The Best Songs Ever Recorded By Anyone Ever: Robyn, "Call Your Girlfriend"
Robyn's a rare case where even nerds ahead of the curve were years behind it. I was hipped to the thrills of her 2005 self-titled album by the other poptimist types contributing to Stylus Magazine two years before it finally enjoyed an expanded international release. But she'd already had two US top ten singles in the '90s as Max Martin's proto-Britney (musically, at least). So even if I was one of the folks saying "HAVE YOU HEARD ROBYN?!?!" on blogs well before the Girls moment, I can only crow so loudly. Plus she'd been platinum in Sweden throughout.
Despite the fantastic hits before and since, 2010's "Dancing On My Own" will probably go down as her canonical classic. And it's a great song, making a dancefloor anthem out of unrequited love and perserverance. In a sense, it's an update of Lesley Gore's "It's My Party," with a narrator who isn't going to give up on herself irrespective of what Johnny and Judy do. But the song that still fascinates me to tears more than a decade later is "Call Your Girlfriend," Robyn's update of "Judy's Turn To Cry," released as a single a year after "Dancing."
Where Gore's character was primarily dwelling on competitive agony and accomplishment (interestingly, "Party" was credited to four men and "Cry" to two women), Robyn's only question about the other woman when jilted is "does she love you better than I can?" and - when she's the victor - she's full of sincere concern and sympathy for the ex. This isn't rivalry. You either love Robyn or you don't, and she wants everyone to be loved.
That said, part of the wicked charm of "Girlfriend" is how the matter of the ex is barely concealing her euphoria over new love. The considerate cliches of the first verse - it's not her fault, you're still her friend, let her down easy - turn into confident horny toad shit worthy of Prince in the second ("don't you tell her how I give you something that you never knew you missed/don't you even try to explain/how it's so different when we kiss"). She hopes his former lover finds happiness, but she and this guy have some serious freaking to do. Thrusting her arms and humping the floor in the video, she takes no joy in Judy's tears, but takes considerable joy in the thought of Johnny, her voice dissolving into wordless rapture over the glimmering dance thump for the kind of keyboard-sample-solo that pop can't give me enough of. God, I love when they sample and mutate a voice for an "instrumental" hook. That DJ Snake shit. I love it.
Taran Killam was part of some tiresome "lol gay" content on SNL, but I've always loved this clip of him recreating the "Call Your Girlfriend" video in a tiny office (Vanessa Bayer beaming, Abby Elliott smirking, Bobby Moynihan remarkably unmoved as they shower him with flashlights). The silliness of the clip captures how infectious the joy behind the song (and the video's arguably artless, definitely enthusiastic pro-am dancing) is. It's pretty hard to make a glowing song about long-desired new love when the lyrics are mostly about someone else's current heartbreak. It's like if "You Make Loving Fun" acknowledged Christine McVie's ex-husband had to play bass on that shit (thankfully she told him it was about her dog rather than Fleetwood Mac's lighting director). But the utopian, pseudo-Moroder synth swells underscore the idea that Robyn being head over heels is right and beautiful even if there's collateral damage. But then she'd already gracefully taken it on the chin herself on "Dancing." This was the payoff.