capsule - Feelin’ Alright

Basically on repeat all day.

(Source: look-alive-sunshine)

totelegraphandbear:

By any account Robyn should not be making music. She should not be a name known to anyone under 30. She should not be making stunning, shimmering, completely respectable perfecto-pop and she certainly should not be ingratiated to the indie set. Except for a huge fancying of fate and an interminable drive, she is someone you should ultimately not be listening to. It is also of great importance that you do.

The music industry is a brutal one and you do not have to look far to find examples of artists being manipulated, used and dismissed like a business transaction. Stellar multiple-album success is so rare that executives are entirely content with just one hit and are more concerned with finding the next one than nurturing it. It is a story as common as a penny and after 1995’s smash “Show me Love”, it was Robyn’s too. She was a one-hit wonder and, apart from Kylie Minogue, no one recovers from that. This is not just the record industry’s fault but also that of the audience. Sometimes one hit becomes so indicative of its acute moment that listeners will not accept the artist’s other songs, or will regard them as inferior. Robyn should be only found on pawn shop dance compilations alongside The Real McCoy and La Bouche.   

Fifteen years later she makes for the most interesting of pop stars: She is as foreign and obscure as possible, delicate and albino-bitten with one foot in fairyland, and she’s short and into her thirties (which is to say she doesn’t fulfill the typified teenage jail-bait model the Americans or Japanese keep reiterating). She may bring a certain sexuality to her songs, maybe, but it’s nothing alluring. She is not a pin-up pop star and her distinctive, gawky Swedish looks ensure this. So notions of pop music heavily predicated on the manufacturing of stars (compare pop star Britney with the facade-stripped truly trailer trash Britney) do not apply to Robyn. Her brand of pop seems legitimate.

This combination of obscurity, elvishness, and maturity engenders her to music listeners traditionally wary of the recording industry, namely independent music fans. Robyn is difficult to fit into a mass image pop marketing scheme and this allows her music to settle with fans who detest, or at least are unflattered by, being marketed to, especially if the product seems too fake or manufactured from plastic.

Then again, maybe her success can be strictly attributed to the quality of her music. Maybe it is catchy enough, or facile enough, or reminiscent of other artists. That can carry many acts to the Top 10. Maybe her collaborations are particularly well curated. Maybe her chord progressions naturally inhibit serotonin uptake. Hell, maybe she has discovered a new note, a thirteenth tone, and she’s just not tellin’. Likely, it’s none of the above. Likely, she has furiously carved herself a continuing career along the same model asindependent artists. This asks an interesting question: can the appreciation of music lie mostly in fetishizing the mode of creation as outside of the industry system instead of by genre. Both Body Talk and The Suburbs are independent music conceived without major label interference and both albums are appreciated for that fact, they seem like honest creations. So maybe among the indie set the pop of Robyn can therefore be seen as legitimate. The fact that itis pop never mattered provided the means of its creation is seen as more pure.  

Still, the governing factor in Robyn’s late-stage triumph isn’t related to how the music was made, or some nostalgia factor, or her voice, or the timbres of her keyboards or even her completely rad style of dancing. It lies in the concision of her lyrics to cut through to the saddest moments of a listener’s experience and juxtapose those against a quintessential pop sensibility. She is dancing while crying, you’ve done it too, and that lonely drunken moment at 3am is as close to universal as you’ll find in pop. Sure, you love “Dancing on My Own” strictly for the reclamation of your unrequited self-respect, but from the watery bass opening “Stars 4 Ever” you are dancing late into the night with a long-lost friend and you miss them terribly. “Dancing on My Own” lifts you from the corner and buys you a beer, but no chorus on Body Talk will have you so solidly in an akimbo, stamping gait as this.  Among all acts working today she embodies the phoenix article —- the enjoyment of sadness disguised as happy music —- better than anyone else, for she is phoenix pop.

Amen.

thechosenjuan:

Me Party - Amy Adams & Miss Piggy
(Written by Bret McKenzie for The Muppets) 

Whatever happens at the Me Party stays at the Me Partayayay!!!!

One more reason to love Amy Adams.