Winamp Wednesday: And What It's All About...
I'll love you! I'll miss you!
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
Robyn, “Show Me Love”
”Yeah, that’s Robyn! Not Robin S.!” The DJs made it clear on Z100, but they didn’t point out that I was about to get totally floored.
Coming out swinging in the Summer of ‘97, Robyn landed consecutive Number Seven hits on the Billboard Hot 100 with “Do You Know What It Takes” and “Show Me Love”. Her album title—Robyn is Here—felt prophetic; we were witness to the next great pop artist, a voice that sounded more assured and deeper than the vocal groups surrounding her on the chart. Then she was gone, a victim of exhaustion that kept her off a supporting tour with the Backstreet Boys and record-label meddling that ended in neither party willing to budge. (The story goes that her American label wouldn’t allow her to include songs that discussed abortion on her next record. I’m sure they all thought that Ben Folds was taking the world by storm with a song about masonry.)
Robyn was seventeen years old when she wrote this song. Seventeen! I’m simultaneously astonished and not surprised in the least. On one hand “Show Me Love” is the kind of accomplished songwriting that one expects after a decade on the scene. It’s the “Let It Be” after you’ve listened to “In Spite of All the Danger” and you go okay that’s what years of constant songwriting did to Paul McCartney. On the other, there’s no way anyone other than a teenager could have been vulnerable enough to sing “Show Me Love”. There are vocal turns of phrase here that can only come from one young enough to be going through it for the first time. Just listen to that first ramp-up in the pre-chorus where Robyn meets “someone—[the smallest of pauses]—like you!”. That’s the very one-in-the-chamber that requires practice but needs to be summoned with that raw emotion.
Sometimes it feels like pop music is talking to you. More than talking to you, it feels like it’s reaching down inside some nebulous place inside of you and codifying those emotions you didn’t realize you had. “Do You Know What It Takes” had told us that Robyn is Here but it had been simply a perfect slice of pop music to get us all going. If you were into Europop even a little bit then it was a groove you couldn’t get enough of, but did it dig down deep like the best ones do? It was the elixir for the body but not yet for the soul. “Show Me Love” was the chaser to that shot that got me drunk on love. When you’re thirteen it might not take much for the right song to be profound, but when you find the ideal of that sensation you know it. I don’t know how to speak to anyone else’s experience, but thirteen seems to be filled with big emotions and even bigger crushes that feel a lot like love, of moments that feel both like prologue and like they’re gonna last forever. It’s the myopia of your own brain telling you that things are big and beautiful and so uniquely yours. The camera trained on you, the microphone on air, the book that has yet to be written.
Pop music was talking to me, and it was saying that the total bliss of love, that fine romance, was just around the corner. If you had asked me how old I thought Robyn was in 1997, I would have said I dunno, twenty-five? How old are the Spice Girls? Younger than Madonna? (The answers to all those questions would have surprised me.) Four years older makes sense and makes no sense. She’s the same age as those seniors who smoked cigarettes and imparted wisdom on the school steps, and when I was a kid they seemed so wise. Looking back nearly three decades I realize that they probably knew next to nothing. But the way Robyn sang of love and the hope within it felt like it could shift the world. “I know you’ve got potential” rattled in me so hard that it shook my teeth. Hell yeah we had potential and we were all gonna change the world.
Damn near everything Robyn has ever put to record has felt world-changing in big and little ways, becoming both the focus and the blanketing motif. Years later “Call Your Girlfriend” would become the anthem for any number of yearning twentysomethings, showing up in clubs and bars and a perfect SNL backstage parody. Robyn could shift the mood all on her lonesome, and nowhere did she do that better than with “Show Me Love” and terrifying Swedish auteur Lukas Moodysson. Lilya 4-Ever is one of the bleakest damn movies I’ve ever seen, so going back to watch Show Me Love was the difference between the end of the world and a sunny day at the beach. Then again, the film is only called Show Me Love because the original title couldn’t be printed on posters in America.
Shooting two singles into the top ten would usually guarantee a long career in American pop music, but Robyn had something fantastic that record labels consider a liability: songwriting credits and a will of her own. Her next two records never made it to the States, and pop hounds like me were left wondering whatever happened to Robyn until she roared back on her own terms years later. Meanwhile her producer was tasked in finding an American Robyn, that baseball-and-apple-pie alternative who would be easy to control and never raise any problems while making everyone a lot of money. How’d that turn out?
I’m too traumatized by reading The Woman in Me to comment on this one, so let’s move on.
It’s no wonder that Jive wanted Robyn (but American this time), to the point of shipping Britney over to Stockholm to work with all of Robyn’s team. And Britney’s rise led to Christina and Mandy and Jessica and Willa and Samantha and Hoku and probably a billion more I’m forgetting. But as thrilling as these descendants could be, there’s still nothing like the original. “…Baby One More Time” makes me think about the Late 90s in general, a small nostalgia rush tainted by everything we know now. “Show Me Love” is that brilliant adrenalin rush that brings me back to the waning days of 1997, to a Christmas that felt like the glorious rush into adulthood that is the tease of adolescence. Too young to take over and too old to ignore, as another song went, but it all felt so real. This was the beginning of something. The world was going to be such a lovely place to explore.
Sometimes it feels like pop music is speaking to you. Robyn always does. If perfect pop could show us love, what else could we do?
Next Time: We’re on a sidewalk surf.