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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781501322747 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publication date: | 10/05/2017 |
| Series: | 33 1/3 Series |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Sales rank: | 649,241 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.70(w) x 6.40(h) x 0.50(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
State of emergency: Björk's crisis
As she began to write the songs that would become Homogenic, Björk found herself driven by an urge to pare things down to their essence. The finished album embraces a range of moods: the delicate, nurturing warmth of 'All Is Full of Love'; the cathartic, joyous violence of 'Pluto'; the cold fury of '5 Years'. Yet it has a unity of style quite different to the manic magpie spirit of Björk's first two mature solo ventures, Debut and Post, albums that flit giddily between genres. On Homogenic, the edges between the exuberant hip-hopped pop of 'Alarm Call' and the flouncing orchestral drama of 'Bachelorette' are smoothed by a tonally consistent palette of beats and strings. Homogenic's title suggests homogeneity, and Björk planned for the album to have 'one flavour' throughout.
This sudden interest in a purposeful pruning back was an understandable reaction to the whirlwind of new experiences and sounds that had been Björk's life since moving to London at the beginning of 1993. She'd achieved and learned a lot in that time, recording and releasing Debut and Post and becoming, along the way, a pop personality and the world's most famous Icelander. It was a time of rapid change and rich growth, but also of great upheaval.
It had been a wrench to leave her beloved hometown of Reykjavík, but following the demise of her former band, the Sugarcubes, Björk's hunger to explore what she could achieve with her own songs had become overwhelming. 'I went on a mission,' she explained. 'I knew I had to put myself in an emergency situation, like Bruce Willis in Die Hard or something, to get all these things out of me.' The Sugarcubes had formed in June 1986 when Björk was twenty, shortly after the birth of her son Sindri. They had been a mischievous, idiosyncratic guitar outfit formed (Björk has often asserted) as a joke – an ironic pop supergroup composed of leading lights from Reykjavík's intensely intellectual, anarchic punk scene. This 'joke' had gone on to become Iceland's first real international musical success. Even so, their UK-based label One Little Indian didn't expect Björk's Debut, released in July 1993, to sell more than 40,000 copies worldwide; it sold 600,000 in its first three months. The Sugarcubes had played with the concept of being pop stars, treating it as an intellectual conceit: 'a pop band, a living cliché'.
Post, which followed in June 1995, raised her profile even higher with an accidental megahit, 'It's Oh So Quiet', an exuberant, brassy cover of a '50s big-band belter, which upscaled Björk into the sort of celebrity that even your granny would have heard of. It was a wild ride: 'I fucking wake up in the morning with a far too big heart, I don't know what to do with it really,'4 Björk enthused manically. Debut and Post reflected that mood: high-energy, exuberant, restless. While touring Post, she'd pushed herself so hard that she'd lost her voice, and the enforced silence had given her a new focus: 'You end up just writing what is dead important ... everything becomes so precious.'
At the time of Debut's release, Björk had said her ultimate aim was that confused critics should 'categorize my music as "Björk music" ... Björk music is very flexible, very intense and very rich. But it is also very whimsical and always changing.' Mercurial whimsicality, though, isn't an easy essence for people to grasp, and by the time of Homogenic, Björk was starting to think she might need to define 'Björk music' more clearly. Her taste in culturally of-the-moment collaborators was starting to dominate the discussion, particularly in the light of her relationships with trip-hop auteur Tricky (who'd co-produced two tracks on Post) and drum'n'bass scene figurehead Goldie (who'd been one of her support acts on the Post tour). The sound of her albums was often credited to her co-producers, with Björk characterized as a force-of-nature voice who needed someone else to do the technical stuff. With Homogenic, Björk wanted the attention to be on her artistry, her sound. 'I'm teasing myself about doing an album completely independently, just in a room alone,' she said. 'It's not that I don't love the process of working with exceptional, artistic people, but I'd like to try something where I do everything from A to Z.'
With that independent, purifying spirit in mind, Björk decided not to call on Nellee Hooper, the producer who had overseen Debut and Post. Instead, she turned to Markus Dravs, Post's young German sound engineer, who she knew – not least from the fact that he'd also worked with her hero Brian Eno – would be able to think outside the studio box. She began to phone Dravs up from the Post tour to explain her ideas for beats and rhythms: crunchy, violent like a volcanic explosion, dirty and distorted like the underground dance music that she loved. In those conversations, the initial musical groundwork of Homogenic was laid. 'Because I'm not a drum programmer, I'd call him up and go "pssht ... shtsss ... crsht" down the phone, and by the time I got home he had built up a library of more than a hundred beats,' Björk explained. 'I used those to start building a kind of mosaic.' Beats had always been, Björk had previously admitted, her weakest point compositionally, and the main reason she'd turned to other producers in the past. This time around, with the help of Dravs, she was beginning with them, and finding ways to make them her own.
As well as fresh beats, Björk was planning a new way to approach things practically. While playing the summer festivals, she tasked Dravs, in August 1996, with building a 'posh, flashed-up writing studio' in her home in Maida Vale, north-west London. 'She wanted – certainly for the early stages – to do everything in her house,' recalls Dravs, 'which suited me fine: my wife and I had just had a baby. So I went round there with my daughter and Björk would sing her lullabies while I was setting up.' It was a productive time: these early days yielded the beginnings of at least four tracks, including '5 Years' (which had been played in an emerging form on the Post tour as early as October 1995), 'Bachelorette', 'Jóga' and 'Alarm Call'.
Despite the relaxed, domestic environment in which they were being crafted, the majority of these early songs are works of drama and tension. '5 Years' angrily berates a cowardly lover, too scared to live up to the challenges of intimacy: 'You can't handle love,' it admonishes over hard-marching, determinedly no-nonsense beats. 'Jóga', a tribute to Björk's close friend Jóhanna Jóhannsdóttir, embraces intensity, trying to deflect high pressure and turn it into an upward momentum: 'State of emergency / How beautiful to be.' 'Bachelorette', meanwhile, returns to the story of 'Isobel', the mysterious forest-dwelling character from Post, closing a song-trilogy begun on Debut's 'Human Behaviour' with defiant and confrontational statements of identity: 'I'm a path of cinders / Burning under your feet.'
The Isobel songs tell a story of travel, searching and self-discovery that draws on Björk's own experiences, crafted into a miniature myth. 'In "Human Behaviour" she's a little girl,' Björk explained. 'In "Isobel" she moves to the big city and big lights. She functions with her intuition, which isn't very good in cities, and clashes with a lot of ill-behaved people.' In the song that bears her name, Isobel responds to the ill behaviour of city people by training moths as 'messengers of intuition', sending them back to school the urbanites in instinct and empathy.
Björk, like her allegorical counterpart, had clashed with the world since leaving home for the big city. It had been a work-hard, play-hard three years in London, and her success had made her a target of the tabloids and paparazzi. In February 1996, on tour in Asia and ambushed by cameras at Bangkok airport, an overstretched, frazzled Björk tired of the whole hoopla, attacking reporter Julie Kaufman with considerably more force than a moth. In 'Bachelorette', a song first begun not long before the Kaufman incident, the mysterious nature child Isobel finally prevails over the city-dwellers, triumphing with an aggressive love as her weapon. 'Isobel decides to return to the city and to take a train, like in the 30s, in South America somewhere,' explained Björk. 'She decides to confront love with love and confronts the cowards that don't have the guts to fall in love with love.' In the end, nature, in sympathy with Isobel, takes over and trees grow over the city. 'Bachelorette' is intuition as shock and awe, empathy as overwhelming force, Isobel's dramatic revenge, full of warning and bristly assertion.
Yet confrontation, pressure and conflict weren't the only opening themes to Homogenic. 'Alarm Call' and the lyrics, at least, of 'All Neon Like', which were also in the works at this stage, suggest that healing and comfort – the emotional flipside of 'Bachelorette', 'Jóga' and '5 Years' – were just as important as aggressive assertion. 'Alarm Call' is an upbeat, dance-poppy testament to Björk's faith in the power of music and positivity: 'I want to go on a mountain top / With a radio and good batteries / And play a joyous tune / And free the human race from suffering.' The lambent, ambient hip-hop groove of 'All Neon Like' began life as 'Techno-Prayer', a soothing poem about accepting vulnerability and starting to heal that was published in the July 1996 issue of Details: 'I'm askin for help / The luminous beam / To feed me / While I sleep.' Both the short poem and the finished lyric released on the album in September 1997 share a vision of a healing metamorphosis. Rather than the 'larva' that surrounds the wounded narrator in 'Techno-Prayer', in 'All Neon Like' there is a 'cocoon', as if with time the larva – perhaps the first life-cycle of Isobel's instinct-moths – has woven the 'glow-in-the-dark threads' mentioned in both versions into a protective shell, a place to grow safely. Most importantly, between 'Techno-Prayer' and 'All Neon Like' the focus moves from 'me' to 'you'; in the poem, the narrator is attempting to heal herself; in the finished song, she is instead reaching out to heal others.
With a rough scheme of beats in place, to bring these songs of crisis and recovery to life, Björk's next tools were to be violins and cellos: she was evangelistic in interviews about the revolutionary sonic potential of a 'chamber music mentality, spiritual and free, my new thing', and how her new songs, penned on her laptop during breaks on tour, were 'mostly based on string quartets'. In January 1996, before she even had final lyrics or beats for 'Bachelorette', she'd recorded a full orchestral backing that opens with tense, thrumming violins which swoop down to meet the dramatic boom of the timpani. This was no afterthought, no garnish of strings, but the basis of the song. In July 1996, she interviewed German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, a childhood hero, in Dazed & Confused, and in August, she sang Arnold Schoenberg's difficult atonal work Pierrot Lunaire at Switzerland's Verbier Festival.
Björk was drawing more than she had in a long time on her ten years of classical music schooling at Reykjavík's Barnamúsíkskóli, having 'stormed out of it at the age of fifteen as an angry punk who thinks Beethoven sucks'. The young prodigy had attended the school since she was five, studying recorder, flute and a canonical syllabus that was heavy on Bach and Mozart, but not so hot on spontaneity. She'd felt restricted by the rigidity, and also the lack of a focus on Icelandic musical heritage. 'I felt I was being force-fed with tradition that wasn't mine,' she said in 2002. 'People who were of my generation were craving for an Icelandic music, an Icelandic sound, that expressed Icelandic reality ... so I sort of strived with my headmaster.'
Homogenic represented a deliberate return to Björk's classical training, reinventing and adapting it for her own purposes. Her first two albums had betrayed little of it beyond Brazilian composer-producer Eumir Deodato's rich string arrangements for Post. Telegram, Post's remix album, had seen her reach out to the modern classical world, working with maverick Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie on 'My Spine' and The Brodsky Quartet on a version of 'Hyperballad'. By the time of Homogenic, she was ready to settle those old arguments with her headmaster.
The title Homogenic phonetically suggests home as well as homogeneity; in addition to representing Björk herself more purely, the album was going to evoke that new national music she'd craved at school, merging classical sounds with her own sense of Icelandic identity. 'I'm really seeking after something that's Icelandic,' she said. 'And I want it to be more me, this album. Debut and Post are a bit like the Tin Tin books. Sort of Tin Tin goes to Congo. Tin Tin goes to Tibet ... now I think it's a bit more "Björk goes home."' For Björk, the key to crafting Icelandic music was to evoke her nation's natural grandeur, the wilderness in which she'd loved to walk and sing alone as a child. 'She wanted to represent the landscape in her record; the mountains and glaciers were the beats, and the strings would be the moss,' says Dravs. Hence Homogenic's volcanically explosive sounds and sense of chilly grandeur: Björk was trying to conjure her vision of Iceland's stern beauty in the grand sweep and spacious yearning of 'Hunter's' lonely cello motif, or the stark contrast between mournfully beautiful strings and clashing, grinding beats on 'Jóga', where her high-soaring chorus exults in 'emotional landscapes'.
The original plan was to craft Homogenic with nothing but those beats and strings, and that voice; it would be Björk music defined starkly and clearly. 'Doing Debut was like, "Wooooah!" Like a kid in a toy store. It's like, "I can have anything? Cool!"' Björk said. 'But I thought the true challenge was to have almost no toys, down to one stick, without a second of boredom.' Unlike Debut and Post, eclectic records strongly flavoured by Björk's collaborators, the overall schemes and themes of Homogenic were laid out determinedly in advance.
The plan was coming together nicely, and Björk was excited about working on the album at home. 'The main problem is,' she said, 'I'm gonna have to call the police in the middle of the night cos I'm working in the studio. "Make me stop," I'll say, "I'm trying to sleep!" I'm gonna start a new, very difficult relationship with myself!'
Björk's relationship with herself was indeed about to become a lot more difficult, but not because of midnight feasts at the mixing desk. First, there was trouble on the romantic front. Her relationship with Goldie had been intense, strained by their busy schedules, and also very public: the couple had long been the focus of tabloid reporters and rumours of impending marriage fuelled the hunger for gossip. As autumn drew in, however, Goldie was getting cold feet. 'It was weird, because it should have been the perfect scenario,' he said. 'This girl wants to marry you, she wants to buy this fucking house ... This vision is there, saying "Do you want me?" And I said, "No." It's like, "Are you stupid or what?"'
Then, days after the couple split, Björk was dealt an even harder blow. Ricardo López, an obsessive twenty-one-year-old fan, filmed himself making a letter bomb (a book filled with sulphuric acid that would spray the recipient on opening) as Björk's version of 'I Remember You' played in the background. He was, he said, enraged that Björk was in a relationship with a black man. López posted the bomb to Björk and then shot himself in the head on camera on 12 September 1996. Four days later his body was discovered, and the bomb intercepted on the way to the One Little Indian offices.
Immediately, the media descended on Björk's home, and the peaceful, private setting of those happy, relaxed studio sessions with Dravs became a goldfish bowl. The Maida Vale house was close to the street, and also slightly sunken. 'A few steps down from the garden gates at the front of the street you could almost point a lens into her bedroom,' says Dravs. When Björk emerged to give a statement, there was, as well as shock and sadness, frustration and anger in her expression. 'It's terrible. I'm not sure if I'll dream very properly for a while,' she mumbled while camera flashes went off around her. 'I make music, but in other terms, you know, people shouldn't take me too literally and get involved in my personal life.'
Besieged, her relationships with her public persona and her home ruptured, Björk wrote another new song, 'So Broken', a very un-Björkish ballad of despair inspired directly by the bomb and López's suicide. It has none of the defiance of 'Bachelorette' or '5 Years', nor the grounded confidence of 'Jóga' or 'Alarm Call', just pain: 'I'm so completely unhealable, baby'. Though it was powerfully necessary, such venting of negative emotion didn't fit with Björk's established musical principles. 'I would always write songs about happy things and keep my dirty laundry to myself,' she fretted. In order to process her predicament, she imagined the song as a black joke, picturing herself as the lead in a melodramatic Spanish soap opera, backed, in her head, by children crying and dish suds splashing. As it turned out, Spain was also to offer a more concrete escape in the form of El Cortijo, a studio near the mountains in Málaga owned by Björk's tour drummer Trevor Morais, which he offered up as a refuge. In a matter of days, Björk and Dravs packed up their equipment and ran for the hills.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Homogenic 33 1/3"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Emily Mackay.
Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: I'm going hunting1 State of emergency: Björk's crisis
2 I want to go on a mountain top: Björk's escape
3 The marvellous web: Björk's friends
4 Excuse me, but I just have to explode: Björk's noises
5 You just didn't know me: Björk's characters
6 Home, what's been found: Björk's national anthems
7 I dare you to take me on: Björk's loves
8 Brand new tomorrow: Björk's images
9 Game we're playing is life: Björk's virtual realities