Girls robyn dancing on my own
“It wasn’t easy for me to socialize with other kids when I got back from touring,” she said in a recent New York Times interview. Like her career, Robin Carlsson’s childhood was singular and a little bit strange: For the first seven years of her life, she toured with her parents’ experimental theater troupe, and while it primed her to become a natural performer, the rhythms of that lifestyle made it difficult for her to make friends or fit in at school. She was born in Stockholm in 1979, three years before ABBA broke up.
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There she is in that stark landscape, moving with her own gravity: The first pop star on the moon. (Although there is some added resonance from knowing that the person behind the camera, the director Max Vitali, was in fact her partner at the time of shooting.) Something about the video-and the song, and to some extent Robyn’s entire freewheeling career-speaks to both the exhilaration and the loneliness inherent in charting new territory. And so a single background dancer in the “Call Your Girlfriend” video would have killed the mood. Robyn’s music sought to strip away the stigma of feeling solitary, to turn loneliness into something triumphant. “Connection” is still a buzzword in our tech-crazed culture, though we talk less often about the motivation to connect often coming from a sense of loneliness. It’s all about connecting to other people, sharing emotion.” “Sure, the internet is the future,” she said in a 2010 interview, “but what we do on the internet is still very primal. Robyn was, constitutionally, not doing it for the likes, which could have felt paradoxical on an album so concerned with the aesthetics of technology. “I came to dance, not to socialize,” she sings on another song from that record, “Dancehall Queen.” It’s a sentiment that might seem prickly and isolationist compared to the communal spirit of mainstream American pop. The album it appeared on was titled, fittingly, Body Talk. The comedian Taran Killam has performed a lovingly observed parody, and YouTube is cluttered with step-by-step homages and tutorials (“Robyn’s ‘Call Your Girlfriend’-Learn the dance!”) which is at once apt and entirely beside the point: The power of the choreography and the one-take video itself comes from how personal, singular, and idiosyncratic these moves feel, like a spontaneous overflowing of Robyn’s strange heart.
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As she sings, her accompanying movements are at turns aggressive, humorous, and unabashedly sensual-at one point, aided by her moon shoes, she does a fluid backward somersault that ends with her humping the ground and then, in the next moment, rolling across the ground like a playful child. She is dressed, in the video, like the world’s most stylish bird: fluffy cropped sweater, twiggy printed leggings, and platform sneakers that make her seem to hover a few inches above the ground. In the back of the bus, in the desolate corner of the dance floor, and-in “Call Your Girlfriend,” one of the best and most iconic music videos of the century so far-in a cavernous abandoned gymnasium, illuminated by pulsating light that changes colors according to her feelings like a giant mood ring worn on the heart.