IUMA HAS IT

Blogging The Internet Underground Music Archive

3. Robyn

Yes, that Robyn.

This isn’t quite the spirit of the project, but it’s interesting — to me, at least — so it’s worth a post. 

Why? Well, One misconception I see a bit about the IUMA project is that it’s one of two things:all dreck, or all nobodies. The former is the point of this project; there’s dreck here because there’s dreck everywhere, and quibbling about the various proportions is missing about five points at once.

But the latter? With this many artists listed, you’ll probably run into a familiar face at some point if you follow local music, or Internet-local music, or, hell, music. It happens to be really convenient for blogging purposes that Robyn’s career is now having a hell of a third act.

That said, it wasn’t as if she was a complete nobody when this came out — “Monday Morning,” the track here, was from her second album, My Truth (i.e. post-“Show Me Love.”) Check out this old bio:

Robyn was born in Stockholm on June 12th 1979. She grew up travelling around in Europe with her parents and their theatrical company, from the age of six months until she turned 7 and started school. In the age of 16, she became famous in Sweden because of the single “Do You Really Want Me [Show Respect]”. That hit single placed her debut-album “Robyn Is Here” as #1 at the album top-list.

Robyn wrote her first song when she was 11 years old. It was called “In My Heart” and was about her parents divorce. In the age of 12 she performed this song in the swedish TV-show “Söndagsöppet”.

That, right there, is an entirely different league of PR. It’s practically an artifact. And who knows whether it’ll be edited in the future? (Some bands have edited theirs.)
Oh, right, the song. There’s a chance you’ve heard it, but in case you haven’t — any of you remember that whole debate when “Fembot” and “Dancing On My Own” came out about whether Robyn was R&B? She wasn’t then, but she certainly was for “Monday Morning”; there’s melisma in her voice and a certain massing to the background vocals (and a key change) that’s almost anachronistic. It’s an R&B album-track, in other words, and by those standards it’s decent. By the time the soft percussion and off-kilter orchestral touches come in, it’s more than decent. I have no idea how Robyn fans now will approach this, and obviously this makes that debate make a whole lot more sense, but as someone raised on ’90s R&B, I’m basically missing everything it’d take to resist this.
(More to come, possibly….)
  1. katherinestasaph reblogged this from iumahasit and added:
    I couldn’t resist.
  2. iumahasit posted this