Cokemachineglow: Body Talk Part 1
I found this Robyn review via a vanity google, so I should mention that it talks about what I (on Pitchfork) and Nitsuh (on Tumblr) have had to say about her. Which is great - love it when people engage with stuff I’ve written.
But in a weird way this framing confirms exactly a point I was trying to make in that Poptimist piece:
Pop music is good at providing artists with the opportunity to trade exclusively in conventionality, and the amount of money typically at stake in the cultivation of a top-tier popstar means that perfection is actively—maybe even aggressively—sought. But pop music is also good at providing artists with the opportunity to fuck it all up: because they’re working within a system of conventions comprised largely of market-tested tropes and bankable clichés, pop musicians are perhaps more likely to craft a perfectly lifeless dud as they are a perfectly timeless classic. It’s sort of the nature of pop: the music needs to be highly artificial and manufactured without sounding like either. It needs to be widely accessible without being shallowly broad; it needs to be personal without being specific; it needs to sound like every great pop song without sounding like any great pop song. It’s a genre built entirely on the successful deployment of convention, but it very rarely clicks.
This is right about one thing: there is money at stake in pop music (yes! even now!) so the people with a stake in it want to have a hit. But the rest of the argument demonstrates something I was talking about re. “the generic” - it’s a quality appreciated at a distance. As soon as you get close up it’s fairly obvious that what looks like deployment of convention is actually a highly tactical negotiation with convention. And successful negotiations change the conventions, otherwise pop music would still sound like it did in 1960.
(The specific points about pop are off here too - “it needs to be highly artificial and manufactured without sounding like either”: this describes almost no big pop hits in the last few years, where flaunting artifice has become a norm. It’s not coincidental, by the way, that this is the context in which people have really got into Robyn.)
Put crudely, you succeed in pop music (or any kind of commercial art) by a mix of novelty and comfort. When critics want to put novelty in a good light we call it innovation. When we want to put comfort in a good light we call it “timeless” or “classic”. But this rapidly turns complicated. Stuff that used to be novel can become comforting, stuff that used to be comforting can be finagled into seeming novel again. And both terms are only meaningful inasmuch as they’re relative to the people you want to sell the records to - who might well construct their own comfort AS novelty. So it’s all hugely tactical even IF you accept the idea that this commercial art is by its nature “manufactured” and the desires and preferences of the creators don’t really come into it.
(Which you blatantly can’t do with a Robyn album of all things - so I was surprised that these ideas turned up in this particular review. But I don’t know Cokemachineglow as a website - maybe they never listen to pop so Robyn DOES seem ultra-generic to them!)
