Show me, Robyn, what it’s all about

It matters, although maybe only a little, that we hold on to all the unimportant memories we can keep. Dates and places that might mean nothing, that once held potential in their limitless expanse. This is only as true as you believe it to be, as it depends on how tuned into relational nostalgia you are, if you use the past to build the present, as I do, and if your future is only alive because of it. Some of us, some of you, let things slip away, and it’s not for me to wonder or speculate on how your lifeline unfurls across the palm. But I wonder and worry what can be lost when we ignore the lessons of the past. 

Just as I can’t tell you how I learned to walk or talk, I can’t honestly tell you the first time I heard “Show Me Love.” I can only tell you that it has always been within me. This is to say I had no idea how Robyn was going to impact my life when I first heard her on the radio in 1997. It’s just that one day she was there, and then it’s as if she were always there. So it’s prophetic then that her debut album, released in 1995, was titled Robyn Is Here, forecasting what matters of importance would follow her, as if we had always been waiting for Robyn to arrive and show us a way forward. 

I can tell you how to ride a stock cart like a skateboard, and I know this better than I know how to ride a real skateboard: a backwards skill taught and learned by backwards people in a pocket universe built by young labor, where the goal is to know what is expected and demanded of you. Where the void remains for you to stretch and learn who you are in the face of so much expectation. I can tell you it feels so free to move so quickly on a piece of welded metal on wavering wheels, down a hallway lined with boxes of groceries waiting to be replenished on shelves. 

“Show Me Love” swiftly became one of those songs that soundtracked the day. For years, there wasn’t a public building alive that didn’t have Robyn on the radio. It didn’t matter, and it never will, where you were. Once you heard her voice delivering the repeating yeah-hey mantra of the intro, you knew what lay on the horizon, and that was enough to sync the rhythm of your heart to what emerged from an unseen speaker. 

I know this song as a radio song because that’s where it always was for me. 1995 is the year I started working at a grocery store, and so Robyn and I both emerged into the world with shared breath. While I was still learning the limits and boundaries of my new, aisled world, she was learning what it meant to climb charts and carve your name into footholds along the way. She was a Swedish woman making R&B-flavored pop, or the inverse, if you’d rather, and her masterworks were destined to soar from rolled down windows when the sun started to bake the glass and metal of cars moving anywhere at all. “Show Me Love” is a song that hits like lemonade in impossible heat, refreshing and vital, but especially when it’s hot, and when you’re moving and building reckless, bountiful joy. 

There is a value added to fucking around at work that I think deserves to be held in importance with any other skill you will build. It’s important to know how to feel joy, to feel alive sometimes, even when the world would rather you didn’t, when the hours of the day tick slowly away, as if they are longer somehow than ever before. It’s paramount you learn how to feel alive. Beyond everything I learned in early employment, this was the greatest lesson. I watched others more experienced than me, who were certainly more adept at feeling free, and learned that I needed this, too. I wondered how to unlock the feeling that they seemed to have, their delirious freedom and glorious opportunity to feel enviable joy. I watched people ride their own stock carts like they had been the architects of movement itself, laughing and hollering despite the drudgery of the day, and wanted to know how to find it for myself.

It’s not the case that Robyn was an outlier on the radio. We had entered into the middle and then later years of an era oft-misremembered as grunge, but we were not without rhythm. When we talk about the ‘90s era of radio stations that populated public spaces, our assumptions are based in alt-rock, and that’s an understandable but flawed lens. It’s the title of all this. The airwaves were littered with them certainly: men with scratchy vocals and jangling guitars. There was a time when they were kings, and there was a time when we were content to live in the fields at the base of them. But they were not the only rulers we had, and Robyn was just one of many who built the dam that held back an endless river. 

One does not exist without the other, as there is perfect balance in things. I don’t believe you can discuss alt-rock in the 1990s without considering what pop, and R&B, and hip-hop were also creating and investing in, how these genres and ideas work together and flow together creates a new kind of singer: one that never languishes in place for too long and moves through ideas that inform each other in some way or another. We can trace all these loosely defined titles back to shared points of origin, and so we can follow their lines and lineages and imagine that they all exist because of each other. There is no alt-rock without R&B because there is always rhythm, a shared language between them. 

To understand the joy that others feel is to try and live just like them. This isn’t to say robbing them of their emotions, but rather emulating and copying. Holding thin paper over the lines of them and trying to recreate it. I learned to feel by watching others do the same, then trying to draw the same outline on myself. Not just joy, not just love and life, but all things. The first time I rode a cart like a skateboard, it’s because everyone else already was, and they seemed so alive that it was impossible to not want to know that feeling for myself. 

To hear “Show Me Love” is to see the architectural blueprints of the world rolled out on the table. Robyn’s voice is so big and crisp and bright, folded in and over with the flavors of ‘90s R&B. It feels effortless, as if it costs her nothing to conjure it from deep within herself. Robyn’s voice is playful and pleading and vibrant. “Show Me Love” was an instantaneous hit, a banger before we even thought to employ the term, and a formative corner of life lived through the airwaves. It emerged to break through the toil and tedium, to inspire something besides drudgery, as if our collective hearts needed its brightness to feel joy. 

What I lacked was the desire to live beyond the simple truth of being alive. I was still so young and so timid, and to live meant feeling everything, sometimes and often all at once. When I watched others around me, riding carts, laughing and yelling and trading playful barbs, it was like seeing a symphony for the first time. And maybe it was. Maybe all the laughter and nicknames and soft-handed insults was theatre. Maybe these were the performances of our lives, destined to be carved into great tomes of memory. 

The first time I tried to ride that cart, I was so alive for a moment, moving fast and shambolic down a hallway, struggling to find my feet, struggling for balance and control. The smell of dirt on the floor kicked up by moving wheels. The smell of old cardboard. I had grabbed the hand of freedom, until I was torn from the moment and fell hard and spectacularly into a towering stack of boxes. They were filled with paper towels in my memory, but maybe this is just my mind choosing irony to embellish on imperfect history. People laughed at me because how could they not, but it wasn’t laughter meant to lay shame upon my body, as I was lying there in abject failure on the floor. Laughter was a shared language. A bridge between ideas. 

There is a simple chorus in “Show Me Love,” as there often are in the songs that we will think about forever. Robyn urges and pleads for three simple things: “show me love, show me life, show me, baby, what it’s all about,” and while this is about romantic love and romantic life, it feels like it’s also about so much more. As if these are the disparate pieces of the one great question of why we’re even here at all, that we are not asking what our purpose is, but rather what we do with the time we have. Do we dwell on all the unsolvable problems? Or do we seek pleasure and joy and choose to live the life we have, unburdened maybe by needing something more than that? 

So it’s simple, maybe, or foolish beyond that, to equate all this to learning to ride a stock cart like a skateboard. It doesn’t matter that I know this, and it matters less that I ever learned how. But this is the problem. We don’t value the times we felt alive as much as the times we wanted something more. Here is what Robyn wanted for us, in the moment of her arrival: to feel something, anything at all. Love or life or whatever. 

That she persists as a perennial icon of pop music is because she ever dared to arrive at all. Boldly announcing that she was here, the Robyn she would become turned heartache and bitter hearts into dancefloor bangers well into the modern age. And this is because she learned to feel free at the same time she learned everything else that builds a life, a career. She asked to feel love before she ever knew pain, and it’s because she chose to play and feel so wildly free. Taking all that she learned, and all that she was, and building a life from it that will thrive long after we are all gone. 

Niko Stratis is a former smoker and an award-losing (and winning) writer. She is the author of the critically-acclaimed book The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman, and the newsletter Anxiety Shark. She once came 2nd in a Chicken McNugget eating competition, but that was a long time ago. She is a cancer, and she lives in Toronto.

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