Battle of the (Sort of) Reformed Pop Tarts: Robyn vs. Rachel Stevens

Sixteen year-olds aren’t known for their judgement.

I’m not saying this to harsh on the young’uns, I’m just pointing out the obvious. I was 16 some time ago, and I did some dumb shit. So did most of my friends. Sixteen year-olds do things like dress up like goths, experiment with bisexuality and heroin, convert to Islam and go through weird flirtations with Neo-Nazism.

The nice thing about being 16 is you can do all this dumb shit, then basically write it off to youthful indiscretion. Nobody will hold your old Skrewdriver records or kufi against you in the long term. You were 16. You were “finding yourself.” It’s all good.

Imagine what the world would be like if you were branded by your adolescent idiocy for the rest of your life? That’s kind of what life’s like for pop stars. They make one stupid decision when they’re kids, cut one dumb, treacly single, and are branded as a cheesy teen-pop star for life. That’s why so many of them live out the rest of their lives in miserable obscurity. It’s better to walk around as a nobody than live out the rest of your life as Tevin Campbell or one of the guys from Another Bad Creation.

That’s why I’m always amazed when teen popsters manage to salvage any sort of grown up career, let alone a respectable one that’s based on nostalgia.

But wouldn’t it be interesting if we were to take two recovered '90s teenyboppers put them head-to-head to find out who’s done the best job of distancing themselves from their shameful past.

Yeah, let’s do that.

The Main Event

In the red corner, with a shame factor of “Show Me Love,” from Stockholm, Sweden, ROBYN!

Here’s the backgrounder on Robyn.

She was raised by weird experimental actors in Sweden, “discovered” at age 13 and spirited away to work with weird Swedish Sven Gali Max Martin, the man who would later be responsible for most of Britney Spears’ early output.

At 18, after experiencing some commercial success in Sweden, Robyn was unleashed on an unsuspecting world. Her single “Show Me Love” was an über-hit pretty much everywhere on the planet in the summer of 1997. I worked at a movie theatre in the summer of 1997 where I was forced to hear “Show Me Love” about a dozen times a shift. The song is still intrinsically linked in my brain with the smell of stale popcorn and harsh grease-cutting chemicals.

Later the same year, Robyn was booked as an opening act for the Backstreet Boys, but had to pull out due to “exhaustion.”

Unfortunately, it’s hard to take the child of two members of an experimental theatre troupe and force her to be the new Tiffany. Robyn eventually rebelled against her masters, first by writing ballads about abortion (hers), then by covering obscure ‘60s soul records, then eventually by making weird electro stuff where she sounds like a cross between a hyper-sexual Björk and Missy Elliot re-imagined as a tiny Nordic girl.

In 2005, the idiots at Jive Records eventually said “fuck this” and cut her loose. Since then, she’s been releasing shit on her own Konichiwa Records label. She only just got North American distribution, but she’s been doing a pretty good job of getting noticed in Europe, so we could see a full-fledged comeback before long.

I’m not going to front. I think post-2005 Robyn is the fucking balls. I don’t want to bias the electorate, but I like this girl a lot. So much so that I really had to debate which video I wanted to put up as an example of her more recent work. Eventually I chose “Konichiwa Bitches”, just because I think this song/video let’s your really know where this girl’s head’s at.



OK, now for the competition.

In the blue corner, with a shame factor of S Club Seven, from London, England, Raaaay-CHEL Steee-VENS.

OK, before we even get started on this one, let’s just go ahead and admit that Rachel Stevens is more poppy, more tarty and considerably less overall reformed than Robyn. She didn’t go from Swedish proto-Britney to some sort of weird acid casualty. Instead, she went from being one-seventh of the worst musical act in human history to maker of aggressively sexed-up dance tunes and future gay-scene icon.

For those of you in need of a history lesson, Rachel Stevens was a remember of S Club Seven, the worst musical group in human history. They were sort of a mixed-gender 1990s version of The Monkees. Except, where The Monkees made music that actually wasn’t that bad, S Club Seven made music that was so bad it has no Earthly purpose other than to torture terror suspects. . You can’t like it ironically, you can’t like it in spite of yourself, You can’t even put it on at a party and have girls giggle and dance with youthful nostalgia. You can only use it to hurt people.

Here’s a refresher.



After the cancellation of Viva S Club, the final S Club series, all of them dropped off the face of the Earth for a few years. In 2004, Rachel Stevens re-emerged as with “Some Girls,” a song so intense that the song alone, never mind the video, gave me a fairly serious erection. Rachel is hot. She’s kind of like Kylie Minogue multiplied by the power of Teagan Presley. She’s not doing anything deep and profound, but she makes ladies dance seductively whenever her shit is played. I appreciate that.

This is the video for "So Good" off the album Come and Get It, her second post-S Club outing. You know how all the Britney/Hillary/Lindsay types are going for this new "more grown-up" electro sound. This is what their shooting for. Now you can see how much they fail.


OK fools. All that's left is the voting process. You shouldn't need a Google account to post now, but if you do email me at cpdart@gmail.com and I'll try and figure it out.

UPDATE: It goes without saying that the deadline for voting is Friday at Midnight.