INTERLUDE: björk and the great big world
wind singing, openness, and post-optimistic animism.
It’s possible that my purpose in life is to go fast in a car with the windows down. There’s a pretty good chance my purpose in life could be to stand in the ocean or to sit on a rock in a river, too— anything with a sudden barrier of noise where you move into it and find yourself separate from the rest of the world. You have to be terribly close to someone to hear them when there’s an all-enveloping noise like that. Then together, you’re both separate from the world, transformed into a secular nation of two people inside a sound box.
You will never be closer to someone than in a river or the ocean or a car. When you’re alone, though, you can scream and shout and nobody will hear you. The barrier of water-sound or wind-sound makes you an island.
You could also sing.
At one point in the history of the universe, there was a child walking against the wind, coming home from school alone across the Icelandic tundra. The wind was loud. So loud that a voice was impossible to hear, including one’s own, and that in combination with the deserted tundra meant that every possible sound and movement was on the table— yelling, growling, whistling, shrieking, humming, ducking into a ditch for a verse and then running up a hill to sing a chorus. What kind of voice is created from trying to hear yourself over the wind? How does facing down a blizzard and howling into it affect a singer?
I can’t say what it’d do to the way you sing or what it’d do to the way I sing, because I’m not around big wind- and water-sounds enough to know. When it comes to Björk, though, pushing her voice into the wind like that was instrumental in developing her vocal style.
Björk has been in the public eye since 1976, when she won a contest at her school and appeared on Icelandic radio to sing a cover of Tina Charles’ I Love To Love. She was eleven years old. This eventually led to her getting a record deal, and she released her debut album Björk in 1977, when she was twelve. Although she declined to do another album, she was in several punk bands throughout her teens. She joined the Sugarcubes after she gave birth to her son at age 20, a band who soon became the subject of international renown— even scoring a slot as Saturday Night Live’s musical guest when Matthew Broderick hosted in 1988— and then began her solo career (again) when the band broke up in 1992. The rest is history, but the important thing to remember is that it started with Björk alone on the tundra, singing into the wind.
You can hear that wind in her voice. There’s a certain dryness and sharpness to it, a papercut ferocity that whips out at you when the song starts to get loud. Even the most mundane words turn divine in her mouth— car parts, bottles, and cutlery. She’s an incredible lyricist, so it’s not like you could go wrong, but she’s the only one who can sing a love song so believably that you’re convinced no one has ever sung about being in love before. The way she sounds is simultaneously something only a human could sound like and something that no human has ever sounded like before.
There are similar paradoxes within her career. It’s easy to write Björk off as weird or an alien or as some forest creature that emerged from the highlands of Iceland fully formed. It’s easy to call her music strange and dystopian. In some ways, that’s a blessing. You have much more creative freedom if everyone already thinks you’re weird and much less to lose when you try something experimental. But thinking of her as some magical creature does a disservice to her, her music, and yourself, as a member of the human race.
What Björk possesses is openness— openness to herself, to other people, to different realities and the potential they have in the process of happening; openness even as a disclosure of past non-openness. Openness about humanity, openness about her relationship to the earth within that humanity, openness to being held by the myriad arms of life. Possibly, maybe, probably not. When you reduce her down to a gimmick or a caricature, you close yourself off to your own potential for openness. When you deny her humanity, you deny your own humanity. It’s easy to write her off as alien because she is firmly from this Earth in a way that very few people are, and you will fundamentally misunderstand her art if you cannot find it in yourself to accept her humanity alongside her capabilities as a visionary.
That visionary forces us to be open to the things under the surface of our world, going unnoticed by those who don’t pay attention. Björk called her opinions towards nature “post-optimistic animism”1, which I think is a great way to describe her lyrical style. It doesn’t have to be happy; it just has to be alive. When we look at the world around us, there’s a lot of beauty and wonder, but there’s also a lot of destruction and industrial terror. We have taken the planet for granted, and now we have to reckon with global warming and pollution and pulling plastic straws out of turtles’ noses. Magic is still alive within it, though— biological magic, something tangible and real and wonderful and mysterious, even with all the scientific backing going into it. I mean, she has an entire album about the wonders of nature2, and that’s not even including the dozens of songs about science scattered through her discography. And it is magical. Culturally, we view science and magic as being on opposite ends of a sliding scale, similar to nature and technology, but they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. You can carry joy on the left and pain on the right. This is an exercise in openness.
On average, it takes me about a year to fully absorb a Björk album. From infancy to my preteen years— because I’ve literally been listening to Björk since I was in the womb— that album was Homogenic (1997), because that was all I had access to. When I was fifteen, I moved onto Debut (1993). When I was sixteen, it was Post (1995). Seventeen was Vespertine (2001) and very briefly Gling-Glo (1990), and eighteen was Medulla (2004). At age nineteen, I have finally moved onto Vulnicura (2015), and am currently looking forward to spending another ten months listening to it.
Is this an insane process for listening to an album? Yeah, probably. Is it necessary? Not at all, but I think it’s fun. I could totally deep-dive on the album and learn everything about it within a few hours, but I prefer to come by the information as questions arise. Spending an entire year on an album also gives me ample opportunity to hear the songs from every possible angle, both emotionally and neurologically, as scientists have proven that your brain creates new neurological pathways every time you hear a song. When all my pathways have been rewritten in the name of Vulnicura, I will move on and be rewritten in the name of a different Björk album. This is also an exercise in openness.
Here’s the thing. I can’t imagine a life without listening to Björk. I knew her as a child and I will know her forever. As is the case with the things we grow up with, it’s difficult to differentiate the experience of a life with it absent from the experience of a life with it present, and in all honesty, I don’t even want to bother trying to imagine life without Björk’s music. It was a superhuman force to me. Björk wasn’t my mother and she didn’t raise me— she was part of the world that I was formed in, like stones or sunshine or water. That’s not to say that I have an inordinately remarkable relationship with her music, or even that the memories I have of it are particularly noteworthy. It just was, therefore it is, therefore it will be. And I can’t predict the future, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the last song I ever hear will be one of hers. I digress, though. That’s not what this is about.
This is about the fact that I butchered the lyrics to Joga when I was five and, in changing the meaning of the song completely, realized that I knew exactly what it was about. I invented words (imagincy, noun— a state of thought-based creation) to try and complete the picture. It was all I could do, and I was right to do it.
This is about the time my father showed me a video of her singing live and I recognized my own vocabulary of movement reflected in her— the flexed feet, the extended elbows, splayed fingers and rocking from the ball of one foot to the ball of the other foot. She wore no shoes and looked like her soul was bigger than the room. Do you ever lay in bed and think you could just erupt and sprout wings? Because I do.
This is about being completely, devastatingly, horrifically incapable of writing about Björk’s artistry, because there is nothing I can do to appropriately describe the gravitas of her voice. It’s a stupid conclusion to come to after having written several paragraphs on said artistry, I know, but what I can say about it will never be enough. It’s like finding God in a junk drawer. You’d never expect it, even though it’s so obvious that it belongs there.
This is also about the fact that there was once a very shy girl who was born on a commune and learned to sing by screaming into the wind while she was walking home from school. And the fact that when I was little, I did the same thing while standing in rivers, because the natural instinct of humanity is to use the voice. There’s a nerve in your brain, the Vagus nerve, that can cause depression when understimulated— the “cure” for it is singing and laughing and shouting, because that’s what we as people are supposed to do.
So maybe it’s my life purpose to stand in fast water and yell at the top of my lungs or to shout along to music while on the highway or to crawl into caves and try and make my voice echo. It might be your life purpose, too.
I am warding off sadness. I’m a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl. I am raising a wonderful hell. This is the triumph of heart, and this is where I’m staying— this is my home.