OK, so Robyn has re-signed to a major label, prompting the third issuing of an album that we first heard the best part of three years ago. And yes, I'm aware more than anyone that this kind of contradicts the staunchly pro-DIY/anti-major sentiments transmitting from tKonichiwa Records Headquarters over the past 12 months and that became her defiant calling card. It changes nothing. She strides onstage to the bleeps 'n' too-small beats of 'Cobrastyle' – a song she didn't write, that was popularised by another 'band' before her (and arguably done better), but which is now resolutely her song – with a giant prop lazer gun clutched tight across her chest. Like, what else. Motherfucker.
She sings in a precise, robo-Scandinavian monotone, without breaking into a smile once and the earnestness is funny and endearing because we all can tell it's only half-pretend. The lazer gun's there to remind us that it's ok to have fun. Then the beats kick in and she starts dancing – a kind of heroic thrashing that I love because it's just like how the music sounds, in her head.
Whatever industry schematic Robyn originally set out to change is still being mapped, tentatively, and the only viable option for shipping mass-produced product to pop audience outsider of the dreaded major system is in the indie label. Indie accrues credibility, sure, but credibility, like pride, is for people who have nothing else left; and me, and everyone else who heard the original version of Robyn in 2005, wanted these songs - somewhat improbably, it seemed at the time - to be everywhere, in the pop charts, at number 1.
Robyn struts and bounces and dances like a fucking beautiful Swedish spazz and the feeling I feel more than any other is just pride. It really feels like one of our team got through, that the good guys won for a change.
'Konichiwa Bitches' is still kinetic, cute – an arse-kicking pop record of the kind you wish Crystal Castles could make. She breaks with tradition and pounds out 'Who's That Girl' – The Knife's 'Who's That Girl' – replacing Olof's megalithic shifting, interlocking grid of colour and beats with just keyboard and two drummers; and it still owns.
This is NOT indie music. Even at its most stripped down it is histrionic, futuristic, unpretentious and unashamed of being overly dramatic; it doesn't have to pretend to be a bit shit to sidestep feeling guilty about being good. Robyn just doesn't do modest.
The presentation of this show, though, which she's been honing in London all year, is still unusual and unprecedented for someone who has more in common, historically, with Britney than MIA (note: not necessarily a bad thing). All of the songs sheared down to rattling bare bones, almost literally when it's just a percussive shudder underneath Robyn being 'Show Me Love' or Robyn being 'Be Mine!' Live, It's almost – accidentally – post-punk-pop, like if Neneh Cherry travelled back in time to Rip Rig and Panic armed with everything she'd learnt from 'Buffalo Stance'.
There are a lot of reason why Robyn – as an entity – works. Firstly, the songs are fucking brilliant and the album's a classic – a rare thing in pop music, which is largely incompatible with the long-player format. Secondly, she's fucking brilliant. There is nothing not to love about Robyn. But she doesn't make the music or write all the words; she kind of curates the elements that comprise her sound, breathes life into it, and that's a skill as much as any other, but there's something else.
Kieron Gillen recently queried, astonished, whether Los Campesinos! are a band "we" made up when we were drunk; they just seem exactly like the kind of thing we'd invent. Robyn feels like that to me. Like she's the singing collective unconscious of our pop dreaming; not part of any one lineage but made up out of scraps of odd pop we remember and cherish, and distorted and amplified in the remembering. We feel so attached to her because we feel like we've invested a lot of ourselves into this stuff. Y'know, it's like the bit at the end of the last series of Doctor Who, where the Doctor gets Jesus'd up through the charged collective hope of the proles hooked into the Archangel Network and starts glowing so he's indestructible when he faces the Master, except, y'know, with nu-rave as the Master, and not shit.
Robyn, please release 'Who's That Girl' and 'Be Mine!' immediately (finally!) as singles, destroy the British pop charts and go home and make a new album with Jenny Wilson. It's been nearly three years since Robyn. This and Ninja High School is all the power my headphones need, but I can't live in 2005 for the rest of my life.