Dancing About Architecture

The sad pop song has existed since pop music began in America in the 1920s and 30s, during which time virtually everyone was sad. Women have had it particularly bad. In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment gave them the right to vote. But it wasn’t until 1925 and the publication of Irving Berlin’s “Always” that women could go out and dance, meet guys at dances, and have those guys break their hearts. When the Greatest Generation went off to fight Krauts and Nips, ladies wallowed in their own sadness by listening to songs like Billie Holiday’s “Gloomy Sunday” and “I’ll Be Seeing You.”  In the 1980s, the sad pop song reached its apotheosis with synthesizer-dance numbers like “Don’t You Want Me,” “Hold Me Now,” and “Take On Me,” which, incidentally, were all written about the same guy. Every good sad pop song has since then fit into the mold cast by these songs. Of course, there are sad pop songs that don’t fit this tradition: “Nothing Compares 2 U,” “Maps,” “Since you Been Gone,” Natalie Imbruglia’s pop classic “Torn,” and many others. But they fail to realize their full potential in some one or more ways.

Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” is one of the greatest damn sad pop songs in history. There are five reasons.

First, it’s about jilted, unreciprocated, or slowly withered love. The saddest pop songs are about these topics. There are very sad songs about abortions (“Brick”), doing too much cocaine (“Tears In Heaven”), deceased parents (Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”), being a spinster (“Eleanor Rigby”), and dying on a giant boat (“My Heart Will Go On”). But those topics are a little too heavy. Great art is about capturing the overwhelming remainder of the human condition, and spontaneously manifesting the paradox of transcendence within a circumscribed experience. Great pop songs are about transmitting the freedoms and limitations of wholly relatable social codes using concrete, graspable examples drawn from everyday life. Robyn’s song succeeds here in every way. It begins, obviously, with the first line, “Somebody said you got a new friend.” It’s not “lover” or “girlfriend” or “wife.” It’s “friend,” a hook-up, someone he goes on dates with and fucks probably. The relationship is pretty casual. That’s life, right? Girl Number Two will pretty soon be replaced by Girl Number Three. X = n + 1 The equation’s pretty simple/common, but it still hurts like a sumbitch. Everything about the song is wholly relatable because it describes one of the most common, almost insignificant occurrences in adult life. And even if you haven’t had an experience like this (possible), it’s still so widely talked about and portrayed that it feels like you have had this sort of thing happen to you. I used to listen with relish to Tori Amos, and I sure as hell didn’t understand half of what she was going on about.

Second, it is an incredible-sounding song. And there are two versions of the song, like a wave-particle bonus round. The “Original Radio Mix” features a twinkling, looped synthesizer floating above the action. The car-rattling bass line is lower in the mix, and it lacks a little of that pleasant way it grates against your eardrums. That said, there’s a lot more space in the verses, and the minor key chorus gains a little subtextual significance against the more upbeat accents. The “Album Mix,” which is my preferred method of ingestion, makes the song sound like the house is going to fall on top of your stupid head. It sounds like it was packed in one of those As Seen On TV vacuum bag things. It makes you feel The Knife’s influence on Robyn as artists and personal saviors. The Original Radio Mix presents as an infective, bittersweet pop parasite that invades your ears, infects your cerebellum, and impels your arms/legs on the dancefloor. The Album Mix has more in common with Metallica’s “One” than, say, The Cardigan’s “Lovefool.” It’s just a marvelous, dense slab of perfect sound punctuated by the odd woodblock thwap and a whirling synth bridge. Put it this way. If the Original Radio Mix is the DJ playing your favorite dance song, the Album Mix is Merzbow playing your favorite dance song.

Third, aside from its easily relatable theme, the song is kind of creepy. “Dancing On My Own” is about voyeurism, witness, and, like, stalking. Lines like “Yeah I know it’s stupid / I just gotta see it for myself,” and “I’m in the corner / Watching you kiss her” are really the main argument of the song. The song isn’t about the being jilted thing. It’s about suffering and watching your former “friend” with his new “friend.” Going to the club they’re at and skulking in the corner like an old pervert or something. How did she even know where they’d be? People need to stop checking in on Foursquare. But why does the song’s creepiness make it great? For one, people like crazy women. It’s an archetype. “Man, bitch is so crazy just stalking me and shit.” The song plays right into our conception of what it’s like to date women. This is like some kinky, Fatal Attraction-meets-Flashdance deal. Except— But— It’s not. Robyn takes it and turns it, which leads into reasons four and five.

Fourth, the song is specular. It’s also spectacular and about spectatorship, but philosophically the song is specular, which means being like a mirror. (“Specular” is related to words like “speculum…”) Both the Official Music Video and last weeks’ Letterman performance of “Dancing On My Own” showcased Robyn pulling the classic gag of making out with yourself, back turned to your audience. But the song isn’t called “Making Out With Myself On My Own,” so what’s that all about? Well, the core of sadness that propels the song and makes it so great is that it’s not really about stalking an ex or being a voyeur. “Dancing On My Own” is about the human condition as its given to us by each other, in relationships and social life. People say reading novels and watching movies and good TV shows like Mad Men (I guess) teach us about what it means to be human, and they do in a way, if you wan to be all didactic about it. (Watch me be all didactic about other things, momentarily.)

The great pop songs use everyday stuff for instruction. The way we learn things is by seeing, doing, and repeating. It was little Ah Ha! moment to discover that the making out with herself thing was part of the whole performance apparatus of “Dancing On My Own.” She’s there making out with herself. Not with another person, as how you’d like expect her to do. She’s making out with her self. There’s a philosophical idea called auto-affection, which I will not get into except to say that this is what Robyn is showing in those videos. Wait, nevermind. I will get into it a little bit. There are a couple ways of thinking about yourself and love and the world and stuff. But the one way that seems pervasive is that things aren’t quite right. You’re not complete. You’re not whole. You’re not at home in the world. This idea can be conveyed like in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. We’re essentially split from our ideal partner and cut off from ourselves in some irreparable way. That’s the general idea behind the movie’s source material, as well. You can look at it in another way. You might think that by talking to yourself you are getting at, you know, yourself. What you think. But within the process of talking and hearing, there’s a minute gap differentiating subject and object. The same thing with mirrors. You look in the mirror and move one arm and there’s a conceptual (and imperceptive perceptual) gap between the act of moving and the act of seeing.

When Robyn makes out with herself in the videos and performances, she is making two visceral-physical arguments. 1.) Not only are we alone in the world essentially (demonstrated by the making out with herself rather than taking up the temporary shield of another person), but it’s no use finding another person because our condition just is to be in a continuous swoon of falling in between lovers and friends who move in and out of our lives. More importantly, 2.) We can’t fully relate to others in principle because we can’t even fully relate to ourselves. Every act of loving affection is as essentially empty as the auto-effective act of making out with yourself. The making out with herself is a visual gag that conveys a, I guess, kind of crudely sophisticated argument: Within the blink of an eye, we’re always already split and cut off from ourselves. Trying to bridge the schism is as futile as making out with yourself. If  the best you can try to do is affect yourself with pleasure, speaking, the thrill of endeavor—whatever—then that’s not good enough. Life will be best portrayed in a sad pop song. Seeking solace with another is only as good (as bad) as  wrapping your arms around yourself, pretending to be with someone else. You might as well draw a face on your hand and make out with your hand-face. Every person is at the same time a one and a no one else trying and failing to be with another one/no-one-else. It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen a pop star do this side of shaving her head or shooting someone in his mansion. So what is there to do? Well—

Fifth, the song is one of the greatest sad pop songs in history because it both facilitates and is explicitly about what the best pop songs facilitate and are about: Dancing. Most people only do it when they’re drunk. Some people are terrible at it. And some people are very good at it. But just about every person has danced because dancing really is one of the more pure expressions of being human. It’s a spontaneous expression of joy. Sure, there are routines and steps and things, but even within the strictures of structure there’s slippage reserved for creativity and excellence. But it’s also sad, necessarily sad, because like every other human endeavor, it hinges upon the You that’s actually doing the It. (You want the best players, even if it is a team sport.) It might take two to tango, but if one or both of them fuck it up, there will be no dancing, no tango. The fewer rules there are to dancing, the more alone you are. Dancing in a club, even if its up on your girl or boy, is really a very solitary thing. At best, you’ll blow the Perception → Brain Command → Body Moving circuit and just start, like, dancing. You’ll lose yourself and everyone else along with it. It’s a great way not only to be alone but to entirely efface the self. “Dancing On My Own” is about these two ironies, 1.) dancing in a crowded club in order to be alone, and 2.) a whole room full of people who at best are hoping to erase the evidence of their’s and everyone else’s existences.

When Robyn sings, “I’m giving my all, / But I’m not the girl you’re taking home,” it’s a sad truth to life. It’s not a meritocracy, even on the dancefloor. I mean, I’ve seen Robyn dance. She’s good at it. But all she has is her body to be in control of, and alone with, and not even fully connected to. Every dance is a dance on your own. (Deep.) When the music dies and the lights come up, at least you have the illusion of grave, meaningful, human-to-human contact. On the dancefloor, that’s all stripped away. There’s just music, motion, and (at best) the promise of a release from the obligation to be a good person who considers others’ feelings and the goodness of your own intentions. The heartbreaking crux of Robyn’s song is that we’re alone, even (especially) when we’re surrounded by people. The obvious specularity of the song is that Robyn is reflecting the dancers around her as she tries to just fit in. But it’s the other way around: Her dancing alone is a reflection of everyone else’s solitude. She’s alone right now, the new girl is going to be alone soon enough, and the one who replaces her is going to be alone too. But solitude is a good muse, and Robyn’s managed to turn a woozy, heavy club song into a philosophical treatise.

Robyn’s latest album, Body Talk, Pt. 1, has a bunch of like-minded songs. It’s only $8 on iTunes, and you should buy it.