Björk's Homogenic (33 1/3) - Softcover

Mackay, Emily

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501322745 ISBN 13: 9781501322747

Verlag: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Homogenic explores the creation of the album that served as a turning point in Björk's career and continues to sit among her finest musical achievements

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Emily Mackay is a freelance writer and editor based in Southend-on-Sea, UK. In her career, she has been to a party at Prince's house, ordered out of a car at gunpoint by the LAPD and helped Thurston Moore steal a sofa. Her favourite though, was being driven around Reykjavík by Björk in her Landrover.

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Homogenic 33 1/3

By Emily Mackay

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © 2017 Emily Mackay
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5013-2274-7

Contents

Acknowledgements, viii, 
Introduction: I'm going hunting, 1, 
State of emergency: Björk's crisis, 5, 
I want to go on a mountain top: Björk's escape, 17, 
The marvellous web: Björk's friends, 31, 
Excuse me, but I just have to explode: Björk's noises, 45, 
You just didn't know me: Björk's characters, 59, 
Home, what's been found: Björk's national anthems, 71, 
I dare you to take me on: Björk's loves, 89, 
Brand new tomorrow: Björk's images, 101, 
Game we're playing is life: Björk's virtual realities, 117, 
Notes, 131, 
Selected Bibliography, 143, 

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,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Academic
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1501322745
• ISBN 13: 9781501322747
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 160
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland