A Service-Oriented Robyn Post

ONE. I made a playlist. I listened to Robyn for three weeks straight, which isn’t unusual, except that I listened to the albums I don’t like. My Truth is really bad. Robyn Is Here is never as good as I want it to be. Everything else is delightful, even the stuff I left off. I can’t deal with 47 Robyn disco songs. Twenty, fine, but I need my beat pattern to change. And the crushed-and-then-amplified-plastic-Pret-container sound of the Body Talk series gets on my tits.

TWO. Here are the videos where Robyn does her Snake dance, cued up to those points.

The Snake Hip/Parallel Processor first comes to us in the original video for “Dancing On My Own.” It begins in the second verse, right after “I’m gonna dance, all night,” and then happens fully as the song begins to repeat the verse ad infinitum. (Usually found at 1:30 and 3:30, depending on how long the intro is.) The original video omits the real appearance, which comes in the return. Here is the first appearance of the full choreo, in July of 2010, two months after the official video came out.

I am fairly sure sure she did this with choreographer Marina Wahlberg. This might be the beginning of their collaboration. Not sure!

This live version is great, maybe more so because she seems entirely winded when she gets to the return of the move at 4:00.

The Nobel version is hard as hell.

Though it is technically the DOMO Dance, the best-filmed version is in the “Call Your Girlfriend” video.

This Roskilde version was taped in July, a week before the 2019 Barclays show. She punts in the second verse and then just skips the dance during the return. I hate the “you like me, you really like me” gesture of having the crowd sing, not least because it encourages assholes to perform this on the subway platform (which they did after Barclays). The crowd work gives her a chance to rest, I get it. Just change costumes again, we love you, Robyn, get up.

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