Madonna of the Wasps

from a 1989 interview with the man himself...

What is your new song "Madonna of the Wasps" about?

Well, "Madonna" is about an artist with a long, straggly beard who's kept in a white room in a castle somewhere in France. It's one of those castles where ... there are 31 doors but there are 32 windows, and if you hang a handkerchief out of each window, there's still one room that doesn't have a handkerchief hanging out of it. In other words, there's a doorless room.

And trapped inside this this doorless room is a very emaciated artist, and every night ... he sits there painting. He's got a kind of hotel suite, so he's not lying there in his own shit or anything like that. But he doesn't get around much.

Anyway, he's trapped up there, and every night this woman comes to him. As her head and shoulders come through the window, he thinks, "Great," but her abdomen is that of a wasp, and it's a kind of two-foot-long beautiful black-and-yellow abdomen with rings around it. And she comes in and she sort of pins him to the bed, and she sticks her tongue in his mouth, and she arcs up her abdomen and he goes, "Unnh, Unnh, Unnh."

She just curls this thing around and stabs him in the navel, and he gets a lethal dose of wasp poisoning. And he just passes out, and the next morning he wakes up and he's OK again. Like Prometheus, he's had his kidneys taken out. Anyway, he doesn't know why he's in there. He doesn't know what his relationship with the Madonna is, particularly. I mean, she's very attractive in one way, you know, but repellant in another.

And then one day, he wakes up, and he's not in the room anymore. He's just walking along in the fields in France, all these sort of flat fields. And it's early morning in November and there's a frost, and he sees this sort of shape lying on the ground, like a crashed plane.

And it's the Madonna. She's dying like wasps do in the autumn, and she stretches her hand out to him and says, "Will you forgive me?" And then that's where it ends.

There's the option: Is she actually going to whip up and sting him again, finally, or is he going to forgive her, or what? So we leave it there... Well, it's very long, so that why I had to make the song completely different, but that's the concept behind it.

I would really like to know the meaning of this song...I really see no relation between any of the words....

Thank you squaresun. Robyn's Logorrhoea is legendary and sometimes well crafted.

I've always wondered (having personally witnessed many of Robyn's astonishing, seemingly extemporaneous between-song monologues) whether these stories are carefully-crafted, or whether his mind simply works this way.

Think I've just gotten my answer.

Robyn is sometimes very critical about assigning a specific meaning to his songs. He has said that he even hates to name songs because some are beyond a name - it is a sound not a physical name of a thing. "I'm going to call this song 'Fred". It isn't about Fred. It does not sound like Fred. It has nothing to do with Fred but I am forced to call this group of words something." I think his songs mean something to him and he wants the songs to mean something personal to each person that appreciates them. "This song is comfortable. Not so comfortable as to put you to sleep. It is more like a comfortable chair where you go to think."

It cost around 70 bucks. Just estimating.