Switched on Pop - Björk's Emotional Landscapes

Episode Date: November 30, 2017

Björk is uniquely both a pop star and avant-garde composer. Though her music often challenges our ears, underneath her records you'll find more in common with today's pop music than you'd expect. Pieced together, you'll hear that she paints emotional landscapes composed of all the complexities of human experience. We give you a way to enjoy listening to her music. Using this hybrid pop/modernist method, we deconstruct her latest album Utopia. Plus Nate & Charlie fall in love all over again. Featured Clips Björk - Losss Björk - Human Behaviour Björk - It's Oh So Quiet Björk - Hyperballad Björk - Joga Björk - Thunderbolt Björk - Lionsong Björk - Arisen My Senses Björk - Stonemilker Björk - Quicksand Björk - Notget Björk - Utopia Björk - Blissing Me Björk - The Gate  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. I want you to take a listen to this new pop song and tell me what it is. All right, hit me. So what's that? That is an absolute banger. That is going to be rocking dance floors around the nation. Oh, come on. Describe what you just heard.

That was this gorgeous little slice of euphoria. Is it pop music? My first answer is no, but then my immediate thought after that is why not? And to that, I don't necessarily have a satisfactory answer. All right, let's play just a little bit more, and I want you to tell me who it is. Okay. So who are we listening to? The other worldly vocals give it away.

This is Bjork. Bjork. Bierke. That's what she says. Burek. Rhymes with jerk. Burek. Yeah.

Nice. Okay, good to know. So that's loss off of Bjork's latest album, Utopia, which has received absolutely rave reviews, and I have to be honest about my first reaction. I want to ask, do you think of this music merits the accolades? Is this once pop star, now modern composer, perhaps just cacophony? Beated breath, don't worry. After a deep listen of her latest album Utopia, I was a skeptic, and now I'm a total convert. And what I want to do today is retune our ears and find out how to listen to something that's really challenging and see that it will reward us over and over with the beautiful sounds of Bjork's Utopia.

Fantastic. All right. Take me through your conversion, Charlie. Welcome to Switchdown Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. Today, Bjork's newest album, Utopia. Who is this, Bjork? I think it's important just to give a little bit of background for those who might not be as familiar. And honestly, I needed to catch up myself. Ditto.

So a couple of things that we may know is that she's very critically acclaimed. But we don't care so much about the accolades. We care about the music. And I want to give us just a quick review of where are these sounds coming from? Because York has this reputation of existing in the pop zeitgeist, certainly in the popular zeitgeist. And yet she is this avant-garde composer. So let's look at how we got there. Cool.

At the start of her career, her music fits in really with the alt rock world. Oh. Go, human behavior. Her earlier work also draws from symphonic music and jazz. What? On, it's oh, so quiet. Oh, give me some of this. No, you recorded all this in your garage.

Oh, I wish. And this is all an elaborate facade. Wow, Bjurk's got layers. Cool, let's keep going. my gosh, but it was her electronic music that solidified her as a pop act. Check out hyper ballad. Yeah, this one I know. Wow, this is what I think of when I think of Bjork is hyper ballad. Cool. Okay, interesting, because her music eventually sort of converges on all of these different sounds, the electronic sounds, these orchestral strings, these sort of roots in punk and alternative things.

And so just want to go and take a listen to her song, Yoka, on her masterpiece, Homogenic. Cool. What do you think that record came out? Wow. Sorry, I'm just recovering from that. Let me formulate my thoughts. That really rocks me. That's powerful stuff.

Yeah. This record's 20 years old. And it really, in many ways for me, and I think for the rest of our conversation, embodies the heart of her music. She sings about creating emotional landscapes and is, combining all of these really different sounds. Over the next 20 years of her career, she establishes a completely unique voice, allowing her to bridge the world of pop and avant-garde.

What I want to do today is look at how should we listen to Bjork's music, especially when it gets really challenging. Great. So to begin with, I think it's important to understand that York does self-identify as a pop star. I always prefer to call pop music like, folk music because it's the music of the people. The beauty of simplicity, as much as I like very complex things, are like very simple things too. And for me, you have to have both.

So this is a funny thing for Bjork to be saying about her music, because when I hear, I mostly hear the complex. And yet she's establishing this idea that it's actually quite simple and that this is pop music, almost as she says it, folk music, music for the people, for everybody. Yeah. So I think this requires a bit of an investigation. I think we need to ask, how is she using the pop format? Right. And this is a question that's actually difficult to ask. It might be a given she's a pop star, but how does her music reflect that aesthetic? I actually think it's all throughout and that the moments when I listen to cursorily,

I miss all of the clues that she's leaving us. So just first off, let's start with lyrics. Bjork writes really beautiful lyrics. and oftentimes simple, pure love songs, full of vernacular, everyday language. And we're going to hear that all throughout her latest album. But I just want to give an example off of her last album, Volta Kura, a song called Lion's Song.

And this is a heartbreak song. So the lyric is these abstract, complex feelings. I just don't know how to handle them. Maybe he'll come out of this loving me. Maybe he won't. Yeah, that's very direct. There's no metaphor there. No, not at all.

And I think the way that she sings every single syllable pulls on these words to, in many ways, give them more emotional content. Yeah. These abstract, complex feelings. Right. Every word is like fought for. Yes. Her style of singing gives words such gravity.

It's like you're hearing them for the first time. But the words are fairly simple. Yes. Simple in a good way. They're poetic. They are descriptive, but they're direct. I think it's something that any great songwriter tries to achieve. And that might be something we can pinpoint as a certain pop aesthetic as a lyrical immediacy.

Right. That is just instantaneous. Aside from just using lyrics, which are familiar, love songs, Bjork uses instrumentation that pulls. directly from a pop aesthetic. Throughout her orchestrations, we're going to hear things which are seemingly really unfamiliar.

Right. But if you listen closely, are actually things that you'd hear anywhere else, potentially on the Top 40 radio. If we take a listen to her song, Triumph of the Heart off of the album, the Dula, take a listen to this. Wow. I have the biggest smile on my face.

That makes me so giddy. Do you recognize who's beatboxing? Is that Ros? That is Razel from the roots. Wow. See, that's visionary. That's great stuff. Razel lends excellent beats.

And you're going to hear throughout her music great beats, oftentimes with kick drums and snare drums, electronic music, electronic synthesized drums. But things that would feel at home in EDM, hip-hop, other places. So you're saying even on her most outwardly abstruse album like Medulla, which is entirely composed of voices. She's still referencing a pop aesthetic by including like a Roselle beatboxing. Totally. On her new album Utopia, she is using high hats in a way that I think we would hear in like a Cardi B song.

Take a listen to just this short section of arise in my senses. I mean, really stretching and playing with our sense of time and adding all these bizarre elements, but underneath it, you're hitting, you know, basically, how, hi-hat sort of trap music kind of stuff that's all over the hip-hop charts. Right, a kind of demented version of the Atlanta hi-hat. Yeah, exactly. And of course, Bjork adds in everything from the symphony. You can listen to Stone Milker in which she has beautiful string orchestrations.

And so when you combine these elements of organic strings and symphonic pieces with electronic drums and synthesizers, added into very visceral lyrics, you get yark. Yeah. So let's just continue where we were. We were listening to Stone Milk Groff her last album. And let's see what these elements sound like when they're all together.

Cool. How do you think it all comes together for you? I think it's sublime, but it does land me back at this nebula, which is the question you originally posed to me, is this pop or not? And I can see it either way. In some ways, yes, this feels so accessible and sort of sensuous to me in a way that a lot of pop music is.

And at the same time, there's these elements that seem so jarring or sort of unusual that it takes me out into this more cerebral place. It's like the same duality she described in that interview. Your leanings towards the simple and the complex, they both live in this music. I think part of this is because her work is highly conceptual. It's seemingly serpentine. But upon close listen, you can discover common musical elements that you're familiar with that come from this pop world. Right. The thing is, instead of giving you your typical verse, chorus, sort of hook, normal pop form, she's playing with all of our expectations by placing things maybe out of order, stretch time in places that we haven't heard them before, even though the underlying elements may be familiar.

And I think by creating these unique soundscapes and new song forms in which sometimes you never get a chorus for a couple songs in a row. Right. What she's really doing is painting these emotional landscapes. It sings about creating emotional landscapes. And I think that rather than playing with our normal musical expectations, she's often putting us in places that are a little bit more uncomfortable because the reality, of the emotional content in her music may actually be not so simple. Rather, there is tension and push and pull

in every emotional landscape that she creates. So as an example of one of my favorite emotional landscapes that she paints, I want to listen to her song, Quicksand. I believe it's the last song on her last album, Vonakura. It's about her divorce from her husband. It's a very powerful album. and like much of her music at first seemingly challenging to enter, and then you realize it is raw, personal access into her real life.

So the lyric is, when I'm broken, I'm whole, and when I'm whole, I'm broken. This sort of lyrical palindrome, scales of emotional justice going back and forth. It's a simple lyric, as we've established, he likes to write these just really concise, beautiful little lines. and yet it is orchestrated in a way that it could only be done this way. You have, on one hand, these really intense beats that feel like they're just throwing you around the room. I mean, can you stomp a beat out to it? What meter are we in?

I gave up very quickly and just sort of lost myself in the flux of it. It's painful. And the pain of heartbreak, as we established, this was about her going through divorce. this album. Underneath, though, are these really lush and beautiful strings. The nostalgia

for past love, maybe the wholeness, maybe the hope for the future, and contained in this very simple line is this whole, I just hate to say it again,

but this emotional landscape, she's painted this unique way of thinking about her experience of this loss of this love. Yeah. Oh, my God, I love your analysis here,

man. You've really gone deep into this catalog, you're bringing back gold and jewels to me. Great. Well, it took some digging to really start to understand this. And now that we have a framework for understanding that she's using the entire palette of pop music. Right. And smearing it and creating new abstractions.

I'm really digging into multiple metaphors here. Thank you for bearing with me. We can begin to identify with the music, much more. more strongly because it is challenging. I mean, when you first hear a lot of these pieces, you're like, oh, whoa, gosh, that's a bit much. Yeah. And then when you start to hear these parts that you understand, then it actually very

quickly all coalesces together. And so what I want to do when we come back from the break is talk about her latest album Utopia, because I feel like we're all needing a little bit of utopia right now. Mm-hmm. And we're going to look at how Bjork ascends out of this very challenging past album, Volnokura, in which we heard all of the... this sort of heartbreak. She comes out on the other side, and we're going to see you there. Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue.

President Trump is now targeting predominantly democratic cities for ice raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday. We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE.

When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up, instead of the top of the top of, down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. Bjork comes out with this album, Utopia. It's a response to her last album, Vonakura, in which she was going through divorce and, of course, Utopia as a response to an album which

really sounds like a volcano erupting. Yeah. What a great title. And so she's telling us right from the start, this is going to be a fairly high concept album. And upon first listen, it could be very jarring. But we're going to find that given these new tools, this way of listening to understand York, that, oh my gosh, it's going to reveal a utopia. That's all I've got. So what I want to basically examine with you is do you think that utopia is an effective response? And is it affective music?

Does she create an emotional landscape of utopia? Cool. Let's dig in. So we don't have enough time to listen to all 75 minutes of her album. But I thought we could just take a listen to the beginning, the first two songs, and see what narrative arc that it establishes and see if it is beginning to paint this emotional landscape. And what we're going to do is we're going to listen for those same elements that we put together in our first half. We're going to be listening for what are her lyrics saying? what instrumentation is she using that we understand both the electronic and the organic,

and then how does she blend them to create her work? Groovy. So it would be appropriate then to just start from the very top of the album. Her song, Horizon My Senses. Take me there. What are the first sounds you hear that come out of Arisen My Senses? The first sounds are the celestial plucking of a harp. And even just before that, there's a bird call.

Did you hear that? Oh, you're right. You're absolutely right. Yeah, this high-pitched warble. There are bird calls and natural elements all throughout this album. Pastoral. Yeah. Later on, actually, on her song, Utopia, this album is primarily harps and flutes are the organic instruments

that are all over it. And what seems like it should be this very sweet, pastoral, as you said, sort of orchestral sweet, the birds keep interrupting. This is Utopia. What does this make you think of, these harps, these flutes, these birds? Where are we? I don't know. It makes me think of the French modernist composer Oliver Messian, honestly, a little

bit, who was this sort of visionary, devoutly Catholic composer who, you. used dissonant chord clusters and bird music to express his divine love of God. I think that's an appropriate connection because this just sounds Edenistic. I feel like we're in the garden. Yes, yes, absolutely. What a cool way to establish this album. Harps and flutes. And yet in contrast, or perhaps actually in support of it, the very first line.

Did you catch that? Just that kiss was all there is. Yeah. Sit with that. Yeah. What comes out? Starting an album like that is starting an album on this feeling of falling head over heels, right? Totally.

This heavenly moment caught just after a kiss. Yeah. How sweet and tender. Oh, man. Yeah. And the way she elongates the civil. Yes of the word kiss for so languorously like that.

I don't know, it's really some great word painting there. Right after she sings this line, leaves us hanging on this kiss, the music opens up. I want to take a listen, see what you're hearing, and can you describe the soundscape for me? It seems to be that Edenistic soundscape you described with these momentary, explosions sort of detonated within it from bass drum and sort of noise boom. But they're not aggressive necessarily. They're more like little love bombs.

Beautiful. What you said is beautiful. And the music is beautiful. I hear it as this intermixing of the organic sounds, right? The harps. And then underlying these sort of electronic elements getting going. You know, you've got these like beats and these high. high hats and it feels to me like an engine restarting. It feels like love restarting.

Right. The gear is starting to turn. Yeah. Ooh, this is interesting. We've gone from a past of great emotional turmoil to a new kiss and love restarting. And so what I want to look at is what is this love? Are we getting more information about who is this person or thing? What's what's going on? You just want the gossip, Charles. I want the gossip. So let's just go a little further into the song and continue listening to a rise in the census. Wow, this is starting to sound like our relationship a little bit, Charlie. Tell me about it.

And then in track two, which we'll get to shortly, I mean, there's the line that epitomizes our show to music nerds obsessing. Falling in love, sending MP3s back and forth. I mean, that could be our tagline for Switched on Pye. Absolutely. It's beautiful. So it's this sort of illusion of love in music. Exactly. What's going on here?

I feel like she's creating this really beautiful moment, this moment of the kiss. Words swirling. Did you catch that how, as she's singing, there's multiple versions of herself. She's not singing backup harmonies in line. They're kind of echoes and reverberations and staggered. I hear that as playing with our sense of time,

as you would feel after a kiss. there's sort of this past, present, future all happening at the same time. It's this really special moment. And it's a love affair, and maybe it's with music. Ah. Well, we're going to see. We're going to see. So where does the album go from here?

We're just going to go a little bit further along, because I love to see what she's established for us up front, and things take a little bit of a turn. So let's check out just the beginning of her second song on the album, Blissing Me. There's our line. Not quite as ecstatic as the album opener. It's the moment after the kiss. So a little more self-reflection. Yeah.

And doesn't it feel that way after a tough heartbreak? And then you have that first little moment of love. And then you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, I've got some baggage I got to work out. Right. Some doubt creeps back in. Huh. And she's going to work out a lot of that in the rest of the album. There's some incredibly powerful moments.

You said you're also challenged by this album. Is this one of those songs? Is this a moment that was harder for you to process initially? You know, I didn't necessarily quite know what to do with this because it is maybe on first listen pretty. It's pleasant, I guess, but it didn't feel like pop music, you know? Listening me to my mind is one that's a little pricklier around the edges. And I think that one of the principal elements for me,

even though it has the similarly lush harp orchestration here, there's something a little relentless about the repetition of that one melody over and over again. That prevents me from sort of being swayed by it or sort of overridden the way I am, for instance, a rise in my senses. A lot of her work requires us to get into the tiniest moments. And so if you're distracted by the repetition of the melody, there's some interesting contrast that does immediately grab my attention because you have these gorgeous harps. We're sort of grounding ourselves. It sounds more like in a classical tradition. Not even a lot of other stuff we heard on her last track. There are sort of these very rectangular, funky, strange rhythms with classical orchestration.

But this just feels like it's drawing on her classical background. And yet the lyrics are not a simple classical song cycle. She's singing about texting and sending MP3s. And so we have these very different points of reference right from the start. Right. There's a nice anachronism there between the sort of stately, almost baroque rhythms of the harp and the hypermodern content of the lyrics. Exactly.

If you are still, though, kind of stuck in this piece feeling, little repetitious. I think it's intentional because it sort of allides nicely right into the next track. And maybe we'll just look at one more piece, which is the gate. The gate opens with similarly long, stretched out melodies. You're kind of wondering, is this song going to take off? And then all of a sudden it does. So just listen to a moment of her melody into this moment where things go in a different direction. That synthesizer, arpeggiated, floating upward just comes out of nowhere. Does it sound familiar? I feel like I'm on a quiz show.

Does it sound familiar? I'm stumped. It reminds me of the very first thing we heard on the album. To the bird call, you mean? It feels like it's drawn out of that bird call. It's sound. Am I crazy? It's a stretch?

It's a stretch. But let me meditate on it. Okay, okay. I hear where you're coming from. There is a sonic sisterhood there. A gestural relationship, if you will. Certainly. Fine.

Okay. We've started with this Edenistic beginning. We got some interesting harps and flutes and nature calls. Right. And some intimate moments. And the music then goes into her electronic domain. So I guess the question is, what is this emotional landscape?

What are you hearing? How is she establishing it? Well, in the way you framed it as sort of this ascent, this Phoenix moment, everything on this album that we've listened to does feel like it's opened up somehow. It's kind of spacious. It's kind of welcoming, you know, the sounds of nature sort of intruding into the tracks like that. perhaps signals a sort of willingness to allow things to enter your life and to happen and to grow organically. So I think there's a permissiveness present here or something. Similarly in the drum beats, the high hat programming, the sort of looseness of time, it allows you to, like her voice, sort of exist in multiple places in the beat at the same time.

It's inviting, even though it's almost literally offbeat. Right. And the synthesizers that come in as well, these crescendoy bird call-like sounds, she's, of course, trying to paint utopia. And what I love about this utopia is that it actually has more in common than we may want with some of the material

that she was singing on her earlier album Heartbreak. We listened to her song, Quicksand. The line was, when I'm broken, I'm whole, and when I'm whole, I'm broken. And I think in some of her other material, which is more rhythmically aggressive, we hear some of more of that, the heartbreak, the angst, the brokenness and challenge of love, even though underlying that had been these nice strings. Here, I think we're getting a little bit of a reversal, and yet they're still both present, right? We have these sweet orchestral elements, these calls to nature, her relationship to music and her finding peace and love in trading music.

And yet underneath it, there is still the complexity of human emotion. And for me, this is what gives great artistic license to stretch our expectations of form and what elements must collide and what must never collide. She pulls at all of these expectations in a way where it's both familiar. And then for me, it's artistically jarring. But jarring in a way, like, it kind of gets me out of my seat. And I'm listening. I'm like, what is that?

I want to know what that experience is. Charles, thank you, because this dive through the Bjork catalog, I'm going to work on saying that, right? That was maybe the most valuable part of this episode in some ways. 45 minutes or so, and that's all you got. I've got to work my humlots there. Bjark. This gives me a framework to listen to this album,

not just as an island, but as part of a larger archipelago in her work. And what you've revealed, too, is how deliberate she is in everything she does. And I think she has charted out this greater sort of artistic narrative that, as you've said, is not only confined to music, but exists in these visual and filmic realms as well. So I'm excited to go back and listen to this album again and not just hearing it on its own, but hearing how it sort of interfaces with bigger themes at play through her work. So as you go out and think about listening to this again, just know that she's asking us, I think, to listen a little bit more closely.

You can't put this on the background and absorb it. It wants active listening. And isn't that exciting? For me, that's a little bit of utopia. Like, I feel like I can escape away into these beautiful paintings that she's made for me and walking through this museum of all of these different emotions.

It's not something to take lightly. It's something to listen in and hear, you know, where you get lost, find those elements that are familiar and grab onto them. Usually you can find that in her voice. You just have to be patient and let every syllable draw all the way out until you can catch the whole word.

So, yeah, active listening and listen deeply to it. Wise words, Charles. Two music nerds obsessing. Sending each other MP3s, falling in love. Falling in love to a song. This episode of Switchdown Pop was produced by Charlie Harding. It was also edited by Alex Kaplanman

and Rose Reed from Arc, a full-service creative podcast agency. You can learn more at arc agency.co. That's ARC agency.co. This episode was mixed and engineered by the incredibly talented and incredibly married Bill Lance. Big congrats. Congratulations, Bill. And design by Luke Harris. Our intern is Olivia Woods.

We're going to be back in two weeks, and we'll be. reporting on the best albums of the year. You didn't know that yet, Nate, but that's what we're going to do. Right. And you won't want to miss it because we're also going to continue our annual tradition of covering a classic holiday song. Until then, thanks for listening. Thanks for listening. Attention Spotify. Has arrived on the new Good Girl Jasmine Absurd Absurd of Carolina Herrera, a fragrance intense with character gourmet and addictive. Imagine a jasmine embollivan, tofu caramelized, and tonka-tostada. A combination that seduce from the first instant and leave a wea.

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