

Second, however, is the realization that Body Talk still has new layers to uncover with repeated listens, especially now that I am closer in age to Robyn herself when she released this project. In particular, the album’s subtly political perspectives, showcased on deep cut “We Dance To The Beat”, have only gained more relevance since 2010: across its dense lyricism and robotic vocals, Robyn lists personal and political cataclysms as warnings (“false math and unrecognized genius”; “bad kissers clicking teeth”; “your brain not evolving fast enough”; “another recycled rebellion”; “radioactivity blocking the exits”), always framed by the introduction of “we dance to the beat”. In other hands, this could be a nihilist manifesto, an admission that 21st century life is, honestly, pretty terrible. But, of course, Robyn softens the blow with a final verse that reclaims joy (“a billion charges of endorphins”; “love lost and then won back”; “gravity giving us a break”) and a killer bridge breakdown where the song’s key line is chanted: “And we don’t stop!”

For Robyn, pop music is rallying call and protest, balm and medicine, affirmation and accountability, and an important tool by which to situate herself within the world through a catchy chorus and a bumping synthesizer. For her fans, like myself, her music fulfills the same roles, a pop lodestar who always has the right word of wisdom for a heartbreak or a triumph. We dance to the beat, and we don’t stop.

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Wenger’s Take

Favorite Track: “Hang With Me”

Rating: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Worthy? Yes

Higher or Lower?: Stay where it is

On my personal Top 100?: Yes

It’s 2011, a year after the release of Robyn’s Body Talk. I’m fourteen at my aunt’s house with a bunch of my girl cousins. We’re watching Youtube on her TV, learning how to be girls from music videos and vloggers. Someone puts on a cover of “Call Your Girlfriend” by Robyn. The video is shot in someone’s kitchen — three young women doing an a cappella rendition with their hands clapping out a rhythm on the table and singing in haunting harmony. A twenty-tens black-and-white filter over the home video gives it the quality I must have thought of as “artsy” back then.

This Erato cover was my first encounter with Robyn. When you come to a song through a cover, your future listening is tempered by your original listening. Most often, I like whatever version of the song I come by first, and this is a bias that is hard to overcome. But not the case with Robyn. Later, when I heard the original “Call Your Girlfriend” I was aching with the exact teenage love pains that Robyn makes music to heal. It's longing and desire packaged in bright electronic sound. The danceable beat clashes against the desperation in the lyrics.

Robyn’s Body Talk is an album for dancing out of your girlhood and into a new, shimmering skin. It’s an album that presents femme braggadocio and unstoppable rhythm as an antidote to evolving heartache.

Some people say every book of poetry has a poem in it that will tell you how to read that book. If there is a song on this album that acts as its manifesto, it’s surely track #9: “None of Dem.” In it, we see Robyn step into her reign over the club.

“None of these boys can dance/Not a single one of them stand a chance,” Robyn sings in those opening lines. “None of them get my sex/None of them move my intellect.” Listening, you can almost see her strutting into a club, looking around at the badly dancing boys and groveling club goers as they turn to take her in.

Robyn really launches into her plans for the future of music when she sings: “Play some kind of new sound/Something true and sincere…/None of these beats are raw/None of these beats ever break the law/None of them kicks go boom/None of them bass lines fill the room.” It’s like a campaign speech. Robyn presents herself as a new and rightful ruler, taking over the dance scene. She’s got beats. She is the law. She’s going to play a new sound. Something true and sincere.

And, my God, Robyn’s kicks really do go boom. I didn’t stop dancing to this album all week. I played it while I walked my dog, while I packed my apartment for a move, while I drove Door Dash deliveries, bumping my shoulders to “Dancehall Queen” and “Don’t Fucking Tell Me What to Do,” as I picked up orders. No one can contest Robyn’s sheer bop-producing power.

But it’s this last part of the manifesto that gives me pause: the idea of sincerity.

Not long before Connor and I started this project, we listened to Lorde’s album Virgin, an album with some lyrics that make you cringe at the rawness of teenage angst expressed in cliche. But, Connor made the good point that, in some ways, it’s this simplicity of lyrics — this near-cringe state of honest emotion — that makes the album succeed.

As with Virgin, there are some lyrics in Body Talk that feel more like a teen girl’s diary scrawl than delicate poeticism. Metaphor is abandoned for tired truisms and cheap rhymes. In “Love Kills” Robyn sings: “Protect yourself, 'cause you'll wreck yourself/In this cold, hard world, so check yourself.” And in Time Machine: “Hey, what did I do?/ Can't believe the fit I just threw/Stupid, (hey) wanted the reaction.” And in “Stars 4-Ever”: “You and I, shining lights are what we are/Look at the sky and I am never far”

But this is pop music, not Shakespeare. There is an amount of silliness and sentimentality that we allow from our pop stars. Moreover, as I read my own critiques, comparing the lyrics to a teen girl's diary, I can feel the implicit sexism.

(I am thinking as I write this of the opening lines from the by-now cult-classic Jennifer’s Body (2009): “Hell is a teenage girl.” The phrase comes to mind any time I think about girlhood.) What is it that makes people cringe at raw emotion? And why do we so readily associate it with teenage angst and feminine hysterics?

Perhaps it is easy to critique some of the lyrical shallowness in Body Talk because it communicates an uncomfortable depth of feeling — the kind of feeling we only know how to associate with youth (girlhood especially) when the hurts of heartbreak hit harder.

Besides, maybe when we cringe, we are really cringing at ourselves. Because isn't there something embarrassing about wanting to be with someone (“Stars 4-Ever”)? Especially when they don't want you back (“Dancing On My Own”)? Or if they are already with someone else (“Call Your Girlfriend”)? Maybe we cringe at the rawness of emotion because what we really feel is shame at our own empathy for that exact rawness. We are all dancing in the corner, watching someone we love kiss someone else.

I recall now an essay by Leslie Jamison, “In Defense of Saccharin(e)”:

“When we criticize sentimentality, perhaps part of what we fear is the possibility that it allows us to usurp the texts we read, insert ourselves and our emotional needs too aggressively into their narratives, clog their situations and their syntax with our tears. Which brings us back to the danger that we’re mainly crying for ourselves, or at least to feel ourselves cry.”

Despite the cheesiness of some of the lyrics, this album is nonstop good. Robyn knows how to undercut the vulnerability with the kind of electronic landscape that lets the sentimental feelings rise and fade into the background, like smoke hovering above a crowded dance floor.

Robyn’s more mature album may be 2018’s Honey. But while the sound is more developed, Honey is lacking some of the raw sincerity that is the blood pumping through Body Talk. It is strange that the exact songs on Body Talk that make me cringe, are also the ones I love the most because they make me remember what it was like to be a teen and what it is always like to feel that tired cliche of an emotion that is desire.