Bjork debut daye how to#
What you should be doing is learning how to live with other human beings." In the three decades since her solo debut, the artist has worked steadily toward that ideal: a place where her voice can flow into the ears of her listeners and the throats of her collaborators, flexing together with them as a single muscle rather than bowling them over from on high. "For me, the target is to learn how to communicate with other people, which is the hardest thing, after all. F*** that," Björk told Interview in 1995. "Everything's geared toward self-sufficiency. Her early years in the public imagination had made her rare and in high demand, but she was interested in more than singularity. She would soon tire of that isolated vantage. Sound became synonymous with personhood: Björk was the voice that leapt out of her. To fans, it held her aloft from the world of other people. To critics, it amplified an intractable weirdness, evidence of individuality so excessive it couldn't help but result in celebrity. As spectacular as that voice was, as much as it struck awe into whoever heard it, it vaulted her up to a bizarre and lonely place. The same year, an obsessed American fan sent her a letter bomb before filming his own suicide. At the same time as she was beginning to bristle at its limitations, her stardom took a painful turn: In 1996, she briefly became tabloid fodder after attacking a reporter at a Bangkok airport who had tried to interview her young son. "You've got to understand that all the interviews that journalists do to me, they always just ask me for an hour what it's like being strange," Björk said while promoting her second album, Post. And she sang with a fearlessness that many read as childlike - a little too raw and earnest for the world of adults, too prone to spurts of glossolalia, as if she were still serenading commuters on that bus. Journalists picked apart the " kooky" ways she moved and dressed ad absurdum. Her face and accent denoted her otherness, her belonging to a volcanic island at the northern tip of the world. Music writers splashed bewildered language over the sound: Björk's voice was " a heavenly hiccuping thing that almost defies terrestrial description," " this dazzling, pure instrument that can put the fear of God into you when she lets fly." It came part and parcel with the uninhibited persona, once summarized as " eccentric Icelandic techno elf," that manifested in the distinctive look and choreography of her performances and music videos.Īs a solo artist in the '90s, Björk came up amid a generation of women eccentrics that included PJ Harvey, Lauryn Hill, Fiona Apple and Tori Amos - all daring songwriters who inspired as much discomfort as devotion in a patriarchal pop culture. Yet as it rang across global airwaves, that voice thrilled listeners with its specialness - its unique pronunciations, distinct syntaxes, unselfconscious reveries and abundant power. I would stand up on the seats and shout out my favorite songs," she said during a 1988 magazine interview. "When I was small, my mother couldn't take a bus because I was always singing on the buses.
When asked herself, the artist described her own singing as something that came naturally, a form of expression learned in childhood and preserved since then, as automatic as speech. She snowballed the momentum she'd gathered with The Sugarcubes and, in 1993, broke from rock into a mix of big-band balladeering and rave-inflected Europop with Debut, the album that laid the groundwork for her to become an international star and Iceland's most visible cultural export.
It seemed to travel through metal and concrete and glass."īy then, Björk was four years into her solo career, having parted ways with her Reykjavík alternative band at the start of the '90s. "When The Sugarcubes played with U2, I would be preparing in the dressing room, and even if I couldn't hear the band. In a 1997 documentary about Björk, U2 frontman Bono spoke of the Icelandic pop star's voice as a weapon. In the three decades between her solo debut and this year's Fossora, Björk has turned her singular singing voice toward a more egalitarian ideal.
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