The Edmonton Muse November 2019 | Page 44

Pop music is an extremely polarizing entity, so much so that even people who don’t like it have strong opinions about it. It’s easily the fastest moving and changing genre of music available to us, with massive personal rises and catastrophic personal falls that always seem to occur in the public eye, big budgets and big debts, and the seemingly impossible moving target that is staying power seems so out of reach for so many artists.

With the introduction of Swedish producers who meet in board rooms rather than studios, piecing songs together with algorithms and surveyed success rates of pitch variants and countless other things that I’ll assume you’re up to speed on – the game is rigged.

With that, comes the introduction of a facet of pop we don’t often hear about (likely because it exists in the aforementioned pop machine’s shadow) is a wave of subversive pop music.

Robyn Marie’s unique brand of indie-pop (or alt-pop) is part of that wave.

Hers is a style of pop that still meets all the markers that the big pop machine dictates, but on a smaller, more independent, and hip level. Those markers include catchy hooks, innovative instrumentation, accessible and relatable lyrics, and a fashion-forward look. However; this branch of pop music deviates from the pop structure in favor of making things more interesting, and she uses softer percussive sounds without sacrificing the listener’s tendency to dance.

Robyn Marie, Anti-pop Diva

with FatDave Johnston