Björk’s new record, Vulnicura , is a jolt of life — real life. A richly coloured, broken eggshell glued back together, the jagged cracks still visible, belying its facade of whole.
Her reappearance is like that shift in The Wizard of Oz, when everything grey turns to vibrant, vivid jewelled tones and shimmering saturated hues. She's not just a star, but rather an entire constellation. She makes the very act of art its own organism, or as casually necessary as the reflex of breathing.
Björk’s artistry is a well documented, decades-long, sky-scraping tower of genius. Her mental landscape is an ecosystem, a branched and bundled world of moving parts. Vibrant splashes and sharply differentiated tones, gentle whispers and shattered-glass cries. Everything existing and co-existing in contrast to and in contradiction with each other.
(Illustration: Samantha Smith/CBC Music)
Björk’s is a world entirely of her own creation and she invites us inside it, presents to us these monuments of human complexity, a woman’s capacity, an artist’s worth. Curves like rounded shoulders and jagged edge collarbones, precise observations and excavations, animalistic gut instincts and bruised-heart emotional storms, lush forests and sparse moonscapes, tiny miracles and cavernous, all-consuming dreams.
The swan dress, a bones-deep, Icelandic belief in fairies and sprites — whatever real or imagined insult one tosses at Björk does nothing to negate the scope of her creativity. She doesn’t think differently because she’s an artist; rather she’s an artist because she challenges herself to think differently. She listens and looks and feels with every nerve and every synapse ready to witness, consider, absorb, reflect and react all the time.
She’s not overly precious about her art and yet this doesn’t diminish its power or importance — if anything, in acknowledging the amount of actual work and time that goes into her carefully laboured executions, Björk roots even the most fantastical and outlandish creation. She has no interest in the myth of creation; she yanks back the curtain and instead offers to show us the mechanisms of her genius, the intricacies of her wild creativity. The art is in the thinking, the utility, the manifestation and the experience.
There’s a relatively modern expression, "full of try," that has made its way around the last seven years or so, allegedly when people my age (and hipsters, yeah, fine) were allergic to effort, would rather burst into flames than be seen as working toward a goal — a slimy kind of desperation driving oneself rather than the appearance of effortlessly acquiring one’s arty/cool status. I think it’s actually the desperation that people are referring to when they describe someone as full of try: desperation to succeed, to be popular and important, to matter, to be among the cool kids and be a capital A artiste.
Lady Gaga is full of try.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Lady Gaga (I’m humming "Bad Romance" as I write this sentence). And I also think most of us are full of try in our own small ways. But I’ve thought a lot about why Gaga’s star has lost its sheen the last few years, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s at least partly due to how badly she wants to be considered an Artist. The weight of all of that desperation, her overwhelming need for approval, it’s oppressive.
Gaga’s persona feels like a construct of artifice — like she’s willfully outlandish, "shocking" and bizarre just because those were buzzwords attached to her idols, not because they are actual manifestations of her real self. It’s as if she wants to take a shortcut to those adjectives, rather than earning them as a result of — or as a reaction to — her own work. This saps Gaga’s art of that intangible feeling of authenticity.
And then there’s Björk. She’s (arguably) a niche musician, whose work may not appeal to everybody, but it’s impossible to deny her authenticity as an artist. There’s nothing about her that feels contrived. And this is a woman who has talked openly and frequently about Björk the myth versus Björk the real person. The innate clarity of her own distinction is the foundation of her authenticity; it’s why her creativity is such a multi-layered archaeological wonder, each incremental depth revealing new aspects to her artistry and her personhood.
In honour of the surprise release of Vulnicura (sped up by two months because it leaked online), it seems like a great time to reflect on the Icelandic artist, her non-stop creative evolution and almost four decades in music.
Click through the gallery above to help us celebrate the artistic genius of Björk: innovator, feminist, reluctant icon, avant-garde mad woman.
Find me on Twitter: @_AndreaWarner
by Andrea Warner via Electronic RSS
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