As two of pop’s most innovative stars convene on Zoom – Neneh Cherry in bed in London, Robyn at home in Stockholm – it’s telling that they spend most of their conversation celebrating their collaborators and creative communities.
Thirty-three years since Cherry emerged from the punk underground into the pop mainstream with Buffalo Stance, Robyn (alongside the producer Dev Hynes and the Swedish rapper Mapei) has covered that timelessly bolshie hit for a new covers collection celebrating Cherry’s first three albums. What may appear to be a pop year zero, says Cherry, was simply a threshold in an ongoing continuity that started in her native Sweden’s collectivist spirit, grew through New York City’s burgeoning rap scene and London punk and street style, and, ultimately, swept a preteen Robyn into its orbit.
They first encountered each other through a mutual friend, the late producer
Christian Falk. He was the only collaborator from Robyn’s 90s teen-pop career that she maintained once she quit the major-label system in the 00s and changed the face of pop. Her impact influenced dozens of young musicians, including Cherry’s daughter, the R&B star Mabel, who would play Robyn songs on the family piano as a teenager.
You get the sense that these connections are the spoils both Cherry, 57, and Robyn, 42, live for, more than anniversaries and glitzy celebrations. “You make me make sense,” Cherry tells Robyn in a conversation that spans age, independence and creating an alternative to the male rock canon. “I treasure the sisterhood and the exchange of ideas and the heart that it has.”
Robyn, did you have any trepidation about approaching such an iconic song?
Robyn: Just getting the request to do it made me feel confident because I had Neneh’s blessing. I feel very comfortable with the song because it’s been with me such a long time. I was 10 years old when I started listening to Raw Like Sushi on summer vacation with my best friend. There’s so much nuance in the words that I could draw from. There’s a deep sense of belonging. It has to do with being present in your own life, being brave, being defiant – these core feelings that have shaped how I look at making music and what I think is important when you perform for other people.
Neneh Cherry: I’m not really into nostalgia, but I think that the journey of history is really important and so to be in this space where Robyn, who is one of the loves of my life, has put her voice to Buffalo Stance and made it hers feels monumental. You could say all the work is connected, but there are these thresholds and Buffalo Stance is one of those.
The prehistory to Buffalo Stance is really well known – the Bristol scene you came out of – but it’s often up to women in music to assert the importance of their history. It’s not always canonised.
R: So true. I didn’t even know you were Swedish when I first heard it. That blew my mind because I had already identified with you without knowing anything about you. I was really little – I didn’t know what you were saying, I just knew this music was made for me. Then, as I got older, your legacy unfolded.
NC: We grew up in a similar environment with creative parents who were working among other people to drop the shackles and find a creative free space. I came in wanting to break out and be unapologetic about owning the space. I grew up between Sweden and the US. There was a duality where I was always being – not defensive, but unwilling to back down, but also there’s a self-consciousness about Sweden that I found quite overbearing. There was this release in coming to London where I could take all of it – the quiet, the loudness, the unusual background that I grew up in – and the world of people that I found here. Finding a way into music was a way of exposing it.
R: I was looking through a book that
Neneh and her family has made about her parents and I saw this chapter that says “Report to ABF”. ABF is the
workers’ educational institution. It was all about bringing the working class out of poverty through education. You could apply for money if you wanted to learn a new language or play an instrument. [Neneh’s parents] Don and Moki [Cherry] taught courses. My parents were active in that world 20 years later. They were studying collective knowledge and collective collaboration. My parents educated me in how to work in a collective. I feel like you work that way, too?
NC: I’ve become more and more conscious of what an amazing gift my parents gave me. Not everything worked! But they were pioneers. We had a schoolhouse [in Sweden] that we moved to in 1970 having been in the US. The Vietnam war was still going on. Being in America as an interracial couple, and all the shit that came with it, my parents decided to go to Sweden where they could focus on making the things they believed in happen, together with the other people from that movement.