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Intersections of music and millennialism. Deep dives, asides, and exasperations by Alex (+ his friends): a lifelong musician, audiophile, and editorializer turned fitness instructor, DJ, producer, and sound curator.
Hey y'all!
Welcome back to The Vocal.
I got a great text message from one of
my very best friends recently, kind of
out of the blue, and he said, I think
I'm ready to go to level two of Björk.
You know, I've been vaguely aware of
her my whole life, for the big things
that she's done, if she's been on the
radio or in the media or whatever, but
I think I'm ready to like, explore.
And I took this as A book report project.
I immediately said, I'm going to
do this in voice memos because
there's no words only format that's
going to be able to communicate.
Her to you in the way that I think I can
communicate her to you And then of course,
I thought this would make a really great
series Bjork is someone that I have looked
to for a really long time Just as someone
that i'm glad exists at the same time
that I am on this earth, you know She
goes through so many different chapters.
She's Such an artist with a capital a
she's done so much It's pretty astounding
to watch an artist like that work and be
received During her lifetime, you know,
not to get too dark, but so much of the
time, some of our most profound artists
and the legacies that they leave are
only realized once they leave the earth.
And Bjork is here still she's
out there doing her thing.
And she's been doing her thing truly
like her whole life being received,
maybe not at the level of complexity
that she's putting out, but she hasn't.
audience for some very avant garde
work that she has been called to do,
which I think is really remarkable.
I thought I would walk y'all through
my story arc with Bjork, the way that
I see her career, the way that I, um,
have internalized the chapters of her
work, the things that have inspired
her, the sounds of her music, as
well as her treks into technology.
She's She's so many things.
She's a singer, a writer,
an artist, a visual artist.
She is a technologist.
She's an avant garde performer.
She's a fashion icon.
She's a style maven.
She's someone that is known for wearing
extraordinarily button pushing, um,
outfits and designs and headpieces.
She is really someone that I
think brings art to people.
Whether or not they
receive it is up to them.
I should take a step back and say,
I don't call myself a Bjork scholar.
I have my own read, um, and my
own understanding and my own
relationship with her work.
But I, by no means think that I have
the definitive approach to Bjork.
This is just one approach.
So the way that I see it, her
career can really be broken up
into three or four chapters.
In this episode, we're just going to be
focusing on what I see as chapter one.
This takes us through solo
albums, one, two, and three.
That's debut.
Post and Homogenic from 1993 to 1997.
Um, first let's hear from the Sugar
Cubed, which is the group that Bjork was
in before she launched her solo career.
So you can hear some electronic
programming, probably some
real analog instruments.
So I hear this and I hear not necessarily
prototypical nineties, but I hear the
nineties, the first chapter of her career.
She's pulling from.
references of the sonic landscapes
that she's occupied previously,
and she's packaging them in ways
that are pretty familiar to us.
So a pretty standard song structure,
a pretty standard kind of conventional
album format, and the, the kind
of the lyrical content on these
albums were pretty self centric.
In that way, the standard fare for
a solo recording artist, she writes
songs, she pulls sonics and, you
know, instruments and compositional
structures from the genres that she's
trained in and she's familiar with.
She puts albums together,
she delivers them to us.
Uh, by that logic, this wasn't
necessarily the most boundary pushing
part of her career, but what she was
doing was already very boundary pushing.
Bjork was someone that was trained
in jazz, she was also coming up in an
age where grunge Punk and kind of like
counterculture movements were meeting
music and electronica was really entering
its new era as well What I think is kind
of tantamount to understanding why she
became such kind of a cultural icon even
in her early Not as boundary pushing days
in the early 90s were so male dominated
and they were very group dominated She was
a solo woman stepping out on her own which
in and of itself was pretty Anti kind of
in the spirit of those genres to begin
with the next level Those genres, many of
them were genres meant to be against the
mainstream or forked off of the mainstream
as others to the mainstream and what she
kind of, I don't know if she was, um,
aware in, in her doing, she was actually
bringing elements of those genres.
To the mainstream, which was
kind of also in the spirit of
those genres, kind of anarchic.
She was like taking the anti structures
and anti anti ing them and bringing
them to greater masses of people.
In those ways, Bjork was really doing
something that wasn't meant to be done.
So even if she didn't do all
that much more than that,
it already was a statement.
1993 was when Debut came out.
You'll probably recognize if you were
to look at the album artwork, she's
like covering her hands like this.
She's kind of playing kind of
like a meek young female kind
of like East Asian archetypal.
character in a way, and a lot
of the songs had some like humor
or tongue in cheek ness to them.
So a couple of the big songs
from this album, the ones that I
think became iconic, one was the
first song called Human Behavior,
which sounds a little like this.
So you can hear some of the genres
that she had been working in.
You hear a little bit of jazz, a
little bit of like, like shuffle drums.
The bass line is a little bit punk and
then the singular female vocal over it.
So it kind of still sounds like a
band, but in a way, it's more pop.
She's bringing it into a pop market.
Also some plays with key and chord
changes that were a little irreverent.
Um, which I can kind of hear some
of her like jazz training in that.
Another song that became kind of a big
hit was called Big Time Sensuality.
Um, which I think in and of
itself may also have been a bit
risque for her, because she was
a pretty young woman in the 90s.
She was also like in an,
in an American market.
She was an international woman kind
of talking about sex and kind of like.
Not super super descriptive
ways, but in, um, overt ways.
And I think that that also kind
of allowed her to lean into
being a little bit of a punk.
But what's funny is that it's
like a pretty light little song.
Definitely can hear the 90s in the track.
Now Bjork self describes her second album,
her follow up called Post, um, just two
years later in 1995 as her city album.
It was when her life was really expanding.
I believe she moved her Home base
or one of her home bases to london.
She's always worked out of reykjavik
iceland She maintains really strong roots
there and a home there But london became
a place where she could access a wider
international market and work and make
music and I believe this may have been
the album when she Maybe started renting
an apartment or bought a place in London.
And so she was surrounded
by a much bigger city life.
Post spawned a lot of the songs that
folks, I think, still know of her.
Post really did the work of like deepening
and strengthening and codifying her sound.
I think of it almost visually as like
all the levels in the tracks were raised.
Things were richer, deeper and clearer
and crisper in a way, and just.
Many people know Army of Me, which
is the first song on this album.
It's definitely a harder hitting, grunge
style, also nuvo electronica kind of song.
Lyrically, this song also is kind of
defensive and, and also offensive.
She is a, a woman that is
saying, If you complain once
more, you'll meet an army of me.
She's saying like, don't fuck with me.
If you complain once more.
You
almost see like 90s movies references,
like I think this was before like
the matrix came out But you can
start to feel like kind of that like
urban feeling of the 90s in this
album and her voice is also getting a
little bit Bigger and the complexity
of her voice is starting to read.
It's not as light not as delicate It's you
can actually hear the fibers of her vocal
cords starting to work and starting to do
new kinds of work and she's putting more
air through her lungs and everything about
it is just kind of like more seismic.
One of the biggest songs of her
career was the second song on
this album called Hyperballad.
Hyperballad does a few things that I think
became prototypes not just for future
work in her career but for other artists.
One of those is it's
kind of pre loop loop.
You can hear the structure of what's
beneath her kind of like these
just Circling drums, circling bass.
We have like the synth
cloud layer on the top.
And then still keeping a foot
in like pretty prototypical pop
structure, here's the chorus.
And by the end of the song, as you
can hear, it's actually a dance track.
So it's called Hyper Ballad.
It's like the best of both worlds.
It's storytelling of balladry
with the kind of hard hitting
dance nature of a pop song.
One of the outliers I think from her,
it's like a vestige of her earliest
work, fell into this album called It's
Oh So Quiet, which was this like almost
camp, drag level, um, take on jazz and
like almost, kind of a burlesque club
or something more akin to a cabaret.
Um, it's very over the top in
such a way that you wonder, is
she actually lampooning that
genre by making it so campy?
It's silly, it's theatrical,
it's whimsical, it's weird.
It's kind of the antithesis of other
sounds that she was exploring at
the time and we really never heard
anything like this again in her career.
This was kind of the last time that This
form of like theatrical performative
jazz and like silliness kept its
kind of claws in her, her work.
And I don't mean claws in a negative
way, but showed up in her work.
And then she's gonna take it to Björk.
On the whole, Post is a really cool
soundscape of an album, and it really
paints the picture of evolving genres.
We have some rock, some jazz,
some electronica, and some like,
lyric and solo female vocals.
vocal driven pop music.
That takes us to 1997, album three,
Homogenic, which is by and large,
to this day, considered some of, if
not the best work of Bjork's career.
It really was the capstone.
It was like she had hit a core.
She had hit a nodule that
she was meant to find.
and no one else could find.
It was a new sound that was
uniquely hers, and it was an
exploration into the interface
between electronica and pop music.
It was a little more self serious,
it was a little bit more intense,
definitely progressive and pushing
things forward, and also a little
bit less of a gentle listen, um, but
really rich and really compelling.
What's cool at this time too, now that
we're kind of past the mid 90s, is Bjork
isn't the only figurehead out there kind
of carving a new lane from the early to
mid 90s punk and grunge and garage scenes.
I think of someone like Moby who like
took from those genres into house music
and Moby was moving it into like what
kind of became like In this album,
Björk starts kind of dissolving some
of the fundamental major pillars of
pop song and pop album production.
So while she does stick to kind
of like verse chorus structure,
she's playing with a meter more.
So there's some interesting strange
time signatures across this album.
The kind of gestalt of it
is that it's kind of queer.
Now I don't say that necessarily
about So Bjork and her sexuality,
just in that it's got this like
queer take on music and sound.
It felt very left of center
and right of center and just
kind of anywhere but center.
But then also center at the same
time, because a lot of this music went
straight to the radio and was actually
like Embraced by lots of people.
This was really when Bjork had hit a
sound and a form of delivery that she
would start to iterate on throughout
her career and that tons of other
artists would kind of start copying.
Some of her best work is definitely here.
Hunter is an extraordinary song.
This is the first song on the album.
Very electronic.
Also definitely darker.
You feel like you're
in the dark wilderness.
You're not necessarily sure if you're
in a European city or like East
Asian countryside or the Arctic.
It's world.
It's everywhere.
It's where you are and where you aren't.
What's cool is that even though this
feels so electronic, there still is
an accordion in this song and strings.
So there are organic materials
and instruments and inorganic ones
interfacing, and it feels almost
like her voice is the surface area
where inorganic, inorganic meet.
She is almost like a Metroid,
and she is like both.
becoming like electronica and computer
as a person, but then also Very very much
still iceland where nature is celebrated
and where the richness of dark during
the winter Inspires artistic creation
and just the way that people live life.
So I hear so much in this sound and
I come back to this music a lot.
To me this is a no skips album front
to back and maybe the beginning
of a string of what you could
call, but what I don't think Bjork
necessarily calls, concept albums.
It's really contiguous, it's really
a package, and it's really kind of a
fully scoped concept front to back.
Another song, I'm actually not sure how
to pronounce this song, it is written
Joga, I believe it may be pronounced
Yoga, and it is about, I think, her best
friend at the time, a beautiful song.
Like Hunter, It's an interface between
dark emotive strings and electronica
threaded with her really unique soaring
Kind of like gravity defying voice.
Is very performative, theatrical,
not unlike things in her earlier
career and the literal way that her
voice is mixed and presented, it's
bigger, it's bolder and sharper.
I think now the production quality is
helping her storytell and genre build.
This is kind of where technology becomes.
one of her greatest aides and greatest
muses for the rest of her career.
A final song, and I believe the final
song in this album, and that takes
us kind of to the end to this chapter
of Björk, is All is Full of Love.
And this is a song that has followed
her throughout the rest of her career.
It is a fan favorite.
It is often performed in tour set
lists, um, and it is something
that feels very timeless.
Again, string section, pulsing, programmed
bass beneath it, threaded with her
Sounds like this starts to appear later.
In the third chapter, as I see it, of
her career, which is kind of the nature
Nymph chapter, um, where she's painting
soundscapes and landscapes using her
voice and using her production materials.
This song in particular, I think sounds
a lot like the Sonic Bed of Utopia, which
she released, I believe, in 2000, 2017.
So that takes us to the end of what I see
as chapter one of Bjork's solo career.
The first two albums of which really
draw from things that she had been doing,
and then eventually land in Homogenic,
where the concept feels fully baked,
the soundscape feels really clear,
there's consistency song to song, we have
almost a concept album on our hands, and
something that was really pushing Bjork.
culture.
It's one of those albums that feels
like it arrived not too soon, spoke a
new language that people were finding
themselves hungry for but didn't know
what it was yet and then would iterate
and replicate for years to come.
This was a place where I think Björk
felt comfortable and ready and charged
to begin taking left turns, um, one
after the other, which brings us into
what I view as Her Chapter 2, uh, which
I'll tell you about in the next video.
But thanks so much for watching.
Hope you got something out of this
and, uh, Sending you lots of love,
Bjork style, through the airwaves.