She’s just a girl, vamping in the showroom of a tire store, spinning amidst a sea of twirling umbrellas, dancing with a mailbox, and ascending on a crane until she’s dominating the frame of Spike Jonze’s camera with her finger to her lips, standing in front of you, asking you to love her.Björk performing at Le Cirque en Chantier, Paris, during her Biophilia Tour (2013) This is the miracle of Björk, but she’s not a miracle. No one delivers words quite the same way Björk delivers words, but the intent, the sentiment of those words, quite often, couldn’t be plainer. A fountain of blood is literally what you are, while we’re at it. She sings the words I’m a fountain of blood because that’s literally what she is. As a generator of madcap ideas and highfalutin concepts, she’s superhuman, but as a singer of songs, as a fount of emotions, she is profoundly human. There’s a difference between respecting her as an outlandish visionary and dismissing her as some sort of baffling space alien. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of her art. But this does her a disservice this denies her humanity. I lived in Björk’s neighborhood, in Brooklyn, for many years, but I never would’ve put it that way at the time: I would’ve insisted that Björk lived on the moon, or on the rings of Saturn. Takes a while to wrap your head around this. Very few people in history are more of this earth than she is. You gotta hold in your head two conflicting ideas here: Björk is not of this earth, and yet Björk is very much of this earth. Remember when Winona Ryder did a Björk impression on Saturday Night Live, in a Celebrity Jeopardy! skit, in 2002? That’s the exact moment the ’90s truly ended, just FYI. There’s a tendency to reduce her to a woodland-fairy-type late-night-comedy routine. The needle to thread here, the challenge to accept here, is to marvel at the inimitable Björk-ness of Björk without infantilizing her or merely caricaturing her. The multimedia magical-realist universe that revolves around her. Like 400 box sets and compilations and so forth. Do not talk to me about Dancer in the Dark.) The Oscars swan dress. That movie does Björk dirty in every conceivable respect. The titanic avant-pop influence of the albums themselves, Post and 1997’s Homeogenic especially. The increasingly avant-garde album covers. “Bachelorette” especially, shout-out Michel Gondry. The truly extraordinary run of mind-bending music videos. A quick summary of the last 25, 30 years of Björk. There’s a needle to thread here though, as her star ascends in 1993, and as we gird ourselves for the decades of Björk excellence and flamboyance to come. Sometimes the things I do astound me.ĭebut’s genre, if you gotta assign a genre to it, is Björk. It’s got a harp ballad called “Like Someone in Love” that makes it sound like nobody had ever written about being in love before. One of which is called “Violently Happy.” It’s got avant-garde jazz. Debut has some legit house-music jams, some bangers. All of that sounds vague, I realize, but can we agree that “trip-hop” is the dumbest name for a musical genre that emerged in the 1990s? Can you imagine yourself saying the words “trip-hop” to the face of an artist you associate with trip-hop? Not even Björk can redeem the words trip-hop. On the show, I’m gonna talk about a bunch of other artists whose Venn diagrams overlapped with Björk’s, starting here in the early ’90s, in terms of vibe, in terms of fearless experimentation, in terms of a cutting-edge collision of the organic and the synthetic, in terms of a mellow but slippery ominousness.
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