"I'm right over here, why can't you see me?"
Ice bristles brush the skin of my back when, on “Dancing on My Own,” Robyn sings: “I’m right over here, why can’t you see me?” Right between my shoulder blades and up the nape of my neck. It’s eerie, a bit surreal, to go unrecognized and unacknowledged in close quarters. Eerie for the narrator, eerie for the listener. It’s one of the elements that make “Dancing on My Own” a pop masterpiece, one that will endure to those “best of the decade” lists in the waning days of 2019. It’s synth-pop, yes, meant for the dancefloor, but Robyn is an auteur sophisticated enough to know that nothing goes better with revery than melancholy. In the face of unrequited love, her protagonist vows to party as therapy, a gesture falling somewhere between bravery and desperation: “I’m just gonna dance all night,” she sings. “I’m so messed up, so out of line.” We know from the beginning that the object of her affection has moved on. “Somebody said you got a new friend,” the opening line announces, and the listener later learns: “I’m not the girl you’re taking home.” All of this is straightforward enough, it’s the sense of distance Robyn conveys that makes the song bite. “I’m in the car now, watching you kiss her,” she sings , the words isolated from the music, a capella-style, on the penultimate chorus. They communicate the coldness and abandonment of a jilted lover who feels defined by an ex. But also the desperation and self-flagellation of someone willing to spy on that ex. It’s a sentiment that conveys something real and something very, very personal. Perhaps the narrator is mourning the loss of a love—that reading makes the refrain of “I keep dancing on my own” courageous, if not triumphant—but perhaps it’s a love that never was. ”So far away, but still so near,” Robyn sings on the gentle, almost-wistful breakdown. Could it be even farther than she’s willing to admit? It’s not hard to imagine the narrator mouthing the words while throwing herself around her Gothenuerg apartment, dancing truly on her own and therefore invisible. That might be the secret truth that makes “Dancing on My Own” so compelling.
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