Why do I place B on a level with Chopin, Thelonious Monk,
Lennon and McCartney, Missy and Timbaland? She understands
that music, like life, should have asymmetrical symmetry.
Here are excertps from
a fine piece of music criticism by Thomas Bartlett in Salon:
'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 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 non-rhyming lyrics,
of course, notably Lou Reed and Radiohead's Thom Yorke,
but it remains an unusual technique.
David Byrne is another great user
of nonrhyming lyrics.
[Björk's] 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
ten 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.
B reminds me of Frank Gehry buildings, ee cummings (whose
peoms B has more than once set to music), Susan
Blackmore's haircut, Monk and Miles and Ornette, Anti-Pop
Consortium and the Wu-Tang Clan. Like the most adventurous
hip-hop artists, B contrasts her vocal asymmetry with the
posthuman perfection of electronic beats. Most B tunes rest
on four-four grids, drum loops and MIDI patterns in groups
of two and four and eight and sixteen.
All Neon Like
B's harmonic sense is more like a modern jazz or classical
composer than a pop singer's. She isn't really a pop singer
at all; she's more like an avant-gardist with enough personal
charisma to have attracted a pop-scale audience. B is the
only major contemporary songwriter I can think of who uses
diminished scale:
An Echo, A Stain
Or melodic minor and lydian:
Possibly Maybe
Or lydian dominant:
Pluto
Even when she uses the plain-vanilla major scale, B's angular
phrasing can make it sound awkward and dissonant:
Anchor Song
B seems to be one of the only musicians outside of hip-hop
who gets that rock and roll is over. There's almost no guitar
in any of B's work. There's a sample of distorted guitar on
Human Behavior, classical guitar on So Broken, pedal steel
on live versions of Possibly Maybe -- I think that's about
it. Her stringed instrument accompaniment of choice is the
harp. It makes it much easier to avoid tired cliche when you
don't use standard instrumentation.
B points us at the future in many aspects of her music, none
more so than in the nature of her collaborations. The point
of her productions isn't so much their computerized sound.
I think B's love of computers is more for the way they lower
the barrier between the ideas in her head and the sound coming
out of the speakers. B recorded some of the final lead vocals
on Vespertine and Medúlla at her kitchen table on her
laptop, using a garden-variety SM 58 and an MBox. She lets
producers and programmers reshape her songs from the ground
up, changing rhythmic feel, key, tempo, genre, the texture
of her voice, everything. B can hear the musical potential
in the furthest fringe of any given style. Massive Attack
by themselves can sound like the lobby of a W hotel, but behind
Post they're devastating. Matmos albums are so experimental
as to be unlistenable, but in the context of Vespertine, their
electronic percussion is gorgeous. Bonny Prince Billy and
Antony by themselves are insufferable, but on Drawing Restraint
9 and Volta respectively, they rock the booty.
More from Thomas
Bartlett:
Her wholehearted embrace of electronics, combined with
her unquestioned dominance of them, makes her our most optimistic
musician, blasting the matrix apart.
It's ironic that TB should describe B as such an optimistic,
because from what I can tell, she's also a textbook high-functioning
clinical depressive with social phobia. Not surprisingly,
so are most of her fans, myself included. B's lyrics make
frequent reference to suicidal ideation and self-harm. From
Hyperballad:
Every morning I walk towards the edge
and throw little things off
like car parts, bottles and cutlery
I imagine what my body would sound like
slamming against those rocks
and when I land, will my eyes be closed or open?
From All Neon Like:
Don't get angry with yourself
I'll heal you
with a razor blade
I'll cut a slit open
From Pagan Poetry
But it makes me want to cut myself, aaaaah
The video for this song includes graphic closeups of B's
flesh being pierced with large needles. Some people think
she might be kidding. She isn't. Her
body language in interviews and onstage indicates to me
that she's as serious as a heart attack. This is music's greatest
optimist? Yes she is. The joyousness of her music is an earned
joyousness, like the joyousness of Louis Armstrong, Billie
Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk:
an earned kind, a tragic kind, a truthful kind, a kind that
acknowledges that life sucks, and that we might as well make
the best of things by getting our groove on.
If you're not already a fan, I recommend all of her solo
studio albums, and I recommend listening to them in order
of release:
Debut
Post
Telegram
Homogenic
Vespertine
Medúlla
Volta
If your experience is like mine, you won't like any of them
for the first hundred or two listens. Give it time, she sneaks
up on you.
B's music videos are all available on DVD and Youtube, and
most of them are on iTunes by this point. They range from
enjoyably odd to transcendently odd. As with the albums, I'd
watch them all, and in order. Be warned that they get more
disturbing as they go along.
If B comes to your town, go see her, her shows are revelatory.
Hear
her and Konono No 1 live in concert, courtesy of NPR. Here
are my three favorite tracks from the mildly redundant but
uniformly hot Live Box:
Human Behaviour (just voice and harpsichord!)
One Day (with, like, thirty-five percussionists!)
It's Not Up To You
Accompanying the end credits to Being
John Malkovich is a beautiful tune called Amphibian, not
on iTunes, but probably easily downloaded somewhere. Then
there's Selmasongs, the soundtrack to Dancer
In The Dark. My feelings about the movie are mixed. I
don't like Lars Von Trier's movies, and Dancer is mostly a
masochistic experience. B gave the project her usual hundred
and ten percent, and she makes it at least watchable. The
dance sequences are fantastic. The soundtrack yielded some
nice tunes, too, most especially the overture and New World.
They're not on iTunes, but again are widely downloadable elsewhere.
Even more problematic is Music from Drawing Restraint 9,
the most relentlessly avant-garde of B's albums so far. I
didn't even see the movie, since Matthew Barney is an even
greater test of my patience than Lars Von Trier. I like the
music, but it draws heavily on Chinese opera and is generally
a steep hill to climb. Two of the relatively accessible tracks:
Gratitude - There's some impenetrable back story on
the text, part of the movie's thing about whales that I
don't have the energy to find out about. I just really like
the melody and the arrangement.
Cetacea - Just vocals and bells, ethereal.
Ambergris March - All percussion, like the workings
of a giant futuristic clock.
B released an entire album of other people's remixes and
covers of Army of Me. Here's my favorite - it references English
folkdancing!
Army of Me (Dr Syntax 'n' CB Turbo Vs. Rivethead)
The coolest and weirdest track on Telegram is My Spine, B's
duet with deaf
Scottish classical percussion sensation Evelyn Glennie.
Apparently, they recorded another one too, much less crazy,
just B's vocals and EG's marimba:
Oxygen
B has generated more and better remixes than any other electronic
musician I can think of. Sadly not on iTunes is a CD called
The Best Mixes From Debut For All The People Who Don't Buy
White-Labels. If you can find it, get it. Dig especially Underworld's
extremely extended posthuman dance mix of Human Behavior.
Other noteworthy mixes:
Earth Intruders (Lexx Remix)
Innocence (Simian Mobile Disco Twelve Inch Remix)
Innocence (Ghostigital Untouchable Innocence Still Amazes
Fearless Remix)
Timbaland uses a sample of Jóga in his hilarious remix
of this Missy Elliott tune:
Hit Em Wit Da Hee
A bit of self-promotion: Dig my remixes of Earth
Intruders and It's
Oh So Quiet.
What is a jazz arrangement but an analog remix? The first
time I encountered B in a jazz setting was right at the obsessive
peak of my relationship with Homogenic. I went to hear Jason
Moran, and he closed the set with Jóga. That tune has
since bemen interpreted by many jazz musicians, including
me. My former jazz octet, The Poma-Swank, did a number
of B tunes, including:
Possibly Maybe
B herself did an entire album with an Icelandic jazz trio
called Gling-Gló. It sounds like a great idea, but
sadly, I can't recommend the record. I'd love to hear B do
more jazz, but maybe not with Icelandic musicians, who with
all due respect play
extremely white. Here's the high point:
I Can't Help Loving That Man
Travis Sullivan's Björkestra
is a seventeen-piece big band based in NYC that plays nothing
but tunes by or associated with B. I can't completely
get behind their arrangements, which veer into fuzak territory
too often for my tastes. Still, when they're on, they are
right on. Their version of Hyperballad could make a strong
man weep. It's a noble undertaking overall, one well worth
supporting. I think this city could do with some more all-B
jazz bands. In a city that for a period supported two different
rock bands who only played songs about hockey (no joke), surely
we can support more Björkestras. I have nice jazz arrangements
of Human Behaviour, One Day, The Pleasure Is All Mine, All
Is Full Of Love, Hyperballad and Anchor Song sitting on my
hard drive, anybody want to form a band and play them?
© ethan hein 2007 | back
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