March Badness is back! Download your Björktober bracket: https://bit.ly/bjorktober
I was sitting in a third floor atrium at MIT in April 2016 when I got a push notification from The New York Times that Prince had died. I remember staring at my screen, frantically scanning for a word that wasn’t there. Prince Charles? Prince Muhammad bin Salman? Please, any prince but Prince. But that extra word never came. The next week, after a poetic April snowstorm had come and gone, I gathered with friends to watch Purple Rain. During my friend Jamie’s eulogy he asserted that—despite Prince’s expansive discography and wide ranging collaborations and musical styles—Prince’s music always came back to three themes: sexuality, Minnesota, and the apocalypse.
It was Prince’s passing that led Jamie, Malia, Katherine, and me to embark on March Badness, a non-competitive listening tournament of 64 Prince songs, in March 2020. Since then, we’ve covered Canadian songs in 2021’s La Folie de Eh?-Pril Madness, 90s hip-hop in 2022’s Apr.ill, and Beyoncé in 2023’s Beyoncmaé. And this year, I’m very excited to turn my attention to the 30+ year (and counting) solo career of Björk Guðmundsdóttir. Welcome to Björktober.
For this year's bracket, we’re considering the 129 songs released on Björk’s ten studio albums and two soundtrack albums, plus the handful of singles that were released on their own. Excluded are her many remix and live albums, as well as her collaboration albums, albums with The Sugarcubes, and the album she released when she was 11. In trying to succinctly describe the evolution of her work, I turn to internet user ferglouc, who six year ago described her then-nine studio albums as follows:
Debut - funky and dancey
Post - dancey but like a r t s y too
Homogenic - earthquakes and electricity and stuff
Vespertine - getting dicked down in a snowstorm
Medulla - AAAAAAAAA and also AAAAAAAAAAAA
Volta - trumpets doing a heckin big honk
Biophilia - science is fun
Vulnicura - the void ft strings
Utopia - vulva flutes
To this I will only add that If Prince sings about sexuality, Minnesota, and the apocalypse, then Björk sings about sensuality, Iceland, and renewal.
Like so many others in my generation, I first encountered Björk on March 25, 2001, when she wore her iconic swan dress to the 73rd Academy Awards. Much of the commentary about the dress was alienating, and I remember that not sitting right with thirteen year old me. Looking back, I think I was captivated by how unbothered she seemed by the othering gaze thrust upon her. She stood there not with the braggadocio and dick-swinging confidence that one often sees from A-list celebrities pushing sartorial boundaries on the red carpet, but rather with something that looked much more like plain old self-assuredness. When I first listened to her music a few years later and liked it, I remember feeling somehow validated, like I had proved the haters wrong.
That song I first heard was Unravel, released as track number one on the Flaming Lips’ 2005 Late Night Tales compilation album. She sings: ”While you / are / a-way / my heart / co-mes undone / Slo-w-ly / Unr-a-vels / In a ball of yarn”. Like so many other Björk songs, she is not only singing but embodying what she is singing about: you don’t need to understand the lyrics to bring to mind a ball of yarn, slowly ceding its core into a mess of string that will ultimately require two people, reunited, to untangle and wind up again.
I spent the summer of 2008 living on the second floor of a walk up in the East Village, directly across from the southern entrance to Tompkins Square Park. My tiny room was basically all bed, save for a small desk at the foot with an iPod speaker on it. Every day that summer I woke up to Bjök’s 2001 album Vespertine; I would usually be up from bed by the end of Hidden Place and out of the shower to hear Pagan Poetry. This was the first Björk album I loved, and listening to it today still brings me back to that summer: the warmth and the grime of the morning air and the complicated mix of confidence and insecurity that cast a spell over this final summer before I finished college. Tompkins Park hosted a lot of dog shows, and so when I wouldn’t wake up to Björk on the weekends I would often wake up to the sounds of dogs barking. At least once, I remember looking across the street through the midsummer foliage and wrought iron gates to bear witness to a tail wagging competition aimed, it seemed, directly at my bedroom window.
Back in Maine later that year, on the first Sunday in November, my friend Bradley and I were listening to Homogenic and noted how it felt like the perfect album to listen to on the day that we set our clocks back: the coziness of an early dusk, the beauty and melancholy inherent to autumn, the rediscovered morning light creating a twist on the familiar…everything about that day feels captured in Homogenic. Listening to Homogenic at the end of daylight savings has become a personal holiday of sorts, as documented in the photos throughout this newsletter. For more than a decade I only allowed myself to listen to Homogenic on this one day of the year, but my dogmatism has softened since moving to Arizona, which does not observe daylight savings time.
I’ve had the opportunity to see Björk perform live twice. The first time was at Auditorio Nacional in Mexico City during her 2017 Vulnicura tour, performing alongside the Mexico City philharmonic. “Gracias!,” she would enthusiastically exclaim at the end of most songs. Three years later, I bought tickets to a series of virtual performance livestreamed from Harpa in Reykjavik. Originally scheduled for summer 2020, the concert series was optimistically intended to thank first responders and celebrate the end of COVID in Iceland. After numerous delays and a softening of the rhetorical stance towards ending the pandemic, the first concert eventually aired right after I moved to Phoenix. I remember setting up my speakers and laptop on the floor to watch the concert in my new house in a city that I had never been to before. Slowly, I started to feel like I was home.
Thanks for reading,
– Grif