Excuse Me, But I Just Have to Explode: Björk’s Noises

Homogenic didn’t just bring together strings and beats, independence and collaboration. In combining Björk’s wide-ranging influences, it also set out a challenge to the sometimes arbitrary divisions we make, not just between genres, but between the natural and the technological, the modern and the traditional. On a more immediate level, Björk the pop star’s embrace of the kind of carefully crafted, harsh and powerful beats used in the dance and hip-hop music that she loved shrugged off the polite sonic limitations conventionally expected of pop music, updating the template to suit Björk’s vision of a music worthy of modern times.

It was a shock to those who were expecting more along the lines of “It’s Oh So Quiet.” The rugged, distorted beats that crunch into the orchestral grandeur of “Bachelorette” or “Jóga,” not to mention the riotous climax of furiously cycling noise and muffled moans on “Pluto,” served notice to listeners that, sonically, Björk wasn’t going to play pretty any more. From Björk’s point of view, it was a natural progression: Post had featured tougher, harder, louder sounds than Début, and she’d wanted Homogenic to go even further, to feature “massive beats, really filthy.” That didn’t mean, though, that she wanted to abandon pop tendencies altogether. As abrasive as “Pluto” was, it follows “Alarm Call,” a song so self-consciously poppy that its demo was named “Jacko.” In fact, Björk’s enthusiasm for hard electronic sounds and her belief in pop were intrinsically linked. Pop music was a matter not just of accessibility, but of modernity; pop should be current, and reflect the increasingly electronic, digital world around it. In Homogenic, Björk embodied the philosophy that she had been refining since Début: electronic noise and pop as partners in the fight against stagnation.

Björk’s fascination with beats was longstanding. From her days as the drummer in Spit and Snot, she’d always been drawn to strongly rhythmic music, including hip-hop. She spoke often in earlier days of her love for NWA and Public Enemy. “From ’86 to ’88, if I couldn’t get to hear Public Enemy every day, I’d go sick,” she declared. “They’re so creative and brave and misunderstood … They take what they are living with every day and make a song out of it.” And when thinking about how to get the volcanic sonic power she wanted for Homogenic, Björk had thought first of RZA, who enthused about the Wu-Tang Clan’s rapport with her: “A lot of people, they scared to be around us sometimes, but Björk just runs around going, ‘Ark ark ark!’ It’s like we from the same motherfuckin’ cusp. She’s unorthodox.” The rock-solidity of Homogenic’s beats and its shiny, liquid textures make it an Icelandic relation of the sheeny, futuristic 90s hip-hop of the Wu-Tang, Missy Elliott and Timbaland—a sound that would also, by the turn of the millennium, come to dominate mainstream chart pop. Elliott actually sampled “Jóga” on the single version of her “Hit Em Wit Da Hee” in 1998. “She was way ahead of her time,” Elliott marvelled in Inside Björk. “She has this hip-hop kinda beat with this whole orchestra over it. It just gave another sound to it. It was like Mozart at a rap show.”

If hip-hop was a key influence in Björk’s career, her other great beat inspiration was electronic dance music. In the late 80s and early 90s, the genre became a powerful cultural force in the form of techno, acid house and rave, one that, unlike much of the EDM of today, still had an underground, countercultural energy. Björk could pinpoint the exact moment of her epiphany. “It was Mixmaster Morris, and it must’ve been like, 1989, in this really dodgy party somewhere in suburban London where the sweat is dripping from the ceiling and falling into your eyes … it was so alive and so creative, having the courage to face the reality you live in and making it pretty … Making you love today. It’s notable, here, that Björk enthuses about Morris using the same language she used to describe her love of Public Enemy, praising the way that both reflected the sounds of the world around them in their music, capturing and reframing current reality.

In comparison, the rock clubs she went to when she first started touring with Tappi, Kukl and The Sugarcubes had “absolutely no creativity … it was like, mouldy with cobwebs all over it.” Subjected as a child to her father’s Hendrix and Clapton, and to the hippy tastes of her mother, her stepfather and their friends in the house they all shared, Björk became convinced at a young age that rock was pop culture’s Miss Havisham, stale and stuck in the finery of the past. Though rock’s bastard child, punk, had at first offered a release from both the constriction of her classical music training at Barnamúsíkskóli and the dusty rock canon of her childhood, it too quickly grew tired for Björk. Then, The Sugarcubes’ unexpected success forced her into the indie world—an insular scene of rules and restrictions. Björk had been one of the band’s most fervent poptimists, talking up the transportive, accessible joy of Boney M and Abba in interviews. By the end of their career as indie darlings The Sugarcubes were, as Björk saw it, out of tune with times, and so failing to fulfil their own original pop brief. “The hardest thing is to make good pop,” she said in 1992. “Pop has been recycling itself too many times now and it’s getting a bit pathetic. Something needs to be done about it and they are not doing it. So I guess I have to do it.”

“I was probably the only one who was into what’s going on today,” she said later. “The others were more into Julio Iglesias, Fellini music and classic rock. We’d always compete on tour buses and it was horrible … each person was allowed to play two songs, and everyone would complain about them and say how horrible they were.” The former co-conspirators were no longer singing from the same songsheet, and the siren’s call of electronic music, linked now to ideas not just of modernity but also of creative freedom and individuality, was pulling Björk further away. When the tired Cubes disbanded, Début grasped giddy dancefloor liberation among the like minds of London.

From that point on, Björk never looked back, and couldn’t understand why others kept trying to; a certain contingent of Sugarcubes fans felt that Début was not an emancipation, but a sell-out. Tom Graves, reviewing the album in Rolling Stone, was apoplectic, rockist and sexist all at the same time: “Producer Nellee Hooper (Sinéad O’Connor, Soul II Soul) has sabotaged a ferociously iconoclastic talent with a phalanx of cheap electronic gimmickry.” Chris Roberts, the man who’d written The Sugarcubes’ first enraptured UK review in Melody Maker, was outraged: “Hooper’s production tries to compress her lunar cycles into an exercycle, making a mere nightclubber of her guileless sealclubber.” Roberts here characterizes Björk as a pure, instinctual, unspoiled force of nature, “guileless,” without artifice, and also a caricature of the northern wildwoman (a “sealclubber”). As such, Début’s acid-jazzy, club-ready production couldn’t possibly be her conscious choice, but only the work of a cheapening outside influence, debasing her natural instincts (‘lunar cycles’) into the mechanical and superficial (“exercycle,” a word that associates dance music with shallow, image-driven people, and a mechanical artificiality). She is fetishized as a wild, feral voice, her Icelandic “authenticity” cheapened by electronics. For Roberts, and other reviewers with similar reactions, the nature and instinct that Björk represented—that she herself wanted to represent—was mutually exclusive of dance music and club life, and the language of Roberts’s review betrays just that binary opposition between nature and technology (or lunar cycle and exercycle) that Björk wanted to break down.

Other reviewers found Début too “coffee-table,” a trendy-but-safe dilettante take on dance culture. It was an accusation that would follow Björk around until Homogenic made electronic sounds definitively her own, and even she later suggested that Début was actually a little on the tasteful side to really reflect her own listening preferences, saying, “the beats are very sophisticated—they’re very Nellee Hooper, you know.” For her second album, she was determined to be truer to her own preferences; she was “starting to grow away from Nellee” and pulling in more extreme influences such as Tricky’s unsettling trip-hop. Post made clear that the electronic experimentation of Début wasn’t just a phase. “The Modern Things,” a little fable of prehistoric cars and computers waiting in mountains for millennia before emerging to take over the world, was her sarcastic message to those who’d called her an electronic Judas: “my little revenge.” “A lot of my friends are so scared of computers and technology …” she said. “Of course, it’s rubbish because computers are just tools. If I hear one more person saying there is no soul in computer music I will puke.” With Post, Björk wanted to realize a new union between the human and the computer, the natural and the mechanical.

Yet it seemed that the balance of elements wasn’t quite right yet. As Post neared completion, Björk panicked that the album was too purely electronic and reworked the songs for a more fifty-fifty electric-acoustic balance, adding sax and harpsichord, Einar Örn’s trumpet and percussion from Talvin Singh. Most crucial among the new elements she added were her and Eumir Deodato’s string arrangements; Post would have seemed a very different album without the lush romance they add to “Hyperballad,” “You’ve Been Flirting Again” and “Isobel.” “I just wanted to bring the album alive,” she said. “I still find it ten times more natural for me to deal with live instruments than programmed ones because that’s what I’ve been doing all my life. Electronic instruments are harder to grasp for me, but of course that’s the reason why I need to tackle them.” Though she despaired at the difficulty some listeners had stomaching electronic music, Björk herself had partly internalized the idea that acoustic instrumentation sounded more “alive.” She knew, however, that there must be a way to combine the two that would make the computer sing with as much soul as the violin, or as her own voice, a music of modern life that could vividly demonstrate the continuity of natural and technical to the world.

The balancing act was made trickier by Björk’s hardcore tastes. Her punk background meant she was no stranger to sonic terror, screaming poets and all. One of her favourite Icelandic bands was the metal group Ham, and in 1991 she’d floated the idea of forming a speed-metal outfit called Scud (presumably after the then-topical missile) with them, saying “I think all people very much want somewhere in them to play speed metal.” (So true.) The self-proclaimed lover of extremes found her sonic nirvana while filming the video for “Violently Happy” in the San Fernando valley, when an earthquake struck. “I thought: Yes! This is what I’ve wanted to feel ever since I was born! It’s funny, it’s like your body is thirsty for it and it satisfies you in a strange way.”

That love of pure, seismic noise and a grounding in electronic pioneers from Stockhausen and Cage to Kraftwerk and Brian Eno led Björk, in the 90s, to musically challenging electronic artists such as Black Dog Productions and their later outfit Plaid, as well as Beaumont Hannant, Autechre, LFO, Aphex Twin and the rest of the Warp Records stable. These were the sort of names and sounds, then known somewhat cringeworthily as intelligent dance music, or IDM, that would crop up in Björk’s remixes, if not, at first, in her own albums, with Mark Bell’s outfit LFO being a particular favourite. “The work Mark did when he was nineteen proved to our generation that pop music is what we understand, Björk said. “We walk around with all these telephones and car alarms, and we hear all these noises. We can keep saying, ‘No, it’s soulless, it’s cold,’ but it’s part of our lives.” The comparatively commercially unsuccessful Telegram moved further towards her tastes with its jungle, techno and hip-hop reworkings; Bjork described it as “not trying to make it pretty or peaceable for the ear. Just like a record I would buy myself.”

As Björk worked on Homogenic, the press reviews for Telegram—often baffled and certainly more lukewarm than those for her first two albums—had been coming in. You can imagine her frustration with the inability of some critics to accept the musical now and her place within it. She was far from the first or the only genre-bender; as well as the electronic legacy stretching from Stockhausen through krautrock to techno, and from funk and disco to electro and hip-hop, electronic sounds had been mainstream pop sounds for many years, from the early 80s synthpop explosion to the hi-NRG teen hits of Stock Aitken Waterman later that decade. And, come 1997, the fruitful blurred boundary between conventional pop/rock sounds and contemporary dance music was a popular territory. The traditionally rooted sounds of grunge and Britpop had fuelled a commercial boom in rock music. At the same time, the explosion of techno, acid house and rave at the end of the 80s had fragmented into a range of electronic genres fizzing with invention: big beat, breakbeat, trip-hop, UK garage, jungle and drum’n’bass. Critics’ albums-of-the-year lists reflected a confluence of those twin currents: Radiohead were beginning to be influenced by the same IDM sounds as Björk on OK Computer, while Primal Scream’s technoid ego-rush Vanishing Point and Portishead’s digitally haunted eponymous second album crashed traditional songwriting into electronic soundworlds to very different effect. Crossover was the spirit of the times, and so, despite the confused reactions to Telegram, Björk pressed on. “I’m just trying to be truthful about what 1997 is,” she said. “I’m talking about all the noises that most people call ugly, in some instances because they’re too familiar. I’ve tried to reorganize them and put a bit of magic there.”

Unlike Björk’s first two albums, Homogenic contains no samples, an easy shortcut to smooth the joins between electronic and acoustic by using a snippet of acoustic instruments as a loop or rhythm. Post’s “Army of Me,” for example, samples Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks,” speeding the original’s sluggish, heavy drums into a driven, intent loop that meshes perfectly with harsh synths, an effect far from the Zep original’s menacing rootsiness. On Homogenic, Björk found a different method of tackling the technophobia that frustrated her: her “little bit of magic.” She’d initially intended, through her create-your-own album scheme where beats would pan to the right and strings to the left, that acoustic and electronic could be blended at the listener’s will. Instead, those elements entered into an evolving conversation with one another in a centre ground. Dibben notes how Björk songs often start with different musical elements (voice and beats, or strings and beats) at odds or separate from each other, gradually drawing closer together in rhythm or melody, or filling the space between them until they resolve into a unified sound, a process that can be heard clearly on many of Homogenic’s songs. “Jóga,” for example, bears out Dibben’s dynamic clearly: the strings dominate the first verse of the song, with the beats edging in softly and gradually, to finally break out in cracking, crashing power on the “emotional” of the chorus as a distinct, disruptive voice, quite separate from the smoother strings. On the second verse, the beats settle into more of a groove, working with the strings, the sounds coming into a conversation with each other as the song progresses. By the end, beats and strings are swelling and swirling in unison, harmony. “It’s been where I was heading,” Björk said of her beats-strings-voice system in 1998, “and Homogenic is where I went all the way.”

Making the album’s core elements hang together—Björk’s powerful voice, the vivid, close-miced strings, and the distorted, manipulated beats—was a considerable production challenge, and Homogenic’s success in doing so is one of the reasons for its lasting influence. “With younger artists, I’ve had so many demos where it’s still the mental image of that record that they want to do. As soon as I hear a distorted drumbeat, I think, ‘OK, Björk, third album, here we go …’” says Guy Sigsworth. “It’s easier to do it now than it was then, because one of the big technical problems you have is that when you distort drums a lot, they lose their front end, the attack part, because they’ve just become a brick of noise.” Loss of attack, the speed at which a sound reaches its maximum volume, was a problem: Björk wanted her beats to be hard, precise, to paint a visual picture, not just to be a fuzzily blunt instrument. Other electronic artists could get round the problem by carefully tweaking the beats and making them the central focus, mixing them almost like a voice, but with a vocal as strong as Björk’s also in the mix, balancing out the conversation between the core elements was trickier. “Aphex Twin can mix the snare drum like it’s a lead vocal, [but on Homogenic] you kind of have to find a way to make both live together. And that’s the challenge of it, and that’s why it’s different,” says Sigsworth. The harmony that Homogenic’s core elements of beats, strings and voice achieve with each other is not just technically hard-won, but audibly ongoing in the songs, which enact a process of reconciliation, a conversation between seeming opposites that ends in resolution.

One level deeper, Homogenic’s unification of strings and beats, the acoustic and the electronic, attempted to reunite nature and technology through pop music by demonstrating the continuity between the man-made and the organic. “Sometimes I think nature and techno is the same word, it just depends on if it’s past or future, Björk said in 1997. “One thousand years ago you’d look at a log cabin in the forest, and that would be techno. And now it’s nature.” The natural world and the techno-modern were often represented in Björk’s lyrics by Iceland’s wild landscapes and the city respectively. Just like Isobel’s revenge on “Bachelorette,” with its invading plants, Homogenic, said Björk in 2003, was about “abolishing the border between nature and the city.”

True to that spirit of continuity, even Homogenic’s seemingly most traditional elements connected to technological advancement and a future-forward spirit. In 1997, for instance, Björk explained that Ravel’s Boléro (the piece of music that had informed “Hunter”) “was largely influenced by his father, who was inventing the first steam car or something. His sense of rhythm came from machines.” And as far as Björk was concerned, an instrument was just another kind of machine, whether it was made of circuit boards or wood and cat-gut. And what was unnatural about electricity, anyway? “It’s not just a phenomenon of this century. It’s always been in thunder and lightning and in Iceland, the Thor’s hammer,” the electrician’s daughter protested. Electrical force was life force, the stuff of lightning, nerve impulses and bioluminescence, not just of robots, machines or the technological other. (For one 1997 interview, Björk even turned up sporting a contraption that ran the charge from a pack of batteries through a tube of crystals, and was supposed to give you energy.)

Homogenic’s lushly singable pop songs—with heavy beats, rampant noise and electronics woven into their very core—were the musical diagrams that would point the way for technophobes and demonstrate the continuum between violin and synth. After all, Björk reasoned, people had always feared new technologies; the worry that new tools might overpower us, as in “The Modern Things,” is a common reaction, especially in times of rapid technological change such as the 90s. The paradigm-shifting rise of the internet was disorientingly fast, and in May 1997 IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeated grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a chess match, a moment seen as a milestone in the relationship between man and machine. Björk, however, saw apparently dizzying technological leaps as part of a long continuum. “When man found fire, he was scared and he said, ‘Oh we’re all going to die’,” she said. “But then he learned to cook with it … Humanity will always win, I think. Don’t be scared.”

In March 1997, when the Homogenic sessions were still under way, Björk became the first pop artist to be awarded the Nordic Council Music prize. At the ceremony, one jury member compared her to the Norse god Heimdallr, guardian of Bifröst, the rainbow bridge that links the realm of the gods with that of men. In the same way, she said, Björk guarded the bridge between the classic and the cutting-edge in music, straddling the divide. “I think it was pretty obvious with me, especially as a teenager,” Björk concurred later, “that I’d make pop music and my role would be to link all these different worlds that I felt were too isolated … bridging the gap somehow.”