On Robyn and the art of the twisted love-song

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been feeling quite down the last few days. So, as a change from doomscrolling, I am going to write about two pop songs that I love, both by Robyn: Dancing On My Own, and Call Your Girlfriend.

Most love songs are straightforward, like ‘I want to hold your hand’ by the Beatles. It’s a basic Person A loves Person B equation. Then there is the other most common form of love song — breakup songs. Person A has lost Person B.

Dancing On My Own is a lot more twisted than that. Here are the opening lyrics:

Somebody said you got a new friend
Does she love you better than I can?
It’s a big black sky over my town
I know where you at, I bet she’s around
Yeah, I know it’s stupid
I just gotta see it for myself

I’m in the corner
Watching you kiss her
Oh oh oh
I’m right over here
Why can’t you see me?
Oh oh oh
I’m giving it my all
But I’m not the guy you’re taking home
Ooh ooh ooh
I keep dancing on my own (I keep dancing on my own)

So the story of this love song is Person A watching Person B kissing Person C.

It’s twisted because the sentiment is voyeuristic, toxic, unhealthy, destructive. Person A has gone to a club to watch her former lover make out with someone else. It reminds one of films like Rear Window, or Taxi Driver, or Peeping Tom, which are all films about voyeurism and watching others as an unhealthy but compulsive activity.

And yet Dancing On My Own is a very uplifting and cathartic song, as you can see from this crowd serenading Robyn with the chorus at a concert — tell me you’re not moved by this slide of BC (Before Covid) pop culture.

This is a style of song that Robyn pioneered — the ‘sad banger’, songs that ‘make you want to dance through tears’ as the Guardian put it. It’s sad but defiant. I don’t know if there’ something queer about that sort of sentiment — melancholy but upbeat. Anyway, it reminds me of Morrissey’s songs or Erasure’s sad banger Give Me A Little Respect. Both of them have prompted cathartic collective singalongs on the Tube. Why are they so cathartic? I think it’s because they are a collective admission and even a mass celebration of feeling like an outsider — they’re queer anthems.

Twisted perspective

Other great love songs take the usual Person A loves Person B format and twist it up. For example, Waterloo Sunset by the Kinks has this set-up:

Terry meets Julie
Waterloo station
Every Friday night

That’s Person A loves Person B. But then it reveals the song is being sung by Person C, who is watching them from his window, too afraid to go outside, but feeling some sort of vicarious thrill by watching Terry and Julie.

Every day I look at the world from my window
But chilly, chilly is the evening time
Waterloo sunset’s fine (Waterloo sunset’s fine)

Person C is clearly not fine — he’s stuck in some bedsit, depressed and agoraphobic, watching strangersin the streets below and imagining how happy they are. Yet the song is somehow cathartic. It gives us what medieval saints called ‘the gift of tears’. As long as he’s playing, we are briefly in paradise, before we realize we too are alone.

Now a truly twisted perspective is found in Bob Dylan’s razor-wire break-up song, Positively 4th Street, which is basically a catalogue of all the things he hates about Joan Baez (it’s amazing their friendship survived this song). It ends with these lines:

I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes
And just for that one moment I could be you
Yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes
You’d know what a drag it is to see you

Person A wishes Person B could be Person A so they’d realize what a drag it is to see Person B. That’s fucked up.

I studied English literature at university, and my favourite writer was Shakespeare (duh). Shakespeare is a master of twisted perspective. He introduces a new subjectivity and indeterminacy into human experience — ‘there’s nought but thinking makes it so’, as Hamlet says.

One of Shakespeare’s most twisted plays is Troilus and Cressida. It’s rarely performed, but it’s a very clever and nasty play. It’s set during the Trojan war, and it mercilessly debunks the ideology of heroic war and courtly love. Troilus is a Trojan warrior, a dumb romantic, whose entire perspective on life is built on cliches of courtly love. He falls for Cressida, a Trojan dame, but she betrays him to win her safety by sleeping with a Greek warrior.

In my favourite scene, Troilus is taken to secretly observe his beloved Cressida making out with the Greek warrior. He can’t believe what he’s seeing — his whole worldview dissolves: ‘the bonds of heaven are slipped, dissolved and loosed’.

What makes the scene truly twisted, truly nasty, is that while Troilus observes Cressida betraying him, another character called Thersites — a low-born cynical and nihilist knave — observes Troilus and laughs at him, and at all the pretensions of courtly love and war. So you have Person C observing Person A be betrayed by Person B.

Some great films fuck around with love through multiple perspectives like that. Blue Velvet, famously, has Jeffrey watch Frank fuck Dorothy, and twists it up further by having Sandy fall for Jeffrey.

But Robyn’s song reminds me more of another movie scene, from Some Kind of Wonderful, an 80s bratpack movie about a love triangle involving Eric Stoltz, Lea Thompson, and adorable blond tomboy Mary Stuart Masterston, who sort of looks like Robyn. Mary loves Eric, but Eric is wooing Lea, so Mary, in a very unhealthy way, tells Eric she will coach him on how to win Lea, leading to this wonderful scene. ‘Pretend I’m a boy’, she says (clearly, like Pretty In Pink, this is a queer movie masquerading as a mainstream teen flick).

So that’s a bit about the twisted love story of Dancing On My Own. But Robyn twists it up further. On the same album, Body Talk, there’s a song called Call Your Girlfriend.

It has an even more unusual story for a love-song — it’s a person telling their lover to call their girlfriend and tell her they’ve met someone new. That’s weird in itself — Person A tells Person B to call Person C. But what’s even weirder is she basically coaches her lover on how to do it — in fact, the tenderest parts of the song are when she tells her lover how to ‘let her down easy’.

So it’s almost like a reverse Cyrano de Bergerac — she’s communicating a tenderness and love for her rival, Person C, through the medium of her lover, Person A. The amount of time she spends during the song explaining to her lover how to ‘let her down easy’ suggests she herself has been dumped many times, and knows how painful it is. Maybe she knows her lover will eventually dump her and she’s coaching him for that day too!

The song uses a rhetorical device called Apophasis, which is when you mention something by saying you won’t mention it. Like ‘and don’t even get me started on your untidiness’.

She sings:

Don’t you tell her how I give you something
That you never even knew you missed
Don’t you even try and explain
How it’s so different when we kiss

It’s a device Robyn uses in another twisted love song from the same album, called Hang With Me. The superficial premise of the song is ‘we can still hang out if we’re just friends’, but the obvious subtext of the song is ‘we’re kidding ourselves, we’re going to fuck like mad in a somewhat toxic relationship’/ She sings:

Just don’t fall
Recklessly, headlessly in love with me
Cause it’s gonna be
All heartbreak
Blissfully painful and insanity
If we agree
Oh, you can hang with me

In Call Your Girlfriend, the twistedness of the song is increased by the song structure, which is not the usual verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structure of pop songs. It’s more like a canon, one of those songs that just goes round and round. It feels even a bit like a basic melody played by bells. There’s a musical term called an ‘infinite canon’, for a song that just goes round and round for ever. And that’s a bit what Call Your Girlfiend feels like — it never resolves, and just goes round and round.

Robyn uses a similar musical structure in her song With Every Heartbeat. Musicologist Dr Joe Bennett says this song primes us to expect a resolution in a certain key, but it never attains that resolution. It’s a song about heartbreak and leaving home, going forward while looking backwards. It’s twisted — she says ‘still I’m dying with every step I take, but I don’t look back’ — but the whole song is about her looking back as she leaves. And it never arrives, it never gets to a new home.

Call Your Girlfriend has a similar lack of chordal resolution. It suggests a toxic love situation which is just going to go round and round without being resolved. And the singer’s constant repetition of ‘call your girlfriend’ starts to sound manic, like they’re in a late-night coke session and she can’t shut up. She tells her lover to ‘call your girlfriend’ five times, and gives them 23 other imperatives — give, tell, say, don’t tell.

Meanwhile we never hear a word from the lover — they’re silent amid this barrage of weird, needy instructions.

Yet again, like Dancing On My Own, the tune of this twisted love song is incredibly upbeat. This adds to its manicness — near the end of the song her voice is sampled and it soars into a high-pitched synth spiral, as if she’s so high she’s gone beyond language.

And then there’s the final twist. On the same album, you have a song about Person A watching Person B betray them with Person C. And you have a song about Person C telling Person B — their new lover — to finally but gently dump Person A.

What if they’re songs about the same twisted love triangle?

But then Robyn is singing multiple parts in the sick triangle — she’s watching herself betray herself.

What if…the whole situation is in her mind? If it’s all some sick fever dream where she is playing all the characters? Some sort of psychotic-spiritual breakdown where you realize you are all perspectives — you are the lover, the betrayed, the dancefloor, the black sky?