After my parents divorced when I was seven, my dad and I started this tradition. When my parents were together, I would take a bath almost every Saturday morning. I would listen to them fight in the kitchen while I played with my rubber ducks. In my memory, the fighting happened almost every Saturday, but I’m probably remembering it very selectively. Well, anyway, once my parents got divorced, I changed my bathing day the weeks I was at dad’s place. Every Sunday evening, he would pour a bath full of water and bubbles, and I would build bubble castles while listening to music until the bubbles were all gone and the water was cold. As I remember it, the music was mostly Robyn. “Do you really want me (show respect)” and “You’ve got that something” were playing from a scratchy cassette tape.
So, one could say I’ve been a fan for quite some time. I’ve got all her CDs. I even met her once, in Tanzania, when she visited the Swedish school while doing her duty as a UNICEF ambassador. I have her autograph tucked away somewhere in a folder. So now that she has done an advertisement for Volvo, of course I needed to check it out.
Visually, it is a typical car ad, and the music is one of the new Robyn and Röyksopp tracks. But the focus of the ad is a silent voice-over, a phone conversation that Robyn has with another woman in Swedish. Mostly, it’s just a quiet conversation you might have with a really close friend or partner, were you sleeping? did you dream? that kind of stuff. But then, in the end, when Robyn gets out of the Volvo, leaning against the car and watching the sun go up over the city, she says
Hello? Are you there?
[I’m here.]
What should you do? Should you choose to see the world, or should you choose to keep it?
Would you even want to keep it if you haven’t seen it?
Seriously. Wow.
In those few sentences, she captures maybe the biggest dilemma of my life. My strong sense of we REALLY HAVE TO DO SOMETHING to salvage whatever we have left of our ecosystems and take care of the planet that we are living on, conflicting with the traveler I was raised to become, with a never-ending thirst to see the world. All the carbon dioxide that traveling releases. I just can’t get those two to fit together.
And Robyn, with her soft voice, just saying those words. I’m speechless.
The ad is for the new green car initiative that Volvo is making. Of course their message is that if you buy one of their green cars, your strain on the environment will be much smaller and therefore you can use it to see the world and still keep the world. It isn’t that simple.
But still. I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve experienced something big tonight.
Katja Malmborg 