Taking Songs Too Seriously: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn

Let me start by saying how much I love Robyn. If I wanted to show you how much I love Robyn, I would hold my arms out all the way to the sides as far as they go! She is the greatest.

I do not, however, love her song Call Your Girlfriend. Everyone else was obsessed with it because she did some cool dancing in the video, and it's catchy and all, but nobody ever talked about how the song is also kind of the worst. Am I the only one who doesn't actually like it? (Okay, the song is musically great, but the message is terrible!)


First is the very obvious thing that sucks about this song: it's about cheating and dumping. It's sung from the perspective of a girl who is getting with a guy who is in a relationship. That sucks big time. I'm not going to demonize her as some evil "other woman", but that is a bad-news thing for both of them to be doing.

That considered, am I the only person in the world who finds it kind of gross that the new girl is telling the girlfriend how to get over the boyfriend, and that she's doing it through the boyfriend? AND that the advice is so bad? It's like mansplaining, but from a girl to another girl through her cheating boyfriend.

I mean, really: you fall for someone who's in a relationship and they fall for you, too. Fine. To then give these ridiculous platitudes to the the girlfriend is just insulting.

"Tell her not to get upset, second-guessing everything you said and done"

You're seriously going to tell a girl not to get upset after cheating on her and dumping her? REALLY?

Oh, and right, you can just tell someone to not go back over their relationship bit-by-bit and figure out what the hell happened when they've been cheated on. All it takes to stop them from parsing through every conversation and fight figure out where you were lying (and when they should have known something was wrong) is you telling them not to do it. Good one!

"And then when she gets upset tell her how you never meant to hurt no one"

Since when was it comforting that your partner who cheats on you and then dumps you "never mean to hurt no one"? NEVER. If you don't want to hurt someone, then you don't cheat on them. You break up with them in a respectful way and they will still be hurt but not nearly as much because you are treating them like a human.

"Just tell her that the only way her heart will mend is when she learns to love again."

This may be true, but it needs to come from her best friends and mom and counsellor, not YOU saying, "oh, you'll feel better once you meet someone else." WHAT THE HECK???? Nope.

"And it won't make sense right now, but you're still her friend."

No, you're not. Friends don't cheat and then dump. It's not a friendly thing to do. Maybe you want to be friends now to make yourself feel better about the situation, but it's a bad-feeling situation and you just need to live with that.

"And then you let her down easy."

I think that once you've told your girlfriend that you met someone new and are leaving her, you are past the point of letting anyone down easy. That ship has sailed.

"Don't you tell her how I give you something that you never even knew you missed
Don't you even try and explain how it's so different when we kiss"

I just can't even believe that this is advice that would need to be given. "Hey, don't rub it in your girlfriend's face that you are so much more into me than you were ever into her, okay? I know it's the logical thing to do, and any sensible/sensitive person would want to do it, but just hold back for now."

UGH!!!!!

So there is my irrefutable proof that this song is the worst. But don't worry! Robyn has SO MANY beautiful songs that you can listen to instead. So crank one of her much much better songs (Dancing On My Own, Every Heartbeat, Show Me Love, Fembot, Hang With Me, Be Mine!, etc.) and emulate these gifs of her dancing like the awesome person that she is: