Appraising Björk ahead of 'Fossora'
Björk is revisiting Björk ahead of her new album's release, so why shouldn't we?
By T. Bloom
I’m allowing myself to broach this subject with the caveat that there’s no need to say everything right now. There’s room for a whole series of JUDGEMENT posts about Björk in the months ahead — and perhaps you should hear me out before groping for the Unsubscribe button.
First, the basic facts: the Icelandic superstar’s upcoming album is called Fossora, the soon-to-be-released single is “Atopos,” and next month she’ll offer a rare glimpse into her personal history and creative process via a podcast series revisiting each of her previous albums.
All of these things remain true regardless of your feelings, there’s nothing that can be done to change them. Don’t shoot the messenger!
Fossora album cover, via Björk
Björk’s entire discography consists of work that’s been produced and released regardless of anyone else’s feelings. This tends to be what attracts listeners to her, many of whom will later drift away in response to their own feelings and preferences being disregarded. That would be true for fans of nearly any artist with a life-spanning career, but it’s especially true in Björk’s case.
Whatever one happens to love about her, there have been times when she’s given it freely, and times when she’s withheld it. There have been times when she did it perfectly, and times when she… just did it. There have been times when she collaborated with the right people at the right time, and others when she collaborated with the wrong people at the wrong time. There have been times when she’s seemed accessible to the public as a genuine person, and times when she has only pretended to, from behind a carefully constructed wall of aesthetic artifice.
And perhaps most frustrating to any onlooker, there have been times when she appeared to know all this about herself, and times when she (apparently) didn’t.
But these are part of a lifelong relationship with any artist, whether as a friend or a fan. This is why artists make for such funny heroes. As public figures they’re a reliable source of novelty and spectacle, which is its own genre of popular entertainment. As examples of the power of self-expression, whatever they manage to accomplish should be considered an advertisement for the risks and rewards of going one’s own way — and failure is built into that process. But just as often, their output serves as a warning: go too far into your own fantasy and you may disappear, becoming ridiculous, unknowable.
Artists like Björk resist easy emulation, but they do inspire us to pursue forms of destiny that did not exist to be met until after we set out for them. People rarely cover her songs, and when they do, the result usually annoys me. They’re her songs! Who really wants to invite that kind of comparison, especially when the person you’re echoing is a global icon of originality?As much as she likes to include themes of universality in her work — seemingly to inspire humankind to unite and feel connected through this vast, mysterious experience of life — her output marks her as one who wishes to remain defiantly singular. She needs us in order to feel understood, but we will always need her more.
Perhaps things would be different if she’d faded away, leaving fans in the position of safeguarding and periodically reviving her legacy. However, over the past decade Björk has kept raising the stakes, leading with weirdness and daring the world to continue listening. And to my own personal surprise, they have.
That leads to another challenge of lifelong fandom: sharing an admired artist with other fans.
Despite her rowdy, gregarious early years as a punk princess singing with The Sugarcubes, Björk constructed a solo career that was presented almost like a one-on-one experience. 1993’s Debut — an ironic title for someone who’s been performing in the public eye since childhood — served as a fresh beginning, and her starkly solo presence seemed to paint her as an outsider appealing to other outsiders, gathering them close around her flickering campfire. This was music made to be experienced privately, insinuating itself into your reality via headphones. Even the anti-party party anthem “There’s More to Life Than This” features an intimate moment when Björk audibly leaves the soirée, inviting the listener to join her on a secret side-quest.
I remember buying this album on cassette tape to bring along on a family road trip; honestly, I remember very little about that trip except this album. It felt like a secret I was keeping from everyone else in the car, a puzzle I was curious to solve. I was charmed by its rawness and moments of deliberate sloppiness, such as all the ambient noise bleeding into her harp-accompanied cover of the jazz standard “Like Someone In Love.”
I found her voice exhilarating — vulnerable in one instant, sharp and dexterous as a flexible blade in the next. To the extent that I was able to understand what she was singing about, I found a lot of it kind of embarrassing at first… but she wasn’t embarrassed. As a young person who was still terrified of sexuality, I found it thrilling to hear someone explore this subject matter so frankly (a la “Venus As A Boy”), bridging the gap between quizzical, childlike amusement and more mature forms of ecstasy. And it took months of listening for me to accept the album’s conclusion, “The Anchor Song,” which was so unfamiliar in its arrangement and sentiment that I truly had no equipment with which to process it.
But I wanted to, and that itself was a totally new experience for me. Until then my approach to music appreciation had always been pretty simplistic: I either liked something, or I didn’t. Here, at last, was a thrilling third way.
The idea that softness and toughness and strangeness could all be patchworked together into something enjoyable — even if, as she insists, it takes courage to enjoy it — was revolutionary to me, and this ended up serving as a template to follow as I searched for new music, influencing what I gravitated toward, which artists seemed worth the effort.
I’ve learned since that the transformative power of challenging music makes itself evident in the difference between the first listen and the twentieth, the twentieth and the hundredth; the only way to get there is to keep pressing Play.
Björk’s 1995 followup Post brought more polish and even more variety, but not at the expense of audience intimacy. The album even concludes with a track called “Headphones,” in which the singer describes the pleasure of experiencing music privately, in terms that her own fans would find distinctly relatable:
Genius to fall asleep
To your tape last nightSounds go through the muscles
These abstract wordless movements
They start off cells that
Haven't been touched before
These cells are virgins…
In these later albums (which I’ll hopefully discuss at length in another post) the artist’s interests and beliefs became increasingly esoteric, gradually coalescing into a kind of poetic personal philosophy of animism and primeval gnosticism. Each album serves as a guided tour of different states of awareness which are grounded — alternately or cumulatively — in the elements, the physical body, the voice, and in human relationships.
How relatable is any of this meant to be? Are we truly meant to participate in Björk’s strange journey through life, or just enjoy watching her go on with it? Music can be a way of sharing spiritual affinity, and her live performances from Vespertine onward do seem to convey a sense of being called to worship in in a pop-up church. However, her musical output consistently recommends the kind of magical conditions that only arise in solitude, or in close-knit groups (and sometimes even during live shows, it’s clear that’s where she’d prefer to be).
That disconnect between the public and private spheres seems to have guaranteed that she’ll always be a cult figure, and never a cult leader. Instead of plotting a path for acolytes to follow in order to achieve total Björkness — as if such a thing was possible — each new album functions as a kind of Hermit’s lantern held aloft, signaling new progress, shedding new light on the past (hers), casting a faint glow over the path ahead (also hers, but ours too).
This morning during a long bike ride, I listened to Medúlla from beginning to end. Only while writing this post did I realize the album was released exactly 18 years ago, on August 30th, 2004. That means today is the anniversary of an afternoon when I bought the CD at Union Square’s Virgin Megastore (RIP), carried it down to Washington Square Park, and listened to the entire album on a portable disc player while lying on the ground in the shade of a canopy of trees.
It was Björk’s intention to record Medúlla using little to no instrumentation, relying mainly on sounds made by the human body: singing, breathing, beat-boxing, hand claps, whistling, et cetera. Many of these are electronically manipulated to a point of abstraction, and the overall production is very dark and cavernous, like haunted voices one might hear echoing around inside a charnel house.
In a public park teeming with people on a summer afternoon, I put on my headphones and seemed to vanish into this vast interior space. I was unreachable, but not alone. With my eyes closed it seemed I could see and feel the shapes of this chamber, I could sense the warmth of these enclosed figures as they hummed and jabbered and wept. At times, such as during the song “Ancestors” (Björk’s duet with Inuk throat-singer Tanya Tagaq) it was a very uncomfortable closeness, the kind one instinctively pulls away from. And yet, I was inclined to stay with them and see the ritual through to its natural end, bathing in the rich sonic stream of “Mouth’s Cradle” and then slowly returning to my body via the daffy, decidedly upbeat “Triumph of a Heart.”
And then I opened my eyes, and a little piece of me was always different after that.
During my ride this morning, I was amazed to discover how many of those same feelings were still accessible to me, despite many years of endless re-listens and various memories attached to certain songs, both happy and painful. The magic is still there. In some ways it feels more powerful than ever, because I have even more appreciation for the impossibility of creating such an album — continuing to create them, for herself if no one else.
People have their own reasons for picking and choosing which Björk albums they consider the most worthwhile, but there’s really something to be said for having followed her lantern signals all the way to the place I am now, experiencing the continuity of them, gradually untangling myself from their meaning and seeing them as a body of work that belongs to her. I enjoyed her last album, Utopia, just fine — particularly the standout single “The Gate” — but at this point, after thirty years of feeling wrapped up in someone else’s emotional tapestry, it’s almost a relief when I can’t fully relate to her anymore. I get to appreciate the separateness that can crystallize around admiration, instead of needing to feel a kinship there.
That’s the greatest comfort of long-term fandom: however I may feel about whatever an artist makes next, I get to sit back and be happy for them.
So what does Björk think of these earlier albums now? Will her later-career perfectionism allow her to appraise them honestly, or will this podcast series prove to be just another performance? After all, if perfection was the original goal, she never would have debuted with Debut.
I’m praying for more of the loose candor that was on display in The Guardian’s recent profile which also served as a Fossora album announcement. It was reassuring to hear Our Lady of Big Time Sensuality tell a reporter that she’s in it for the long haul. “I feel, as a singer-songwriter, my role is to express the journey of my body or my soul or whatever, and hopefully I will do that till I’m 85, or however long I live. I try to keep the antennas up and read where my body is at.”
All that tells me is I’ve got to do my best to outlive her — because I’m outraged at the thought of missing out on a Björk album that comes out after I’m dead.
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