by Alex Ross
Björk listens avidly to choral music, which plays a dominant role in Iceland’s music culture. If one in ten inhabitants seems to play in a rock band, one in five sings in a choir. While working on Medúlla, Björk was listening to several CDs of choral songs by Reykjavik’s Hamrahlid Choir, which she herself once sang in. It is somberly beautiful music that sets you on the edge of paralyzing sadness, or, perhaps, pulls you back gently from the brink. Later on, she reconvened the entire Schola Cantorum to record a choral arrangement of Jórunn Viðar’s song “Vökuró” (“Vigil”), a simple, elegiac setting of a poem by Jakobína Sigurðardóttir:
Far away wakes the great world,
mad with grim enchantment,
disquieted,
fearful of night and day.
Your eyes,
fearless and serene,
smile bright at me.
For decades, Viðar was the only female member of the Icelandic Composers’ Society. She was eighty-six when Medúlla was made, and her song became the still center of the album. It is one of the most purely entrancing recordings that Björk has made.
Björk, like a lot of her countrymen, had a complicated family background; the idea of the nuclear family has never really taken root in Iceland. Her parents divorced when she was two, and she grew up in several households at once. Her mother, whose second marriage was to a rock musician, cultivated a hippie, communelike atmosphere. Her father, who went on to become the head of the Icelandic electricians’ union, kept a more orderly, conservative household. Björk’s working method, a mixture of elaborate preparation and last-minute improvisation, perhaps reflects this divided upbringing. Her most substantial family inheritance may have been from her grandmothers, who could remember the timeless rural world of Laxness’s novels and preserved the romance of the landscape. From them Björk heard Icelandic folk songs, which she calls “old-woman melodies.”
Starting at the age of five, Björk attended the Tónmenntaskóli, a music school in Reykjavik. She took theory and history classes, sang in school choirs, and mastered the flute well enough to play an atonal Finnish concerto whose name she has now forgotten. In 1980, at the age of fifteen, she wrote a piece called Glora, which is the only extant recording of her as a flutist (Björk included the track on her 2002 boxed set, Family Tree); the playing is pristine, the music a bit like the beginning of the second part of The Rite of Spring. Under the guidance of a teacher named Stefan Edelstein, she explored the more radical corners of the classical repertory, gravitating toward Stockhausen, Messiaen, and John Cage. Stockhausen remains one of Björk’s heroes; she interviewed the composer in 1996 for the magazine Dazed & Confused, defining him as a man “obsessed with the marriage between mystery and science.” Early on, she made her own attempts at avant-garde experimentation. She made beats from a tape of her grandfather snoring and played drums to the sound of a popcorn machine.
As she headed toward her teenage years, Björk had shaken off her classical upbringing. She was frustrated by its obsession with the past—“all this retro, constant Beethoven and Bach bollocks,” as she later said in her Stockhausen interview. With her stepfather’s encouragement, she started singing pop songs, and in 1977 she recorded an album of covers that sold respectably well as a novelty item. She formed a self-consciously “difficult” band with other conservatory alums, then appeared with a succession of riotous punk outfits, the most famous of which was Kukl. (There was a Kukl side project with the enticing name Elgar Sisters.) Kukl signed with Crass Records, the English anarchist label, which preached an anti-bourgeois, anticommercial code. But Björk was skeptical of punk’s purist ideology: she immediately rebelled against the rebellion.
Björk found fame abruptly, almost accidentally. In 1986, shortly before Reagan and Gorbachev arrived in Reykjavik for their nuclear summit, Björk and her comrades formed a collective organization called Bad Taste, whose manifesto announced, “Bad Taste will use every imaginable and unimaginable method, e.g. inoculation, extermination, tasteless advertisements and announcements, distribution and sale of common junk and excrement.” Principally, this assault took the form of a Bad Taste band, called the Sugarcubes, who aimed to send up the kind of bouncy cliches that passed for Icelandic pop. A song called “Birthday” became a surprise hit in Britain, and within a few months the band was an international phenomenon. The alternately charming and irritating synthetic jangle of the Sugarcubes was really an expression of the sensibility of Einar Orn, a poetic prankster who later released one of the freakiest rap albums in history. Björk, however, inevitably stepped forward as the band’s most conspicuous personality. The band ran its course after three albums.
By 1990, Björk was striking out on her own. That summer, she went on a long bicycle tour of remote parts of Iceland, stopping in tiny village churches and playing for an hour or two on the organ or harmonium. From this adventure emerged “Anchor Song,” which has a meandering melodic purity that is very Björkian. Around this time, she made a record of jazz standards, Gling-Gló, which suggests that she could have had a major career as a jazz singer. Most important, she delved into electronic pop, which traced its technique, if not its content, to Stockhausen’s pioneering synthesizer compositions of the early 1950s. She started out listening to Brian Eno and Kraftwerk, then moved on to dance music and rap. She used to take her boom box out into the Icelandic countryside to listen to Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet at proper volume. It remains one of her favorite records; the voluptuous menace of tracks like “Welcome to the Terrordome”—beats and samples stacked up in a droning roar, like Stockhausen stuck on A-B repeat—echoes through all her work.
In 1992, Björk moved to England, where she could experience electronic music at its most creatively intense. The whomping beats of techno dominated the London and Manchester dance floors, while ambient bleeps and clicks wafted through sweaty rooms in Sheffield. With new digital technologies, electronic artists could cover up the fuzz of synthesizers and manufacture hyperreal, crystalline soundscapes. Björk was especially attracted to Massive Attack, which fused the languid pacing of reggae with the sonic depth of hip-hop. Like disco in the seventies, the new digital music often became a backdrop for strong female voices like Björk’s, which could burn like candles in a dark room. At this stage, Björk left much of the work to her producers, who included, to name the most significant among dozens, Graham Massey, Nellee Hooper, Tricky, and Mark Bell.
In 1993, Björk made a phenomenal solo entrance, singing “Human Behavior” on the album Debut. Over a cheesy, funky timpani riff, which was sampled from the Antônio Carlos Jobim—Quincy Jones soundtrack album The Adventurers, she sang gleefully from an alien point of view, assessing the risk of getting close to the human species. It was a career-defining move: Björk positioned herself as a figure outside convention—as a member of another species, even—while implicating the listener in the conspiracy. The songs on Debut and its follow-up, Post, show Björk at large in the world, falling in and out of love with Venus-like boys, dancing at druggy parties, circulating through the neon glamour of nineties London. Behind the travelogue of the Icelander abroad was a sneakily imposing thesis about technology and music. She had delivered her manifesto in 1992, when she met up with Massey to record the track “Modern Things.” Machines, she sang over a gently burbling electronic stream, have always existed, waiting for their time in the sun. Technology, in other words, need not be a sleek, soulless force; it can embrace nature, teem with life.
Indeed, Debut and Post lack the emotional detachment of many British electronic records of the period—the cooler-than-thou stance of Tricky, for example, with whom Björk had a short romance in 1995. From the outset, Björk wanted to bring traditional instruments into the mix; her first idea was to have a brass band playing over severe electronic beats. In the event, she relied on flute, harp, accordion, and harmonium. Talvin Singh supplied Indian string arrangements; the Brazilian arranger Eumir Deodato came out of retirement to endow techno stompers like “Hyper
-ballad” with a Nelson Riddle lushness. The intermeshing of acoustic and electronic textures succeeded not only because the production avoided the usual cliches but because the songs were stocked with historical cues. Several of them lean on a stately tango rhythm, which supplies a hint of between-the-wars cabaret. The gently rocking chords of “Isobel” are cousins of Gershwin’s chords for “Summertime.”
The intermittent nostalgia of Björk’s musical material is tempered by the urgent optimism of her verbal imagery, which seems always charged with the sense that the next moment or meeting could transform everything. She likes to exclaim in breathy terms of some visceral but elusive “it”: “I’ve Seen It All,” “It’s in Our Hands,” “It’s Not Up to You.” Her lyrics, which are sometimes composed with the help of the poet Sjón, are a kind of poetry of possibility. She is unafraid of the darker byways of emotion, but she has no time for modernist-style alienation. On “Who Is It,” she sings, in a definitive statement of her emotional philosophy, “I carry my joy on the left / Carry my pain on the right.”
Like the greatest opera singers, Björk combines precision of pitch with force of feeling, and any diva will tell you how hard it is to have one without sacrificing the other. If you throw a lot of emotion into your voice, you will easily lose control of the pitch. If you focus on the pitch, you will find it difficult to convey emotion. Something tremendous must be happening in the brain when a singer is able to escape that double bind, and Björk’s new album is like a CAT scan of the process.
“Everyone loves Maria Callas,” Björk told me, “because she doesn’t get locked up in a technique box. She keeps her rrrr”—she gestured toward her chest. “The unity of emotion and word and tone. Especially, the purity of expression. Every genre has these mechanical cliches that get implanted in the voices and start to hide the power of words.” She sang a bit of rock and roll around the words “I don’t know nothing” and made a bit of bel canto from the words “I know everything.” Björk manages to sound as if she knows everything and nothing at once.
In February 2004, Björk went to Salvador, the capital of the Bahia province of Brazil, to watch Matthew Barney create a high-tech, avant-garde float for Carnaval. Salvador’s Carnaval is not as flamboyant as Rio de Janeiro’s; the emphasis is more on the energy of Brazilian music and dance, especially the African-accented music of the Bahia region. Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, leaders of the Tropicália musical revolution of the sixties and seventies, both come from Bahia, and both were in attendance as Barney’s float made its entrance. Barney’s musical consultant was the downtown New York musician Arto Lindsay, who spent his childhood in Brazil. Björk wasn’t directly involved in the float project, but the Nordic idea was manifest in the person of Valgeir, who was in charge of electronic samples.
Björk settled herself apart from the action, renting a house in the old hippie community of Arembepe, about an hour up the coast. She was having a hard time adjusting to the warm weather and had come down with the flu. The other Icelanders had instituted a minor social revolution at the Brazilian house. They released a supposedly bad-mannered dog from its kennel, and the animal now happily roamed free with a tennis ball. They invited the house’s domestic staff—a gardener, a cook, and a cleaning lady—to sit down at the dinner table with them.
Valgeir had set up a makeshift studio in a ten-by-ten-foot spare bedroom. An old air conditioner rattled ineffectively in the window. When Björk was feeling better, she played me the results of her sessions with Tanya Tagaq, the Inuit throat-singer. The Inuit tribes in northern Canada have a long-cherished game in which two female singers sit face-to-face and make all manner of rapid, breathy noises, in an attempt to make each other smile. Björk fell in love with this kind of vocal horseplay at the time of Vespertine; it recalled the sensuous avant-gardism of Meredith Monk, whom she had long admired. On Medúlla, Tagaq’s artful hyperventilations fill up the middle spaces that, on earlier albums, were occupied by the electronic swirl.
Bahia was ready to muscle its way into the already crowded sound-world of the record. Björk had been listening in on Lindsay’s rehearsals with a group of Afro-Brazilian drummers, who were to play alongside the float. They came from two Bahian groups, Cortejo Afro and Ilê Aiyê. They played rollicking, ever-shifting beats with a martial tinge. Björk thought of putting them on “Mouth’s Cradle,” another of the choral-powered songs on the album. Later, the drummers were recorded, and they gave the music a grainy texture and a forward drive. But they weighed on Bjork’s conscience; they violated the strictly vocal concept that she had set up, and they seemed too obvious a move for a tourist from the north. “I don’t want to be colonial, culinary,” she told me. “My brain says no, but my heart says yes.”
The climactic night of Carnaval arrived. Barney’s creation was to make its appearance in the parade of floats as it moved along the oceanfront of Salvador. Björk ventured out in a small van with various Icelanders and friends of Barney’s. About a mile from the beach, a Brazilian security detail—nine men in charcoal-gray suits, sunglasses, and earpiece headphones—drove up in a second van to supervise the celebrity visitor. Björk wanted to walk the rest of the way through the crowd, but the security people vetoed the idea. They formed a V-shaped wedge in front, and the crowd parted. Björk sang along to Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” on the radio and talked again about The Master and Margarita, which Johann, her Pilates instructor, had just read. “When I was young,” she said, “I was surrounded by friends who were always having these drunken passionate arguments all around me. I sometimes feel as if I read a lot of important books just by listening to their arguments.”
Brazilian paparazzi had got wind of the approaching convoy; they swarmed around the van as we disembarked. Indeed, the entire expedition had been arranged with the understanding that if Björk allowed herself to be photographed on this occasion then she would otherwise be left alone. “Robert Altman should make a movie about the paparazzi,” Björk said, registering the tension of the situation. “About this little world of people who lurk in the bushes for five days, hardly sleeping or eating, waiting like hunters for the prey, for Lady Diana or whoever. They hate each other, and they hate the prey. It is all about the moment of the kill. It would be a very interesting movie, yes?” She said all this without bitterness, as if she were observing a phenomenon that had nothing to do with her, which, indeed, it really didn’t. “Actually, most people here don’t know who I am. They just know that I’m famous for some reason.”
A little later, we were on a balcony high above the street, facing the old lighthouse of Barra. Barney’s float came into view. In the lead was a big industrial tractor decorated with tree trunks on which phallic candles had been mounted. It was pulling a long trailer bed with high walls the color of rust, on top of which Arto Lindsay’s musicians and Valgeir were playing. Björk explained that Valgeir was sampling the sounds of wheels crunching over various wood implements that had great significance in the Afro-Brazilian candomble religion. She began to sing her own version of a candomble hymn.
Valgeir, dressed in a lab technician’s coat, was hunched over his laptop. Barney was directing the action from the street. Björk waved at them while the paparazzi snapped away and the security men warded off an overzealous journalist who had begun yelling at Björk in frustration. An hour later, Björk succeeded in shaking off all but two of the security people and worked her way into the crowds that were following the floats. For fifteen minutes or so, before the photographers picked up her trail, she danced along the Avenida Oceanica with a couple of friends. I thought of Bulgakov’s Margarita, flying on her broom above the dead lights of Moscow: “Invisible and free! Invisible and free!”
In 1998, Björk moved from London back to Reykjavik. It was the beginning of a period of retrenchment, a retreat from the gregarious, promiscuous spirit of Debut and Post. Her albums of the next few years, Homogenic and Vespertine, turn progressively inward. A certain harshness enters the music. “The album represented
some kind of doomsday,” Björk said of Homogenic in an extended interview with Asmundur Jónsson, the record producer, that appeared with her Live Box collection. “Some kind of explosion had to take place, some kind of death.” At the same time, Homogenic evoked reassuringly familiar Icelandic landscapes, whether the sonic meadows of “Jóga”—written in honor of the woman I met at the art show in Reykjavk—or the seismic cracking of “Pluto,” which seems like Björk’s answer to Leifs’s Hekla. By this time, Mark Bell had become Björk’s electronic guru, and he gave the production a rough metallic sheen.
Vespertine, released at the end of the summer of 2001, was a homecoming of a different kind—a swerve toward a more intimate, chamber-music style of performance, without any of the heavy beats that had made her earlier music amenable to clubgoers. Matmos, an electronic duo then based in San Francisco, wrapped several songs in a bewitching sonic filigree, a gentle overlay of murmurs and rustles and clicks. Vespertine was Björk’s most ambitious work to date; it made clear what was already implicit in the previous albums—that she was not simply a singer with great taste in collaborators but a full-fledged composer with a singular command of melody, harmony, rhythm, and texture. The tone of Vespertine is established by the first sound you hear: a half-diminished seventh, a Romantic chord of brooding ambiguity. “There lies my passion hidden,” Björk sings, drawing the chord around her like a blanket. The harmonic adventurousness climaxes on the song “An Echo, a Stain,” in which a chorus dwells at length on a huge, soft, luminous cluster of tones.
While intellectual types celebrated Bjork’s latest turn—a prospectus for an academic anthology solicited papers on such topics as “cyborg/nature dichotomy,” “grammatical and syntactic deterritorialization,” and, most appropriately, “anti- and hyper-pop”—some longtime fans voiced discontent. Vespertine was not unlike Radiohead’s pop-averse Kid A, which had come out the previous year. (Thom Yorke joined Björk in a duet on Selmasongs, the companion record to Dancer in the Dark.) But Björk avoided the appearance of writing against her audience, of launching a polemic against mainstream popular music. She manages to stand apart from the crowd while not holding herself aloof from it. In private, she can wax critical about a lot of the music that’s going on around her, but her catholicity of taste is real and automatic. I didn’t hear anything cynical or calculated, for example, in the way she talked about collaborating with Beyonce. When I asked what she liked about Beyonce, she answered, with a slightly disbelieving look, “This is an album about voices, and she’s got the most amazing voice.”
