One Week // One Band

Björk - “Enjoy”

Both Post and Debut are very “spastic” (Björk’s term). They jump from genre to genre between and within songs. Trip-hop beats nestle next to orchestral strings and mambo drums. Trying to describe what is exactly happening, musically, in “I Miss You” (whistles, saxophones, tabla drums, organs) makes it sound like a joke rather than an ecstatic ode to hopeful expectations. It’s this heterogeneity and novelty lust that characterizes Post. And it’s an approach to sound we’ve lost. While several pop artists in the nineties approached music as a postmodern smorgasbord – think of Basement Jaxx, Beck, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness – pop music has become increasingly interested in nailing one specific sound and never deviating from it. As SFJ notes, Daft Punk are the avatars of our current state of pop, not Basement Jaxx - and certainly not Post-era Björk. (Note the name Post: it’s not just about mail; it’s also about being postmodern.)

This makes it strange to consider Post in terms of Björk’s career. While Post is universally loved – a few years ago, Stereogum hired several of indie’s big stars to make a cover album for it – almost no contemporary artists seem particularly influenced by it. The covers illustrated this dynamic. While everyone involved gushed over the album, the covers tended toward the overly ornate and fiddly (likely a consequence of hiring a bunch of ornate and fiddly indie artists). Most of the contributors seemed to read the album as a Vespertine warm-up. They saw only a maze of sounds intricately arrayed, and they generally passed on replicating its immediate joy. Pattern is Movement did a version of “Enjoy” that seems to have ignored several of the song’s key lines, like “look at the speed out there/It magnetizes me to it.” Björk chose most of her album’s collaborators after partying with them in London. I can’t imagine how you could party to this cover album.

Listening to the original of “Enjoy” reveals the key problem to covering Björk. So much of Björk’s artistry is anchored in her iconic, immediately expressive and virtuosic voice. Covers of her work often fail because few can approach the instinctive command of melody and phrasing that she has, and her vocal quality is the point of all of her songs. The melody of “Enjoy” is simple enough that I can sing it. But listen to the “there” in that first “Look at the speed out there.”  Björk turns the word around, shaping its bright, sharp curves and adding a slight ripple, before cutely panting from exertion. As the verses marches on, she bursts further and further outward into the cave echo-augmented belting of “ENJOY! ENJOY!” This is the opposite of Auto-tune.

Again and again on Post, she builds from the intimacy of verses that sit on your ear. From there, her voice slides up a scale until she hits an explosive chorus. This is a punk artist’s vocal interpretation of pop’s basic trick; Björk’s sweeter version of grunge’s whisper-to-a-scream. But it’s the key that holds the insanity of the instrumentals together. Björk’s voice is the wide-eyed adventurer from Debut, venturing into the sonic novelty of Post. By making it easily approachable and immediately understood, we follow her into its overblown thickets. “This is really dangerous,” she sings on “Cover Me,” “but it’s worth all the effort. Cover me!”

Fifteen years later, Post seems ambitious, engaged and excited by the world, but also determined to stir mighty emotions in the listener. It sounds too weird and happy to be dated. While I may love other Björk albums more intimately – Homogenic and Medulla are my favourites – Post is the album for everyone. It is pure pop, pure delight.

Björk - “Possibly Maybe (Lucy Mix)”

Telegram is no one’s favourite Björk album (Christgau included). And its middling success on the charts is probably partly responsible for the ridiculous and tsunami-like Björk industry of endless remixes, B-sides and special editions. But it does illustrate the flip-side of why her work is nearly impossible to cover. As long as you have Björk’s voice and melodies in there, you can probably crank out a decent tune. When choosing my favourite Björk songs, I often find it difficult to choose between remixes or the original. For instance, I prefer Telegram’s version of “Possibly Maybe” to the one on Post. A line like “I suck my tongue/In remembrance of you” sounds more appropriate emerging from the drugged out, half-asleep sensuality of the Lucy mix. But either way, it’s her velvety delivery that carries the song’s key charm.

Björk’s relative egolessness about having people change and manipulate her work has encouraged her to work with numerous artists, including Tricky, Nellee Hooper, Thom Yorke, Matmos, Antony, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Timbaland, Rahzel, Talvin Singh, Graham Massey and Brian Chippendale. A few have become integral to her life as an artist, like Michel Gondry and Mark Bell. For Björk, the collaborations serve as a vital counterpoint to solitary work. “I work so much on my own,” she says, “which I enjoy very much. 90% of every album is me editing on a computer or writing, walking outside writing melodies, or writing lyrics.” Collaborating lets her “just [merge] with somebody who is hopefully quite different from me.”

This way of working – and the number of men she has worked with – has produced some negative perceptions of her work. In a 2008 Internet post, Björk accused an Icelandic newspaper of inaccuracy and sexism. According to her, they had reported Valgeir Sigurðsson had produced and written most of the instrumentals on Vespertine.* She corrected them: he had done neither; he was a sound engineer and programmer on the album. The writing and producing was done by her. The mistake prompted her to generalize: “it feels like still today after all these years people cannot imagine that woman can write, arrange or produce electronic music. i have had this experience many many times that the work i do on the computer gets credited to whatever male was in 10 meter radius during the job.”

Anyone who has read Alex Ross’s profile of Björk in the New Yorker can’t doubt her control over her work. But while other artists work exclusively in solitude with instruments and computers (or imagine they do), Björk is unapologetic in enjoying having other people to work over ideas. Björk plays other musicians.

Her collaborations are another example of Björk’s narrative of exploration and return. Creation begins in a place of solitude, but collaboration is the way to bring it into the world of ideas, to test it and make it a weirder thing than one could have originally imagined. Collaboration changes you just enough so that you can return back home to understand what that original solitude meant. It won’t lead you in the pure direction you intended, but that’s only a good thing. Purity of invention is overrated.

*It later turned out that Björk was a little confused about the facts: the newspaper had quoted someone who had suggested Sigurðsson was the producer and writer, rather than making the argument themselves.