Now, I am the person in the world who least needs convincing that pop culture should be taken seriously. But most of my conviction that popular movies and music, comics, fashion, etc., are genuinely important comes from an impatience with critics and audiences who dismiss the forms and as a result, overlook high-quality content. Star Wars is a terrific set of movies about accepting your responsibility as an adult member of a community. Neil Gaiman's Sandman series is a heartbreaking exploration of solipsism, creativity and family. Hell, Vena Cava's collection for the Gap is a good opportunity to explore why the "tribal" trends that are all over a couple of season's worth of collections are at minimum a pain (although I'm still buying the dress) and at worst culturally insensitive. But--and I've thought about it quite a bit--I'm not entirely sure Lady Gaga is worthy of that level of scrutiny, especially when Robyn is out there, not getting the attention she deserves.
Robyn sneaked into my ears in the late 1990s, when her singles "Show Me Love" and "Do You Know What It Takes" made the U.S. airwaves, and I never really forgot the aural impression. Even singing formulaic, non-specific love songs, something about her stuck. But it took me a moment to recognize her again when Robyn reemerged as an indie auteur in 2005. In 1997, Robyn stood out both for her slight vocal style, perfectly suited to express vulnerability or to work with chilly electronic production, and for an attractive but short angular haircut and for favoring flattering but not form-fitting clothes at a time when the pop tarts who surrounded her were baring belly rings and shaking their extensions. Today, Robyn's moved even further away from any association with mainstream pop stars, and Lady Gaga has more in common with those starlets than with Robyn.
I suppose wearing a dress made of bubbles on the cover of Rolling Stone, or painting your lips in a grotesque pucker is a little different. But ultimately, Lady Gaga's artistic presentation seems firmly in an established cultural and commercial tradition. Her video for "Love Game" may involve more sequins, light-up staffs, and Campari than the average New York subway, but it seems like a rememberance of New York's imagined sentimental grittiness than any authentic or raw expression of sexuality. Hooking up with a cop to get out of trouble is not a new idea. The visuals in "Poker Face" are more original, more compellingly strange, and Gaga's voice takes on a lovely, sad inflection in the chorus. But the constant intrusions of shots of Beats by Dr. Dre headphones is a distraction, and the lyrics are simply wretched. Anyone who uses the phrase "love glue-gunnin'" should have to serve time in some sort of artistic penal institution. Invocations of Russian roulette don't really make a girl edgy anymore. In fact, Gaga's entire schtick often feels like another step forward in someone's life-long attemts to be a Very Bad Girl. The beats in her songs are undeniably catchy, even if there's nothing audibly striking about them. But ultimately, Lady Gaga is nothing more, and, this does count for something, nothing less than a very attractive skinny blonde woman who wears some questionable clothes and builds some neat props while recording danceable, generic songs.
Physically, Robyn and Gaga are similar. But Robyn's cut her hair shorter to emphasize a face that can be alternately vulpine and sweet, and frequently wears clothes that disguise, distort, or deemphasize her body. She's undeniably serious about her music, and walked away from a major-label contract to record her 2005 album, Robyn. But unlike Lady Gaga, Robyn appears to have an actual sense of humor. The skit that opens that album, "Curriculum Vitae," announces Robyn's qualifications as the following:
World record holder with a high score of two gazillion in Tetris
Two-time recipient of the Nobel prize for super foxiest female ever
and war time consigliere to the Cosa Nostra
She split the storm, invented the x-ray, the cure for AIDS, and the surprise blindfold greeting
She performed and choreographed the fights for Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon
The Game of Death and still does stunt doubles for Jackie Chan on the weekends
...
She's listed in section 202 of the United Nations Security Act of 1979
As being too hot to wear tight sweaters on international airspace
In this world of tension, pressure and pain
She is known by men and women of all origins and faiths
for her wisdom, compassion, and relentless
determination in the quest to get paid.
Some of her best songs have a specificity that seems a little off. In "Bum Like You," Robyn promises to put up money for her lover's bail, bake him pie, and knight him mittens. The weird details catch your attention and make you pay attention to a lovely, small song about loving someone who is a mess: "you don't even look good / God it ain't right /but you're starry-eyed and out of sight," Robyn sighs. "Be Mine," describes an intense moment of romantic humiliation, when Robyn catches her lover tying another girl's shoes--and the girl is wearing a scarf Robyn gave her man in happier times. The music is too upbeat for the pain it contains, but it contains the stacatto beats of a heart that's not functioning properly and lovely arcs of sound that sound like something close to hysteria. The fragility of her voice is on tremendous disply in "With Every Heartbeat," a song that's less grounded in details but uses abstract visuals to nice effect in the video to suggest the disorienting impact of heartbreak:
But Robyn dosn't deserve attention just because she's good. She's also delightfully, intriguingly strange. Her cover of the Teddybears rap-inspired semi-nonsense song "Cobrastyle" has an air of light menace to it. She waltzed in remixed Snoop Dogg's "Sensual Seduction" turning it into "Sexual Eruption." And because she can, Robyn sang backup hooks on Britney Spear's "Piece of Me," the best rebuttal to paparazzi culture recorded in recent years (Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi" ain't bad, but even Alexander Skarsgard isn't enough to make the 8-minute video worth watching). Her latest collaboration, with Royksopp, "The Girl and the Robot" is all the proof you really need of Robyn's superiority to Lady Gaga, though:
It's incredibly weird, and entirely familiar: Robyn lounges at home, calls someone who doesn't pick up the phone, takes a home pregnancy test. All this, and her lover is a brightly colored workaholic robot. Lady Gaga may be doing an effective job of flipping off the past while paying homage to it. Robyn's actively pulling the accumulated freight of past emotion into the future with her, unafraid of its strangeness.