Aside from her singing, it's the production on her albums that has garnered Björk the most praise. She is viewed as a true sonic innovator, one who has extended the frontiers of music in general, and electronic music in particular, with each new release. There's no question that the sonic worlds that Björk has created for her albums are entirely distinctive, but there are two qualifications that should be kept in mind. The first is that this element of her work has been deeply collaborative.

She has worked with some of the most innovative producers and programmers in electronic music, including Nellee Hooper, Marius de Vries, Graham Massey, Mark Bell, Tricky, Howie B and Matmos. The second is that, contrary to much of what has been written, her talent is less for creating new sounds than for recombining existing sounds in new ways. On "Homogenic," string octet and accordion are combined with volcanic electronic beats, to create a desolate, apocalyptic soundscape. On "Vespertine" she took the sterile clicks and crackles of Powerbook improvisers, and built them into a comforting cocoon of sound, embellished with music boxes and harps. She has consistently taken sounds from the far fringes of electronic and experimental music and used them in her own music. Rarely has a mainstream artist relied so heavily, and so successfully, on the avant-garde.

While Björk has been, if anything, overappreciated as a sonic innovator, she has been underappreciated as a songwriter. She is the only major songwriter in recent memory for whom the apparently inescapable influence of Bob Dylan is irrelevant. Her lyrics stand out for a simple reason: They don't rhyme. Other songwriters have experimented with nonrhyming lyrics, of course, notably Lou Reed and Radiohead's Thom Yorke, but it remains an unusual technique.

In this regard, popular song lags far behind poetry: If Cole Porter is Alexander Pope, effortlessly tossing off his couplets, then we have progressed perhaps as far as the Victorian era, gingerly testing out off-rhymes and unusual line breaks. But there is Björk, sprinting ahead to tear the conventions apart, as if T.S. Eliot had been dropped among Tennyson, Arnold and Browning. (A better analogy might be Emily Dickinson, who did write in the Victorian era, who did shatter many of poetry's conventions and whose crystalline constructions display a definite kinship to Björk's ... but nobody bought her records.)

This is partly a matter of courage (or foolishness) on Björk's part, simply choosing not to rhyme where anyone else would, but it is also that she often phrases her melodies in a way that seems not to call for rhyme. Pop music songs are almost always written in clear, regular phrases, all of the same length, that are further locked together with rhyme. Writers who tinker with that construction, as Burt Bacharach and Hal David did, by dropping or adding measures, pushing and pulling the melodic lines so that they don't fit together quite so squarely, often use rhyme as a glue to hold their relatively flimsy structures together.

Björk is different in that she does not tinker with the structure, she discards it. This is not equally true of all of her work, or of all elements of her songwriting -- "Venus as a Boy," for example, has fairly standard melodic phrases, and she often sticks to the verse-chorus structure of popular song -- but for the most part she is working from a different template. Her phrases are anything but regular; rather than a series of four-bar phrases, she might have one of three followed by two of five, finished with one of four.

Even more singular, her melodic phrases often display little or no connection to the beats beneath them. The melodies themselves are often developed through motifs, with short phrases repeated and elaborated, in a manner more similar to Brahms than to other popular songwriters. Björk's 10 years of conservatory training show here -- the influence of the composers she despised is clearly in evidence. Listen to the opening of "Hidden Place" from "Vespertine": The verse melody is a four-note motif, resolved differently each time. It repeats more frequently as it becomes more agitated, never matching up comfortably with the beat beneath it. Finally, it snowballs into the chorus.

Because of these irregular melodic phrases and unrhymed lyrics, it always takes a moment to adjust to Björk's songs. They can sound clumsy at first, strangely forced, unfocused or simply incomprehensible. The end result, though, is that her music has a freshness, an air of the unexpected, that is unusual. In most pop songs, an attentive listener can pick up the basic structure almost immediately. Consciously or not, he or she anticipates the rhymes, the call and response of the phrases. Björk's songs keep even the most exacting listeners a little off balance. There are no rhymes to guess at, no way of predicting what will come next. They force you to listen intensely.

And it's worth listening intensely, not just to the music, but to the words as well. Her lyrics are often reminiscent of e.e. cummings; deeply felt emotions, always tempered by a dash of cheekiness. They can be exhilarating ("I'm no fucking Buddhist/ but this is enlightenment"), touching ("since we broke up/ I'm wearing lipstick again/ I'll suck my tongue/ as a remembrance of you"), morbid ("I imagine what my body would sound like/ slamming against those rocks/ and when it lands/ will my eyes/ be closed or open?"), observant ("I thought I could organize freedom/ how Scandinavian of me"), and disarmingly intimate ("He slides inside/ half awake half asleep/ we faint back into sleephood/ when I wake up a second time in his arms/ gorgeousness, he's still inside me"). She likes to fold personal material into the realm of fairy tales, so that everything becomes mythic. The entire lyrics of "Unravel" are "While you are away/ my heart comes undone/ slowly unravels/ in a ball of yarn/ the devil collects it/ with a grin/ our love/ in a ball of yarn/ he'll never return it/ so when you come back/ we'll have to make new love."

It is mystifying that Björk has had such success with such unconventional songwriting. She has produced her share of catchy choruses, to be sure ("Hyperballad," "Venus as a Boy"), but even hardcore Björk fans would be hard-pressed to hum most of her songs. Even in some of her more accessible material, there are surprises in store: The melody to "Human Behavior," her first single, is in an entirely different key from the bass line.

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