60 Songs That Explain the '90s - Björk—“Hyperballad”

Episode Date: April 21, 2021

Rob explores Icelandic musician Björk’s hit “Hyperballad” by discussing her unique artistry and the various ways she stretched beyond the conventions of popular music. This episode was originally produced as a Music and Talk show available exclusively on Spotify. Find the full song on Spotify or wherever you get your music. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Rumaan Alam Producers: Isaac Lee and Justin Sayles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to a music and talk episode where full songs and talk segments play together only on Spotify. Best of all, you can create your own music and talk show for free with Anchor Spotify's podcasting platform. Get started at anchor.fm-fm-f-M-C-H-O-R-F-M-U-S-I-S-I-S-M-U-S-I-S-E-L-K. A lot of spelling there, but just do it. We live on a mountain. right at the top, this beautiful view from the top of the mountain.

Every morning I walk towards the edge and throw little things off, like car parts, bottles, and cutlery, or whatever I find lying around. It's become a habit, a way to start the day. The point is that I can't do these words justice. I cannot say them, let alone sing them, with anywhere near the gravity. they deserve or anywhere near the gravity they possess now that Bjork has sung them. I can't think these words with the gravity they now possess. I am 19 years old and I am forlornly looking out the third floor window of my freshman year

college dorm room. That's the memory. The point is that the memory is painfully mundane. Unremarkable dorm room, unremarkable college green panorama out the dorm room. window, unremarkable 19-year-old. No offense, to me, the point is that in this moment, I'm no longer there. I'm no longer looking at what I'm looking at. I'm no longer me. I am transfixed. I am transported by Bjork, who is singing words that sound mundane when I say them, but become transcendent when she even thinks them. The junkyard of priceless treasure just in the consonants of car parts, bottles, and and cutlery, when Bjork sings the words, car parts, bottles, and cutlery.

I'm going to let you in on a little secret. As a professional rock critic, I am compelled, often to share with the people my deep, incisive, unquestionably worthwhile thoughts on music that I just heard for the first time, like 10 seconds ago. I'm not complaining. I'm suggesting you should complain. You want to know how many times in my whole entire life I have profound. connected with a piece of music the very first time I heard it, five. Five times. If that, five, that's not the way music works. You need time, you need absorption, you need reflection. A song

doesn't hit you the first time. Not really, not fully. I am telling you that Bjork's hyper ballad hit me the first time. This song hit me in real time. Who is she? Where is she? What is she going through? Why is she littering? And to whom is she addressing this? My name is Rob Harvilla. This is 60 songs that explain the 90s. Bjork's hyper ballad is one of the 60. Five times in my whole life that a song has truly hit me hard the very first time I heard it.

Bjork's hyper ballad is one of the five. The electrifying sense of danger with which Bjork sings the word safe. Hyper ballad is from Bjork's second. solo album Post, released in 1995. I first laid eyes and ears on Bjork when I caught the video for the song Motor Crash by the Sugar Cubes on MTV exactly once. Motor Crash is not one of the five, and yet it was clear immediately that the lead singer of the sugar cubes could sing words with a charisma and a ferocity that could alter the DNA of those words. Dangerous motor crash, terribly bloody, motor crash, destructive motor crash.

What did imprint itself on my pre-teenage brain that day watching MTV was Bjork's delivery of the phrase nursed her gently. It's not that she changed the definition of the phrase exactly, it's that she suggested that one could nurse someone gently, but also ferociously. Bjork Goemann's daughter was born in Reykavik, Iceland in 1965. Technically, she recorded her first album as an 11-year-old. She sings The Beatles, The Fool on the Hill in Icelandic. I wouldn't get involved. A decade or so later, she joined the Sugar Cubes, Iceland's premier art rock band.

They sounded like Twilight Zone rock set. Ugh, that's glib. I should have reflected on that more. Clearly, I have not yet. Absorbed them. The first and best SugarCube record, life's too good. It's got motor crash on it. Came out in 1988, the year they played Saturday Night Live. Matthew Broderick was the host. This was his intro. All the way from Iceland,

our NATO ally, ladies and gentlemen, the sugar cubes. Sure, shout out NATO. The sugar cubes put out two more records and had a quite singular, beguiling junk drawer chemistry to them. But anytime Bjork's voice pulled into anything past second gear, it was obvious. where she was headed, or let's say it was obvious that only she knew where she was headed. And thus, in 1993, did her real first solo album arrive. She called it debut. In her first music video as a solo artist, for her first single, Human Behavior, she is eaten by a bear.

Beavis and Butthead reacted accordingly. Whoa, that looks cool. Yeah, yeah. Hi, praise. A quick word on genre. if I may. In a little while, I'm going to start talking about a bunch of other artists whose Venn diagrams overlapped with Bjorks, starting here in the early 90s in terms of vibe, in terms of fearless experimentation, in terms of a cutting-edge collision of the organic and the synthetic,

in terms of a mellow but slippery ominousness. All of that sounds vague, I realize, but can we agree that trip-hop is the dumbest name for a musical genre to emerge in the 1990s? Can you imagine yourself saying the words trip hop to the face of an artist you associate with trip hop? Not even Bjork can redeem the words trip hop. Debue has some legit house music jams, some bangers, sorry, one of which is called violently happy. It's got avant-garde jazz. It's got 23rd century synth pop. It's got a harp ballad called Like Someone in Love that makes it sound like nobody had ever written about being in love.

before, sometimes the things I do astound me. Debutz genre, if you got to assign a genre to it, is Bjork. Bjork makes Bjork music. There's a needle to thread here, though as her star ascends here in 1993, and as we gird ourselves for the decades of Bjork excellence and flamboyance to come. Quick summary of the last 25, 30 years of Bjork. the truly extraordinary run of mind-bending music videos, Bachelorette, especially.

Shout out Michelle Gondry. The increasingly avant-garde album covers, Utopia especially, the Titanic avant-pop influence of the albums themselves, post in 1997's Homogenic, especially. The Timberland album, the beatboxing album, the phone app album, the starring role and dancer in the dark.

Terrible movie. Terrible movie. That movie does Bjork Dirty, in every conceivable respect, do not talk to me about dancer in the dark. The Oscar Swan Dress, the coffee table book,

the other book, the other other book, like 400 box sets and compilations and so forth. A lot of box sets. The MoMA exhibit nobody liked. The multimedia magical realist universe that revolves around her. The needle to thread here.

The challenge to accept here is to marvel at the inimitable Bjorkness of Bjork without infanticizing her or merely caricaturing her. There's a tendency to reduce her to a woodland fairy-type late-night comedy routine. Remember when Winona Ryder did a Bjork impression on Saturday Night Live? In a Celebrity Jeopardy Skit in 2002, that's the exact moment the 90s truly ended. Just FYI.

You got a hold in your head two conflicting ideas here. Bjork is not of this earth, and yet Bjork is very much of this earth. Very few people in history are more of this earth than she is. Takes a while to wrap your head around this. I lived in Bjork's neighborhood in Brooklyn for many years, but I would never have put it that way at the time. I would have insisted that Bjork lived on the moon or on the rings of Saturn. But this does her a disservice.

This denies her humanity. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of her art. There's a difference between respecting her as an outlandish visionary and dismissing her as some sort of baffling, space alien. That's the needle to thread. As a generator of madcap ideas and high fluton concept, she's superhuman, but as a singer of songs, as a fount of emotions, she is profoundly human. She sings the words, I'm a fountain of blood, because that's literally what she is. A fountain of blood is literally what you are while we're at it. No one delivers words quite the same way

Bjork delivers words, but the intent, the sentiments of those words, quite often couldn't be plainer. This is the miracle of Bjork, but she's not a miracle. She's just a girl, vamping in the showroom of a tire store, spinning amidst a sea of twirling umbrellas, dancing with a mailbox,

and ascending on a crane until she's dominating the frame of Spike Jones's camera with her finger to her lips, standing in front of you, asking you to love her. Have a fit. This guy's scorching.

I got hit. The stone mistake. Bjorke's rendition of the 1951 Betty Hutton jazz tune, It's Oh So Quiet is the flashiest moment on post, produced mostly by the great Nellie Hooper. The mind-bending Spike Jones video is central to that flashiness. Some Bjork fans will tell you that it rankles Bjork that arguably her biggest hit is a cover song, is a goof,

is an anomaly even within such a wildly anomalous body of work. Fair enough. Don't you hate people who tell you you got to listen to the full out to get the full effect. Who has the time anymore? You got to listen to Post straight through to get the full effect. The clash of vulnerability and invulnerability. The Technicolor technogamous, sepia-toned hyper-balladeer. What emerges from these contradictions is astounding. Possibly maybe is a bubble bath with a PhD. Uncertainty excites me. In the official video for possibly maybe as she sings

these words, she is caressing and serenating and licking a slice of watermelon. Make a note of it. Beavis and Butthead could not be reached for comment. Baby, who knows what's going to happen? Lottery or car crash. Or you'll join a cult.

A bubble bath with a PhD. Good Lord. I'm getting vague again. Fine. Fine. Possibly maybe is a trip hop song. Fine. Trip hop. Fine. By 1995, the subgenre that shall not be named is a flourishing subgenre. It is cutting edge headphone music, astral projecting music, deep thinking music, deep feeling music, sulking music. This was well

established by 1994 when the down-tempo electro-goth band Portishead, the pride of Bristol, England, released their debut album, Dummy. Dummy is exquisite sulking music. You'd expect nothing less from a song called Sour Times. Portishead singer Beth Gibbons did pretty close to zero interviews and somehow possessed both one of the frailest and fiercest voices in 90s alternative rock. Dummy in 1997's Portishead are sonically immaculate and emotionally bereft. Givens could sound like both a 1950s jazz singer and a bloodthirsty 23rd century warlord. Put it this way.

She's not asking you to love her. All mine. You have to be. Another ultra-mundane memory of mine made transcendent by the soundtrack alone. One time at like two in the morning, I was farting around on the internet for an hour with Rhodes off the first Portishead record on repeat. That's it. That's the memory. Terrible idea, by the way. Yeesh. The most harrowing farting around on the internet experience of my whole life. Rhodes is the highlight of Portishead's 1998 album, Roseland, NYC. Live. On the DVD, Beth Gibbons is surrounded by her band. which is surrounded by the New York Phil Harmonic,

which is surrounded by a lustily hooting live audience, and yet she still looks and sounds like the lonest human ever born. The chords here are F, G, and A minor. That's mundane. That's the point. The point is that Beth Gibbons makes them sound transcendent. Shout out to that guy. people. Portishead also included Jeff Barrow and Adrian Utley and you could lose yourself in the

gearhead fussiness of the instrumentation, the crackly turntabalism, the precise reverberation of the snare drum, the Bond villain guitar sorcery, the shuddering Fender Rhodes organ that gives the song Rhodes its name and your darkest nightmares their form. But by 1994 it was already clear that to elevate a style of music that stylized and downcast, to give music this bone-chilling real heat, you need to a singer, a real singer, preferably a modern-day torch singer, both wounded and wounding. Massive Attack, the other great trip-hop collective from Bristol, had this figured out on their 1991 debut album, Blue Lines. Well, partially figured out. One of my less enlightened musical opinions is that most of the massive attack songs built around brooding dudes rapping at one another sound to me now

like Flight of the Concords. That's Glib also. I should reflect more on that. But the truly great massive attack songs are something else and often leverage the greatness of someone else. Sometimes that means reggae Grant Horace Andy, though on the blue line song, Unfinished Sympathy, that means soul noir singer Shara Nelson. On 1994's protection, on the song protection, that means Tracy Thorne, long-time singer for everything, but the girl, and a virtuoso in the arts of crying on the dance floor. This is how you nurse someone gently but ferociously. I'll stand in front of you.

I'll take the force of the blow. Protection. And on the song, Teardrop, off 1998's Mezzanine, still for my money, the most purifying and soul-mangling, full-length trip-hop experience available. That means Elizabeth Fraser, singer for the Cocteau twins, who'd spent the 80s and early to mid-90s,

making God-tier dream pop that sounded both ethereal and bulletproof. Like Bjork, she can tell you. sing with a conviction that can change the words DNA. The chords here are F, G, and A, basically. That sounds mundane. That's the point. The point is that Liz Fraser makes them sound transcendent. These are all ultramelo examples, I suppose. Part of what I love about massive attacks, mezzanine, is the threat inherent to it, the moment when the bottom drops out, the distortion kicks in, and you really get to feeling like a fountain of blood. It's heavy metal by other means, and you could find sounds that sinister elsewhere.

too. The Bristol rapper and producer and frequent massive attack collaborator known as Tricky. On his first few solo albums, especially 1995's Max and Quay and 1996's pre-millenium tension, they sound like a grinding fountain of bone. But on Max and Quay, especially, his primary weapon is the singer Martina Topley Bird, who can sound brooding and ethereal and tremulous and buried deep in the mix if that's what you need. But what you may not know you want is for her to play Chuck D. part in a remix of public enemies black steel in the hour of chaos. Prophets of rage come in many forms and speak in many voices. Tricky collaborated with Bjork on two songs on Post.

Later, they had a brief romantic relationship, which much later, in an interview with Fact magazine, Tricky would concede was most likely a bad relationship for her, because of him, and he still felt bad about it, especially after how good she'd been to him and how much she'd taught him. She said to me once, never learn to sing, never take a singing lesson, or,

and I said, why? She goes, because you've got weird melodies and you write weird melodies for your songs. And if you learn, it will change it. And she always used to say that to me, and she knew me better than I knew myself. The hurts, the regrets in Tricky's voice in this interview I find more affecting and destabilizing than the great many tricky songs I've listened to in which he's trying really, really hard to sound destabilizing.

Part of what strikes me about this story is the idea of, You've Got Weird Melodies as the highest possible compliment Bjork can pay you and never learn to sing as the most important piece of advice Bjork can give you. And again, there's a needle to thread. That doesn't make Bjork, as an artist herself, feral or guileless, or simply weird for the hell of it. She is not Winona Ryder's impression of her, or Kristen Wiggs' impression of her, or Melissa Villasenaure's impression of her, or anyone's impression of her. What a mantra, like, never learned to sing, makes Bjork is open to the universe, and open to the notion of creating a new one. The words canny and uncanny are not opposites, exactly, and I feel like this is a quirk of the English language created just for Bjork.

She is capable of getting plenty weird and supernatural and unpredictable, but even in 1995, she was also shrewd enough to leverage that public perception, that caricature of her, and disarm you instead with how direct and forceful she could be. So what did an unremarkable 19-year-old me really know about Bjork, standing in his unremarkable dorm room with its unremarkable view, listening to Hyperballad for the first time? If I knew anything, debatable, I thought I knew that Bjork was Elph and weird and sang weird and danced with mailboxes and got eaten by bears in her videos,

which left me utterly sublimely unprepared for hyperballad, for the beauty of the first half of hyperballad, or the foreboding of the second half of hyperballad. It's early morning. No one is awake. I'm back at my cliff, still throwing things off. I listen to the sounds they make on their way down. I follow with my eyes till they crash.

I imagine what my body would sound like, slamming against those rocks. And when it lands, will my eyes be closed or open? Hyperballyt is a love song, or a song about where to put your rage when you're in love. I will refer now to an AOL chat, Bjork did with fans in November 1995.

It begins with her saying, I'm Bjork, and this looks very exciting. I've never done this before. She has asked about her birthday and touring while being a mother, and now she takes care of her voice, and why she left the sugar cubes. And if the sugar cubes might ever reunite, her answer to that is nope. And why she wrote the song Bedtime Story for Madonna, because that happened. And if she has a black belt and karate, she's a red belt, and what she does in her spare time? Her answer is what spare time? And what inspired the song hyperballot? Here is her answer in its entirety. The critical time in a relationship, which usually happens after three years, and I can see all around me with all my friends. It's got to do that when you fall in love, it is so precious to you. You never know this might be the last time, so your behavior towards the loved one becomes very sweet, and you go somewhere else to be aggressive, because I believe that all people have got both sides.

So you end up having to unload your aggressions at a bar or by throwing cutlery off cliffs. So you can come back to your loved one, kiss him, sweet on his cheek and say happily, Hi, honey. So really, hyperbattle is about Bjork loving someone so much. She's hiding crucial parts of herself from him. She's blowing off steam. If she didn't let herself throw shit off a cliff,

then one of these days she might throw you off a cliff. I should add that the final question in that AOL chat was, Yo, Bjork want to have cybersex, which she handles gracefully, though it wouldn't surprise me if she'd thrown a Buick off a cliff afterward. And here's the moment where I'm looking out my dorm window, but whatever's out there is no longer what I'm seeing. I don't think is an unremarkable 19-year-old hearing hyperballot for the first time that my own personal lyrical analysis got any deeper than love makes you melodramatic. Honestly, that's not bad analysis for a 19-year-old.

But I was stunned, genuinely instantly, for one of the five times in my life stunned by this image, just the thought of Bjork entertaining the, the thought of her own lifeless body dashed on the rocks far beneath her. It still haunts me. The loving curiosity with which she sings, will my eyes be closed or open? That is chilling, that is haunting to me still. Even now, even long after Bjork has explained to me, pretty much exactly what this song is about in multiple interviews. Three years. It's about being in a relationship for more than three years. That is not an arbitrary number of years. Another Bjork quote from you from another interview. I really like reading magazines about science, you see. And when people fall in love, they make this kind of drug in their bodies so they become

addicted to each other physically. Nature makes things so that the drug lasts for three years. So if they're together, they're just on a natural high. Nature makes sure that people get three years to sort out if they want to be together for life or not. That three years is a tryout time. Then they wake up and it's a whoops, what am I doing here kind of thing. Then they are forced to sort out if they love the person, like real love, or if it was just a trick. So does this work with songs? I wonder if the love you have for a song works like this. Except let's say instead of three years, the drug lasts 10 years, maybe 20 years, maybe 30.

But one day you wake up and your response to a song is more analytical than emotional. Maybe that's a kind of death. If there was an actual physical drug that would let you hear a song for the first time again, I'd take it. I'd take it just for the moment when hyperballot suddenly morphs into almost an acid house jam and hence how dangerous Bjork feels and how much aggression she's got to unload. I envy how little unremarkable 19-year-old me knew about hyperballad in this moment. To a lesser extent, I envy how little I knew about anything.

You and me, what does that mean always? What does that mean? Forever. What does that mean? It means we'll manage. I can assure you that ignorance was not bliss, exactly, but there's a pleasure in letting a song blindside you like this. You're stupefied.

You're enthralled. You're changed. After hearing it only once, cherish these moments when they happen. Whatever song makes it happen. Because you only get five or so. My guest today, we're thrilled to talk to Ruman Alam, best-selling novelist and Bjork fan,

Recently he was talking about Bjork on Twitter, and magically, he ended up here. His latest book, of course, is Leave the World Behind. Ramon, thanks so much for being here. Oh, it's a great pleasure. I'm always psyched to have any excuse to talk about Bjork. All right. Well, good, good. I was hoping that as a fiction writer, you could shed some light on what makes hyper ballad

so striking as a narrative or at least a scene, you know, with only a handful of lines. Like, rock critics are always abusing this word novelistic, but they're the talent for a world building that Bjork has. Is that something that you recognize in her? I do think that's probably a part of the appeal for me in her work, because I tend to really love, like the pop music that I love the most, tends to have a kind of flare with language, right? Like, I love the Smiths so much because I love the way that those lyrics sound.

And when you look at the lyrics for hyper ballad, like the detail, car parts, bottles, and cutlery, right? This is the first sort of list of things that she mentions. I couldn't tell you what it means, and I wouldn't really attempt to tell you what it means, but there's a sense that it means something. And I think with so much of Bjork's music, there's a sense that it means something to her,

and that that's kind of enough for her fans. Yeah. You know, I read Leave the World Behind Not Long ago, and what was really scary in that book was what wasn't in the book, right? Like the lack of explanation. Like, all the things you don't know about what's happening. Are songs better at creating mystery just because Most songs don't have enough words to over-explain everything.

That's an interesting analog. I do think that's probably true. And again, maybe it's more permissible in the format of a song, because especially a song by an artist like Bjork, who is such a persona, there's a sense that it's a text that's really just a key to this person, and that person is so alluring and you kind of want to figure them out. But you can't really. The song doesn't really give you enough to go.

on. And also, some part of it has to do with the way it sounds, which is apart from language and even harder to figure out, because it's incredibly hard to talk about the way that the song sounds and what those sounds are suggesting in terms of the narrative. Right. Are there Bjork songs for you on Post or any other album that work especially well for you in terms of building a vivid fictional universe really quickly? Oh, yeah. I think she's incredibly adept at that. I think my favorite song off of post is actually headphones, which is the final song on the album. And she seems to be speaking directly to the listener, but as so often the case with her,

some percentage of what she's saying is either gibberish or Icelandic. And it's really hard to answer which one it is. And also it's like it doesn't matter. You know, you don't, you certainly don't need to know what she's saying to get this sense of intimate connection. When I was tweeting about Bjork the other day, which is how you and I began this conversation, I've said something about headphones, and I said that it's the closest I'll ever come to getting a voicemail message from Bjork. And that is really how I think the song operates. It's so intimate.

And it's also kind of like this beautiful meta-flourish because the song sounds amazing when you listen to it on headphones. Right, of course. I see interviews with her dating all the way back to 95, where she talks about, ah yes, my gibberish, my famous gibberish. Sometimes it is Icelandic, but she says, you know, it's whatever I feel in that moment is what I sing. So it's like distinct to whatever she recorded that song and then live going forward.

It's just now she fills in whatever she's feeling in that moment. There are not a lot of pop artists, even avant pop artists who I think work that way, who sort of can change even parts of their lyrics on the fly like that. Well, and it's a telling turn of phrase, because I actually don't really think that Bjork is a pop artist anymore. I think she began as one or she began in the drag of a pop artist. Yeah.

But really, that's not what she is. She's sort of a composer, and one of the great instruments that she uses is her own voice. And so it's a composition that will probably die with her, except for these recordings. But as you say, like, when you hear her live, when she does perform these songs live, She will sort of like, you can feel her kind of improvising around the sound that's been established in the recordings, but sometimes she changes it up and it's really surprising and weird. She's a really odd artist, and she's like more odd the longer I think about her. Right. Does Post Scana's pop to you?

So I had debut, her first record, on tape, on audio cassette, and I had, post on CD, and I do think that those are pop records. And I think that at the time, I probably would have thought of them as sort of like very European, very like sort of club-inflected, very cool. And then she had an album of remixes called Telegram, I think. It all had this sort of like Euroclub cool sensibility that was very foreign to me as a 19-year-old living in the United States.

but it had that vibe to it. And I think that in everything she's done since Vespartine, she has walked further and further away from that work. Yeah, you said something about Bjork being an artist who wholly outpaces her audience. And I liked that phrase. Does that sense of her start with Vesbertine, you say? That's the point where she stops becoming a pop artist. And it's a little harder to wrap your head around each album subsequent to that.

I think so. I think that like, Fesbertine feels like a very sophisticated pop record in the same way that Corton Spark feels like a very sophisticated pop record. And then just like Joni Mitchell, after that point, Bjork was incredibly famous, incredibly powerful and able to sort of follow her fancy. And so she could make an album that was Acapella. She could make an album. She released a quartet of live recordings that are really astonishing.

And the production value on those is really high. she just was able to do whatever she wanted. And I think the project has become more and more insular and more and more strange over time. I had forgotten until I started researching again that like the phone app album, it was like a series of apps. And like I remember in real time at the time just like I can't. I'm sure this is great if I spend like 20 hours unraveling it, but I don't know if I could devote the time necessary to truly get this. like that's the artist Bjork became. 100%. I feel like you almost have to be like

a rabbi with her and really pour over the thing and sort of figure it out and piece it all together. And she's thinking a lot less about the pleasure of her audience. Like Vespertine pose