One of the aspects of poplar music that makes it memorable or catchy, moving it into the 'standard' arena, is how often it is covered and/or interpreted by other musicians. We may not like a given piece performed by artist A, but we are able to rehear it, and love the interpretation of artist F. Maybe we eventually fall in love with a piece of music when it is finally presented as an instrumental piece and we are left to explore it without lingual interference. More often, many of us use music to highlight, subdue, enhance or change the mood we are currently experiencing. (I just put on baroque music because it is a music that is conducive to my writing).
I suggest frequently to individuals that if they listened to something once that convinced them to never listen again that indeed it should be listened to again at a later date. We, as humans have a finite number of emotions to feel but an infinite numbers of experiences in which to feel them. Music accompanies our lives. It is universal. It gives hope and amplifies joy and sadness. It is mnemonic perhaps by accident and has the power to help us recall emotions when memory and speech have left us. The late Oliver Sachs wrote a fascinating book on the impact of music, in part, on the brains of those with dementia. With my own father encased in dementia rendered speechless and confused, I witnessed firsthand the power music has on the demented individual. In his prime my father toured with various bands he had put together playing the music of The Mississippi Delta. During my last visit with my father I put on one of his blues albums, cranked it up loud and suddenly my father began to literally dance around his study like one sees toddlers dance. His arms pulled up in a joggers position he began to bounce and sway back and forth as he sidestepped around the room. It was a delight to see. That music was able to reach in deep and pull out the joy we, his children or caretakers, no longer could make contact with. Sachs' premise is that there is more music memory embedded in our brains than speech or actual memory. I think there is truth in this, at least for me. Music has the power to enable me to recall places, people, names, emotions, scents and to reconstruct past events.
Another aspect of music that is so compelling and holistic in nature is how we physically hear and respond to music. We obviously hear it with our ears but it is felt in the body in very distinct locations: head, face, mouth and chest. The notes in the soprano rage are felt in the face and head, mezzo ranges are in the mouth and chest and bass in the chest or all over. If you can remember the scene from the film, Mr. Holland's Opus, where Cole, Holland's deaf son, sitting atop a speaker, convey's to his father that he can indeed hear music, you will understand my point. Music is also a vibration to be felt. I think it impossible to listen to music without feeling it as well. As a trained singer having studied bel canto for years, I have a natural tendency to listen to music all the while invisibly moving my throat to silently reach the pitches I hear. It's a habit.
Björk requires background information, not to enjoy her, because many of her videos are just fun and silly, but rather to fully understand what it is you are experiencing and being asked to understand.
When I sat to begin this piece I had already begun to make a list of notes that centered around the phrase 'performance artist'. After considering this further, and if I am forced to place once word to describe Björk's work I would now choose 'conceptualism;' specifically conceptual art. She is a performance artist working in conceptualism.
Many years ago I was told by my dear friend Simon, albeit hearsay, who was once a neighbour of Björk's, that she often listened to clinical recordings designed for med students learning to listen to internal bodily functions such as heartbeats, digestion, lung breathing sounds, etc. When I first heard this I instantly understood something about her 'sound'. Much of her work, despite her use of synthesizers, is mimicking the sounds of the body or sounds so familiar that they become strange in her hands. In, Dancer in the Dark, a Lars von Trier film, which she wrote most of the soundtrack to, we can hear her use of repeated familiar sounds in tracks such as Cvalda where she incorporates the repetitive sounds one hears in a factory. In the courtroom scene of the same film she uses the familiar sound of new sneakers trip squeaking against clean floors as the basis for the melody. In her music, video 'Violently Happy' she uses the sounds of snipping shears to echo the visuals of individuals confined in a padded cell. Love can feel like something one is trapped in and it can be maddening. It's an oxymoron of sorts to be violently happy yet the early days of love often do feel as she describes it.
I imagine that most of us imagine breathtaking scenes when we think of nature and when we think of life, we might imagine babies or spring. But life and nature are also things that incorporate death and the grotesque. There are sounds that are never heard and yet are the basis of life. The sound of a heart beating is forever used as a metaphor for love yet we rarely if ever are aware of our own let alone anyone else's heart beating. When we do see a real heart beating in a chest cavity it becomes grotesque and not what we imagine when reading sonnets or love poems. Björk takes the ordinary and makes it strange; the everyday and makes it music; the function of our internal unknown bodies and brings it to our ears. She uses the electronic and makes it warm. Her incorporation of Norse mythology into the visual aspects of her videos, her phrasing, speech patterns, the symbolism in her videos and her successful marriage of these components makes her unique and worthy of the extensive academic research already underway which not only examines the construction of her music but her use of Icelandic landscape and mythology in her output as well.
BJÖRK & JONI
I have discussed the work of Joni Mitchell with countless people over the years who have had a similar reaction to her music as they do Björk's and while on the surface they would appear to be extreme opposites, they do share some unique and important qualities. Both of these magnificent artists write very personal songs, so personal that most other artists don't cover their work. Standards come down through the ages because they are recognized as songs about anyone and everyone. Often even gender is not crucial to their successful performance.
A preliminary search on YouTube for official Joni Mitchell music videos turned up two! They don't exist. The visual art component to her work is her painting which is often used for her album covers and interestingly, Ms. Mitchell considers herself a painter first and a songwriter second. But if you look at her paintings while listening to her music she begins to come together in a way that we could not see as clearly before. Too, her reworking of her earlier pieces in later years, has brought a depth unrealized prior. Her use of a full string orchestra, for the first time, on her album 'Both Sides Now' put her own compositions into the realm of standards. She reinterpreted her own work as an older woman looking back and suddenly there was space for the rest of us.
Her rendition of the same song in 2000, almost thirty years later, we hear a completely different song. In mezzo-soprano we hear a woman recounting experiences that she doesn't fully understand. In her second rendition I almost get the feeling she is speaking to another person, perhaps to her former younger self.
On the album cover of the 2000 work the front of the album shows a front self portrait and the back is a rendering of the same painting allowing us to see what she is experiencing. When we see and hear an older Joni we hear the seasonings and mistakes of a rich life led.
Björk and Joni's songs are detailed and specific. The titles of Björk's songs further add to their complexity and their level of intimacy. Bjork also sometimes sings in Icelandic which most singers will not take on unless it is a dialect they understand. (I would bet that karaoke bars in Iceland there are many Björk tunes, in Icelandic, to choose from). Speakers of romance languages will often sing in other romance languages but it is rare that a romance language speaker will be known to sometimes sing in Arabic or Chinese or some other language not Latin based. Though the other way around is common when the second language is the language of colonial dominance: Arabic/French or is a known language to the singers region Hebrew/Arabic, Croatian/Serbian, etc. Singers sing in languages that they can express themselves in, when they know what the phrasing should be, when they can feel and interpret a meaning or nuance. I may be wrong, but I think it is only, (if one wishes to be successful,) opera singers that are professionally expected to sing in more than one language not native to them in any manner. We can't interpret what we sing if we have no idea what the words mean.
Joni's songs tend to be complete stories with beginnings, middles and ends. Bjork's songs tend to be poetic with fewer clues for the listener to follow. Think of it this way: American film versus French film. American film tends to spell everything out for its viewers whereas French film rarely explains anything for the viewer. Many people dislike French film because there are often no happy endings. We are introduced to characters without explanation and they go off the screen without us knowing what happens to them. This is unsettling for many people whose culture this is not. Hence the discomfort of Björk. She does not explain anything (unless you research her ideas).
Björk has another unique distinction: She recorded her first album, sung in Icelandic when she was 11 years old and it sold, roughly, 7000 copies. She is a classically trained musician playing the piano, flute, recorder, guitar, drums, bass guitar and harmonica. She is a child prodigy placing her alongside the precocious likes of Mozart, Petula Clark, Julie Andrews, Prince, and Stevie Wonder, but one would have to subtract Clark and Andrews from the list because neither one plays an instrument though Julie Andrews did learn to play the guitar for the film The Sound of Music. She is not a fluke. She went on to become the lead singer in the band The Sugarcubes and once it disbanded and she went solo is when we began to hear of her in North America. If you say the phrase 'Swan Dress' those that don't know who she is will suddenly recall who she is. (I'd like to say something about that dress and perhaps her idea behind it. Women are often described as having the features of a swan. Swan neck, and in ballet one of the greatest roles a ballet dancer might perform is as a swan in Swan Lake. The Oscars is the night of nights when celebrities get to dress up like peacocks… What better a statement than to arrive as a swan? It was a play on words. It was shapeshifting).
Other than the music that come out of The United Kingdom I would venture to say that the average person doesn't imagine much music is made outside of The United States or The U.K. And they would be right for the wrong reasons. Music sung in any language other than English is not promoted and when something is not promoted it is perceived as not valid or worse non existent.
It was a long time ago that I turned off American radio and went in search for sounds that might reinvigorate my ears. If you are really listening to music today you will rarely, if ever, be listening to something original. You will be listening to music that is crafted to sell records and contains very little originality. And trust me your listening preferences can, and too often are, created for you by others. The voices behind such music may be decent or good , but the message, tone and quality of the music too often lacks originality or dynamics. Too much of it sounds the same.
Björk is following an Icelandic cultural sound and a rhythm that is 100% on a wavelength that English speaking people have a difficult time understanding. I think of her as an Icelandic Haiku. I once purchased a foreign film with English subtitles for a friend, knowing the story would be one she'd enjoy. When she found out that it had subtitles she balked at having to watch it stating that she hated films with subtitles. I thought about what it meant to view films solely in one's language and what it meant to never be exposed, through film, to another culture other than your own. This limited outlook is often applicable to people who refuse to listen to music in languages they don't speak. There are continents filled with people who are doing the same things we are doing but they are doing it slightly different and that difference is always worth listening to or noticing.
Sting collaborated with the Rai singer Cheb Mami on his hit song Desert Rose. I read an interview about Sting and Cheb Mami's collaboration. In it Sting described taking his son to see Mami in concert and his son asking him why so many people were attending the concert when he had never heard of Mami. That's the power of promotion. That you know who Sting is but you haven't a clue who Cheb Mami is. That you think Björk is a swan dress and something insignificant from Iceland. Sting but more so David Byrne, I think, have significantly used their fame and influence to promote the sounds, music and musicians that are creating music on every square inch of our planet, that will most likely never be heard outside of the lands they perform in. Byrne's label Putumayo has almost single-handedly - because people like to be hip and if David says it's hip, people listen - inspired the world to listen outside their box of music they imagined was once complete.
If you go to YouTube and bring up any of Björk's videos the struggle to understand her is clearly evident in the comment section below her videos. People love her, or hate her but mostly people don't understand her and she is too often referred to as weird. If writing your own songs and recording them at 11 and having enough money from this to send yourself to music school is weird, then … then I don't know what.
Her album Biophilia has launched a groundbreaking educational program in Reykjavik that introduces and teaches creativity to children as a way of learning rather than by rote. Her creative level is so intense and conceptualized that she is light years ahead of the rest of us. Everyone wants to be the parent of a Mozart, but it will never happen if your Mozart hears day in and day out s/he's weird. And that is why Björk is so special: we are looking at an individual who is openly sexual, and sensual, without being crass, she makes no apologies for not being American, she embraces her epicanthic fold, and she is fully and completely immersing us in Norse Mythology without us even knowing it. Her shapeshifting in her videos is a huge component to Icelandic identity and mythology. Concepts of sound as natural or a part of nature, the body as natural and nurturing, blending the symbolic with sound. These are all components that she melts deliciously together.
LANGUAGE & PHRASING
No language is spoken and no person speaks without an accent. Björk, by accident has become a spokeswoman for Iceland and when she is speaking about her country and home she speaks with a clearly Icelandic accent. When she is talking about her music she code shifts into what I only just discovered is known as Estuary English (EE). Neither Cockney nor The Queen's English but rather something in between. Her rolling R's become pronounced and almost sound affected when speaking in Icelandic or English but this is a natural tongue roll for her and not done for dramatic effect. For those of my readers who are interested in hearing and reading of examples of Björk's speech patterns you can read an excellent academic paper on the subject here. I do not know enough about Icelandic speech phrasing or where or how emphasis is placed but reading the lyrics to Björk's songs while listening to her sing helps me enormously. I begin to understand that her emphasis is not always on the word itself but on how it feels when it leaves her body to express it. Her videos (the visual components) further emphasize where she wishes to place the emphasis.
Here are the lyrics for Mouth Mantra:
My mouth was sewn up
Banned from making noise
I was not heard
Remove this hindrance
My throat feels stuck
I was not allowed
I was not heard
There is vocal sadness
I was separated
From what I can do
What I'm capable of
Need to break up
Vicious habits
Do something
I haven't done before
In vow of silence
Explore the negative space
Around my mouth
It implodes
Black hole
With jaw fallen in
In fallen jaw
Jaw fallen in
I am not hurt
This tunnel has enabled
Thousands of sounds
I thank this trunk
Noise pipe
I have followed a path
That took sacrifices
Now I sacrifice this scar
Can you cut it off
Here is the video:
In Part Two of my Björk series we will look at the organic components of her music with a focus on Norse Mythology and shapeshifting used in her videos.
Part Two: Shapeshifting
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