Björk
Björk once described her music as being guided by a “beautiful relationship between complete discipline and complete freedom.” Freedom came naturally to her, having grown up in Iceland under the influence of hippie communes and punk collectives; she expressed discipline in the rigor and vision of her albums. She has united electronic innovation, audio-visual experiments, radical new performance modes, scientific investigation, and naked emotional expression in one dazzling catalog, becoming one of the most uncompromising pop stars of our era in the process. As Jenn Pelly wrote in a retrospective review of Björk’s second album, Post:
Nature was her ultimate teacher. Björk said Iceland itself, not other singers, shaped her voice. It is an extreme landscape of glaciers and volcanoes, of barrenness and eruptions, endless daylight in summer and mostly darkness in winter. Walking 40 minutes to school, a young Björk entertained herself by singing: sneaking down to the moss on the ground to whisper a verse, runnin
g up a hill to unleash a chorus loudly against the wind. Björk absorbed the peaks and valleys, light and dark, twists and turns of her reality, arriving nowhere conventional. When she sang in accordance with the moss and the hills, perhaps it was a result of studying Cage in school: music was everywhere.Instinct became Björk’s personal law, and boundlessness became her key. Maybe it was the punk-surrealist in her, saying doors are only locked if you believe them to be, that what exists inside your mind is already real. “I’m going hunting for mysteries [...] I’m going to prove the impossible really exists,” Björk sings on the austere “Cover Me,” each note aglow with a sense of discovery.
Notable reviews: Post (1995); Homogenic (1997); Vulnicura (2015)Further reading: “The Invisible Woman: A Conversation With Björk” (2015), “Björk Is a Music Video Genius. Here Are 10 That Prove It” (2017), “Revisiting Björk’s First Film, The Juniper Tree, In Honor of Its Restoration” (2019)
