As Robyn continues to build the anticipation around her ninth album, Sexistential, she released not one, but two new singles from it on January 7th (following the earworm that is “Dopamine”). While “Talk to Me” got a video to go with it, “Sexistential” was the song that Robyn chose to perform on TV for the first time via The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, marking it as a “favorite” of hers. After all, Robyn surely knows that it’s filled with the kind of boldness and brashness that the patriarchy despises hearing or feeling from a woman, let alone seeing “acted out” in real time on a stage. Hence, a predictably misogynistic headline from The New York Post that declared of her performance, “Robyn mocked for cringeworthy performance of ‘awful’ new single on The Late Show.”
Needless to say, the (male) writer of said piece was likely deliberately searching for the most trollish comments possible to make this “point” so he could describe her as “awkwardly danc[ing] around” (but Steve Martin would rightly understand this as the mantra, “Let your mind go and your body will follow”). Indeed, this was a kinder comment than the ones he dug up to ensure the “collective perspective” would be emphasized by such “hot takes” as, “‘This sounds awful,’ another person said. Someone else tweeted, ‘I have secondhand embarrassment.’ ‘I love Robyn but nope,’ a fourth person wrote. ‘Is this really what is considered music nowadays?’ another fan asked.” Sure to keep underscoring that “fans” wrote these comments, it’s all meant to legitimize the ongoing indoctrination that everyone, no matter how much they “love” a musician, wants to see them “pack it in” after “a certain age.” Especially, of course, if they’re a woman.
But, like Madonna before her, Robyn isn’t having it. In fact, she’s clearly using Sexistential as an opportunity to push back (and, as she says on “Sexistential,” she likes to “go out and push”) on the continuing narrative that a woman can’t do, well, much of anything after her forties. In fact, society is basically saying that women should be “grateful” already that perceptions of aging have shifted enough to even “accept” that women in their forties are still “out and about.” And—gasp!—going so far as to still take lead roles in movies. However, when it comes to pop music, the acceptance quota for “older” women is remains extremely low, and Madonna has stood largely on her own in being a vocal advocate for breaking down this barrier for so long (while some might also cite Cher, she’s tended to step back from releasing albums and making “appearances” as regularly as Madonna does when Cher was at her various “later” ages, with her longest break from releasing a studio album being the twelve years between 2001 and 2013).
In 2023, just before Kylie Minogue was about to turn fifty-five, she proved her own commitment to defying the expectation that no one wants to see or hear from a female pop star who’s outside of their thirties (which would mean a reckoning is coming for the likes of Ariana Grande, Charli XCX and Taylor Swift). This came in the form of “Padam Padam,” a song that took hold of the world despite Minogue touting the kind of lyrics once generally associated with twenty-somethings (e.g., “This place is crowdin’ up/I think it’s time for you to takе me out this club/And we don’t need to use our words/Wanna see what’s underneath that t-shirt”).
Yet somehow, Robyn, eleven years younger than Minogue, is causing far more “controversy” with “Sexistential” than Minogue ever did with “Padam Padam.” And this is likely because the latter kept the sexual lyrics “vague” enough to be “unoffensive” rather than as specific as, “I’m already ten weeks in maternity/Fuck a single mom, I’m not judgmental/In my sweatpants and some juicy hentai” or “So I was about to go have a kid on my own/And then my doctor said, ‘Now Robyn, who would be your dream donor?’ ‘Well Adam Driver always did kind of give me a boner’/She’s like, ‘Yeah, wasn’t he great in Don’t Mess With the Zohan?’” (The doctor somehow confusing Adam Sandler with Driver for an unexpectedly comical effect.)
Apart from being the first person daring enough to immortalize/remind people of the existence of Don’t Mess With the Zohan in song form, Robyn also has the “gall” to express her sexual attraction to a “younger” (though Driver is in the same decade of his life as Robyn)—and married—man while referencing what more reductive types would call her “baby-on-demand” process. However, maybe the most “scandalous” verse of all is Robyn pronouncing, “My body’s a spaceship with the ovaries on hyperdrive/Got a whole universe inside that exists in between my thighs.”
And no, just because she’s about to be a mom and older doesn’t exempt her from still being horny. Which is why, as she said of Sexistential’s overall “vibe,” “I feel like the purpose of my life is to stay horny [here, too, Madonna would tend to agree]—it doesn’t even have to be about sex, but it’s feeling sensual and attracted to things that I enjoy, and not letting anything take over that.” Not even the enduring public opinion foisted upon women with the “shamelessness” to express themselves however they see fit (whether sexually or otherwise) when they’re no longer “allowed” to.
Speaking to that exact limitation that society places on women growing older and, therefore, expected to “cover up and shut up,” Robyn addressed one of the sources of her inspiration for “Sexistential,” which was an Andre 3000 interview from 2023 wherein he talks about why he no longer wants to rap at his age. As Robyn told Zane Lowe, “Me and [my producer] Klas had both heard this amazing interview with Andre 3000 where he talked about his beautiful album and he said, ‘You know I can’t rap anymore, like, what am I supposed to rap about, like, colonoscop—my colonoscopy?’ And both me and Klas were like, ‘Yeah, we would actually love to hear that.’ And you know, if anyone could do it, it would be him. And I just, I think a really smart person said to me, um, a while ago, like, women and Black artists have a harder time aging within popular culture and I just felt like, you know, this is not the time to be, um, cautious or scared about what is happening to me, you know.”
This is precisely what Robyn conveyed during her first television performance of “Sexistential.” Unbridled and unbothered. And, what’s more, extremely “Madonna coded.” Starting from the moment the camera opens on her in a yoga pose reminiscent of the one Madonna showcased for “Vogue” during 2004’s Re-invention Tour (which she embarked upon the same year that she would turn the age that Robyn currently is). Granted, Madonna’s pose (struck while the lyrics, “Strike a pose” played, obviously) is much more intense as it quite literally involved standing on her head, but still, there’s an undeniable parallel. And then, of course, there is Robyn’s extremely “Music-centric” costuming. For she sports a look (namely, the leather embroidered vest, red pants and purple, sequined arm-length glove from Dario Vitale’s SS26 Versace collection) that would be right at home in Madonna’s ghetto fabulous cowboy era of 2000-2001.
Gyrating and thrusting her hips forward as the lyrics to the song flash on a screen behind her inside of a Venn diagram, it’s difficult not to feel anything but joy and love for a woman who is so unabashedly herself. A woman who has refused to cave to the pressures, increasingly so (despite the false narrative to the contrary), of being boxed in by what makes others (mostly men) feel “comfortable.” So it is that Robyn has officially joined Madonna’s longstanding fight to be “permitted” to keep doing what she does best at any age: being a pop star.
