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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
As Bjork releases an extraordinary career retrospective, it's time to crown her as the most important pop musician of her generation.
Sep 6, 2003 | In 1993, the former lead singer of the Sugarcubes, a popular alternative rock band from Iceland, released an album called "Debut." So began the most extraordinary musical trajectory of the decade. Ten years later that singer, Björk, is the queen of contemporary music. She has released four solo albums, each one expanding the bounds of what seems possible in popular music. In my experience, no other active musician inspires as much respect in other musicians. A forthcoming documentary titled "Inside Björk" features testimonials from artists as diverse as Thom Yorke, Missy Elliott, Elton John and religious composer John Taverner.
But for all that, Björk remains curiously isolated, her music more loved than influential. Radiohead, probably her closest rival in the intersection of popularity and critical acclaim that makes up at least one definition of greatness, has spawned countless baby Radioheads. Björk has no copycats, no one feeding so obviously off her achievements, because those achievements are so alien. Radiohead is very much of our time, the musical zeitgeist for the millennium, but Björk and her music come from a different time and place. There are two options in placing Björk: Either she is an anomaly, brilliant but finally irrelevant, or she is the most important and forward-looking musician of her generation. In either case, we will need to wait 50 years to really make sense of what she has done, and absorb her influence in any useful way.
Over the course of the summer, One Little Indian Records has been releasing a series of eight Björk-related DVDs, ranging from live concerts to music video collections to documentaries, along with a box set of four live-concert CDs, with each disc corresponding to one of her studio albums (that is, containing the same songs in the same order). This glut of new material comes only half a year after Elektra released the "Family Tree" box set, an idiosyncratically curated career retrospective on one full-length and five 3-inch CDs.
Retrospective projects of this size are normally reserved for dead jazz musicians or canonical classical composers. For a 36-year-old pop star with a mere four solo albums to her name to get this kind of treatment is unprecedented. Even more extraordinary, no one is likely to complain about it: If any other active pop musician (excepting, perhaps, living legends like Bob Dylan or Neil Young, with decades of strong material behind them) were to attempt a similarly grandiose project, it would be taken as an act of unforgivable hubris.
The world of alternative popular culture is none too tolerant of success, as Wilco, the Strokes and even Radiohead have recently discovered, with waves of faddish discontent emanating from Manhattan, leaving no hipster unaffected. But Björk has enjoyed 10 years of uncommonly smooth sailing with nary a backlash in sight. Since striking out on her own in 1993, she has managed to retain complete indie credibility and alterna-cool while still selling millions of records. This is an extraordinary achievement in a world where the two are seen as incompatible. The modern-day parable of Kurt Cobain's life is the ultimate cautionary tale: The strain between art and commerce was too much for him. Not only does Björk seem unlikely to kill herself, she projects an air of almost enchanted contentment.
One reason that Björk has so successfully escaped criticism is that she escapes the confines of genre. Bands are too often criticized not for their own shortcomings, but for the shortcomings of whatever genre or movement they are perceived to represent. If you're fed up with the New York rock revival, take it out on the Strokes; if you think that grunge lost its authenticity, go after Pearl Jam. Björk's music refuses to fit snugly into any genre. Some tracks on her first album, "Debut," could be called club and some from her second album, "Post," come close to trip-hop. Otherwise her music exists in more or less uncharted territory. There are, of course, other musicians of whom this is true, but few have had success at all comparable to Björk's. What is more unusual is that her music can't effectively be described as a mixture of genres. The work of even the most iconoclastic musicians can usually be approximated with a kind of a + b + c = x (Tom Waits = Tin Pan Alley + Kurt Weill + carnival). No such equation is remotely convincing when it comes to describing Björk's music.
What kind of music is she making, then? There are a number of possible answers. None of them is entirely satisfying, but each is at least partially illuminating. A friend of mine suggests that she is actively trying to figure out what pop music will be like in 30 years. I would half-seriously propose that she's making a new kind of Icelandic classical music. This is an answer that Björk herself has hinted at. She discusses her 10 years of conservatory training as an experience of being "force-fed German composers." Against that, she sets her own desire "to invent a new Icelandic modern musical language."
Another possible answer, of course, is that she's just a clubby pop musician who has bent the rules of the genre far enough to appear unique, causing critics like me to wax rhapsodic about nothing much. In the end, pigeonholing gets us nowhere. Rather than trying to provide a definitive answer to this perplexing question, I'll attempt to outline, as simply as I can, her musical achievements.
It seems impossible to start with anything other than that voice. "Childlike," "feral," "alien": All three words have been used repeatedly in describing her pipes, and their apparent incompatibility alone gives some sense of just how unusual the sound is. Billie Holiday's voice famously combined childishness with world-weary wisdom. Björk has pushed the paradox a little further, combining childishness with ferocity and unbridled sexuality.
She is a true virtuoso vocalist, the likes of whom popular music has rarely seen. Her operatic range and seemingly effortless pitch control have been demonstrated not only in her own music, but in her performances of Arnold Schoenberg's notoriously difficult "Pierrot Lunaire." Her voice can be perfectly clear, and she often phrases in an intentionally tentative way, bringing the childlike quality of her singing to the fore. But that can be undercut immediately by an extraordinary guttural sound, as if the note were too fragile to support the energy coming out of her body. It is a sound no child could ever make.
