The Girl and the Robot

Whoa. So much to say about this song.

First of all, I love it. God bless the Swedes on this collab.

Most pop songs either remain in a major key throughout the entire song or at least start out in minor chords and rewards you with a major chord release via chorus. Thus fulfills the formula of pop bliss.

"The Girl and the Robot" may be disguised as your standard electro-pop dance anthem but is actually miles apart from anything I've heard. It never strays from the minor key. You wait and you wait. But there is no chorus. There is no release.

And that's what makes it perfect. Though the melody abstains from relieving its own stress at any point during the song, it meshes beautifully with the emotionally bludgeoned state of the narrator. She's admittedly hit rock bottom as she pleads for her lover to call and waits relentlessly for him to come home. But just as our reward never arrives in the form of melody, he doesn't either.

It reminds me of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's short novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which takes place during just a single day in a Soviet labor camp during the Stalinist regime. This book has no chapters. There are no breaks in pace as we sink deeper and deeper into the daily routine of Ivan Denisovich. He wakes up every biting, cold morning with dejection in his heart, and the only brief period of time is he able to shake himself from this cruel reality is when he shuts his eyes and goes to bed. End scene.

Denisovich's doom is as constant (though obviously not equatable in nature--well, maybe) as Robyn's as she drives the melody through a string of accusive verses but never achieves gratification.

Maybe that's why I can listen to this song over and over and over and over again. I'm so fascinated by the melody that I keep waiting for the chorus to come. But of course it doesn't. So I play it again because subconsciously I am still expecting.

But when has something good ever come out of expectations?

And since when did this post about a great song turn into yet another existential self-jerk?

Life.