WHEN I FIRST HEARD ‘CALL YOUR
GIRLFRIEND’, IN 2012, AT NEW
YORK’S GREAT BASEMENT GAY BAR,
NOWHERE, THE ODDLY ACCENTED,
ANDROGYNOUS VOICE SOARING OVER
PERCOLATING SYNTHS MADE ME
SURE THIS MUST BE SOME EARLY ’80S,
EURO-FUTURIST CLASSIC THAT HAD
SOMEHOW ESCAPED MY NOTICE.
..........................................
But no! It was a new record by Swedish
retro-electropop dance diva Robyn, of
‘Dancing On My Own’ fame, taking her
lyrical sophistication up a notch to bring us a
nonstop ecstatic dance track that can actually
make a grown man cry. (At least a certain gay
man, under the right conditions.)
The unusual lyric situation of ‘Call Your
Girlfriend’ is that the narrator exhorts her
new lover (you) to telephone your current lover
and dump her, explaining that you just met
the narrator, and it’s not your girlfriend’s fault,
and that she will heal eventually when she
learns to love somebody else, but you’re both
still friends, goodbye.
The record has some unusual features. As far
as I know, ‘Call Your Girlfriend’ is the first
electropop single with absolutely no drum fills
since The Normal’s ‘Warm Leatherette’ from
1978, and that’s cheating because I’m pretty
sure that’s an actual tape loop. With drum fills
being an essential part of the ‘excitement’ of
popular music, eschewing them is downright
perverse. The last non-electropop single I
can think of without them is Marc Almond’s
‘Ruby Red’, which is still decades old, and
doesn’t have a snare drum to begin with.The song begins without an intro and ends
without resolution – it basically peters out- implying that this cycle will begin again,
meaning either that: a) Robyn will continue to
exhort her partner to break up with the titular
girlfriend, but it may never happen; or that b)
life is one long sequence of breaking up with
an endless series of girlfriends, and the titular
call will soon come to Robyn herself.
Like Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s
masterpiece, The Shirelles’ ‘Will You Love
Me Tomorrow?’, ‘Call Your Girlfriend’ is a
little novel, a story with something wrong
with it, where we are aware of hearing only
one side of the dialogue, and only a snapshot
of that. Who are these people, and why does
our narrator presume to know what your
girlfriend needs to hear? Just how many
times has she done this?Earlier on the album, Body Talk, Robyn
sings, “I’ve got some news for you: fembots
have feelings too”. Is the narrator of ‘Call
Your Girlfriend’ human? Because she’s so
clinically, abstractly insightful, she seems at
least like an experienced psychotherapist,
if not simply a replicant. (Forgive me, I just
saw Blade Runner 2049.) Being an android
would certainly help explain the deliriously
cybernetic vocal-sample solo.And yet her apparent psychological insight
is pretty cracked too. How would you feel
if your partner broke up with you over the
phone? (It has happened to me, and I can
tell you: dehumanised.) All that apparent
concern for the girlfriend doesn’t extend
to allowing this breakup to happen in
meatspace. Is the song also happening over
the phone? Is this happening in a phone-
only universe? In search for answers to all
these questions I await the sequel on Robyn’s
long-awaited follow-up album. In fact it’s
been seven years... though the Blade Runner
sequel took 35, and we still don’t know
whether Harrison Ford is a replicant. •Stephin Merritt is the principal singer-
songwriter of U.S. band The Magnetic Fields.
He spoke with Smith Journal on the eve of his
Melbourne Festival tour.listen up: stephin merritt
THE MAGNETIC FIELDS FRONTMAN PONDERS THE
WISDOM OF CALLING YOUR GIRLFRIEND.Illustrator Timothy Rodgers105 SMITH JOURNAL