Revisiting Robyn's Honey (with Who? Weekly's Bobby Finger) (Patreon Preview)
Pop Pantheon
DJ Louie XIV
4.7 • 630 Ratings
🗓️ 24 July 2023
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In a preview of this week's Pop Pantheon: All Access episode, Who? Weekly's Bobby Finger joins Pop Pantheon: All Access to revisit Robyn's most recent album, 2018's long-awaited Honey. Bobby and Louie dig into the album's central themes of grief and loss, how it pivots from the catharsis and gratification of classic Robyn songs towards something more amorphous and even frustrating, its deconstruction of dance music genres, the journey of the title track from Girls soundtrack curio to undulating, sensual house track, Robyn's position in the greater pop music ecosystem as the Mother Niche Legend and so much more.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everyone, it's DJ Louis, and I'm just dropping a snippet of our latest Pop Pantheon All Access episode, which is a deep dive into Robin's most recent album, Honey, with Who Weekly's Bobby Finger. Of course, we've talked about Robin on this podcast before in an early episode with Gia Tolentino, but in that episode, we really didn't have a chance to talk that much about honey, and I had been aching to talk about it, get into this very odd, |
| 0:21.5 | frustrating, sometimes rewarding, and beautiful record by one of my all-time favorite artists. So I'm dropping a snippet of this Patreon episode here. If you enjoy it and want to hear the rest of the episode, plus get at least three bonus episodes of the podcast per month, access to our Discord channel, and so many other perks. you can go to patreon.com slash pot pantheon and sign up at the icon tier, or you can click the link in the show notes of this episode. So here's a preview of that conversation. All right, I'm here with Who Weekly's Bobby Finger. Bobby, welcome to the Patreon show. Oh, thanks for having me on the Patreon show. I love Patreon. It's weird to say it that way. Lindsay and I call it Patreon and I don't really remember why. Sorry, the Patrion show. Of course, I know that as a devout Who Weekly VIP member. Yes, I'm a, I'm a Patrion from day one. So yes, I'm sorry for mispronouncing it. I had it all wrong in my head. But seriously, thank you for being here to talk about literally one of my all-time favorite artists, like an artist |
| 1:14.7 | that I know means a lot to you too. And to discuss an album of hers that I kind of find to be like |
| 1:22.3 | an equal measure, the apotheosis of like the Robin concept and also like a kind of frustrating album at the same time. |
| 1:29.3 | I don't know if that idea rings true to you. This is her latest album, Honey. It came out in 2018. |
| 1:35.8 | It had come out after about an eight year gap between her seminal sort of series of albums, |
| 1:42.3 | Body Talk that was then packaged into one single album, which happened |
| 1:45.5 | in about 2010, 2011. This is, of course, the album that contains the iconic singles dancing |
| 1:50.7 | on my own Call Your Girlfriend, but also like about 15 other classic Robin songs that were in |
| 1:56.7 | a very particular mold. These were kind of like absolutely cathartic, slamming dance pop songs about |
| 2:03.8 | love and lost love and yearting for love and having your heart broken and everything that we know |
| 2:10.3 | Robin is the kind of queen of that particular mood, the crying on the dance floor song is kind of like |
| 2:15.9 | the Robin specialty. And these were the kind of like 15 songs I think people think of as like the defining versions |
| 2:21.2 | of those songs. And then, you know, this album is a very different kind of album. This is an album |
| 2:27.2 | that is restrained and sort of like doesn't give itself up to you particularly easy. I'm wondering |
| 2:32.2 | how you felt about honey when it came out. I know you had a lot of expectations going into it. I went back and reread a piece on Jezebel about you kind of tracking the release of the song, Honey, which we'll circle back to. But how did you feel about Honey on impact? Like when you first heard it as a Robin fan who sort of thought of her songs in this particular way going into it. On impact. Well, it was funny that you brought the Jezebel thing because it wasn't until you asked me to do this episode |
| 2:54.1 | that it brought out a memory that I hadn't accessed in a long time, which was like, yeah, I wrote that Jezebel piece because from 2016 to 2018, all I could think about was Robin Honey, like, when is the song coming out? And it was such a thing that if I remember correctly, the reason I wrote that Jezebel piece about like, where is honey? |
| 2:52.1 | What's happening with honey is because I would constantly the reason I wrote that Jezebel piece about like, where is honey? |
| 3:08.6 | What's happening with Honey is because I would constantly bring it up in our Jezebel Slack. |
| 3:12.0 | And then finally, like Julianne Shepard was like, you just have to blog this. Like you can't talk about this all the time and not blog it. Like you have to explain what the situation is. So it was this song that premiered at the end of an episode of Girls, I believe the final season of girls, |
| 3:26.2 | and it sounded finished. It sounded ready to go. And I think that's kind of one of the |
| 3:29.8 | craziest things about honey and sort of the most frustrating things about Honey is because |
... |
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