As musicians from Rebekka Karijord to Tori Amos begin to explore birth, perhaps pregnancy in music could become less taboo
Songs about gynaecology are few and far between. Tori Amos wrote Spark and other songs following her experience of miscarriage. The lyrics of PJ Harvey’s When Under Ether are suggestive of abortion (“Something’s inside me/ Unborn and unblessed”) although Harvey denied a direct link. Kate Bush imagined a father’s perspective of birth in This Woman’s Work. Great songs; relatively slim pickings. Pregnancy and childbirth are transformative experiences and also not unusual. Why then does so little music explore it?
Motivated by this absence, Norwegian composer Rebekka Karijord wrote an experimental concept album of narrative pop, Mother Tongue. Released earlier this year, it chronicles her first pregnancy and the traumatic premature arrival of her daughter. “There is something in popular music for women with this topic that I felt has been taboo,” she says on the phone from Stockholm where she lives. “With this subject, as any subject, it’s super-important that women and artists in general are allowed to be honest [about] where they are in their life.”
Continue reading...by Lucy Jones via Electronic music | The Guardian
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