Bjork reigned over a quasi-popular avant-garde realm for almost 30 years. As a teenager, she was a household name in Iceland where she was the lead singer for The Sugarcubes. She then began a series innovative and touching solo projects that have delighted critics while challenging their expectations.
Her 1997 album Homogenic–my favorite–is an extraordinary mix of lushness, intensity, and an electronica-infused tribute the artist’s unmolested home, with hopeful (but not always happy) lyrics. The musical arrangements on all ten of her studio albums are unique feasts for winds, brass, European club beats and vocals that can be dramatic, playful, or pretty.
Fossora, Bjork’s newest album, features one song after the other and offers alternatives to the scientific, irreligious values of our age. The album explores the family and homeland of the artist, as well as the country she recently returned to. In her 50s, Bjork’s unique music is less compatible than ever with progressive ideals. Fossora comes across as conservative, even if she doesn’t mean so. This suggests that traditionalism and the avant-garde may be more frequently meeting in the future. Bjork’s appearance in Robert Eggers’ stunning anti-Hollywood epic The Northman is a similar example. It’s a brutal, but spiritually rich movie that avoids easy secular moralizing.
Bjork, a long-standing environmental activist, has used her lyrics to invite to a world beyond technocratic absurdities. This is something that used to be viewed as a luxury in the United States for only the most extreme hippies. But it’s now more common to see younger reactionaries using these lyrics. Bjork instead of spouting left-wing platitudes on energy use, she describes the joy of a communion with the natural neural system of the Nordic forest.
There are no fairies or worship of nature goddesses; there is a sense of panentheism–not the divinity of nature, but divine presence in nature–characteristic pagan stuff revived by the Romantics, but not incompatible with Judaism or Christianity (think Psalm 19, for example). Bjork’s magical localism is in sharp contrast to climate change media gurus. Her music doesn’t ask you to envision a new world made possible by policy. It makes you feel like you are actually smelling the dirt.
Bjork’s 1986 behavior, when she showed her pregnant belly to Icelandic television, was not only indecent but also when she wore a swan gown and dropped eggs on the red carpet at the Academy Awards 2001. Her old stunts now seem to have been prophetic celebrations for femininity and motherhood in an era where natural childbirth is increasingly co-opted and fertility rates continue their decline. She sings “Sorrowful Soil”: “In a women’s lifetime, she gets four-hundred eggs but only two or three nests.” Another song, “Ovule,” decries that “deadly demonic divorces destroyed the ideal.”
Bjork has been vocal in her support for #metoo over the years and has spoken out about her experiences with harassment while filming Dancing in the Darkin 1999. However, she believes that the problem is more complex than what slogans like “toxic masculinity” convey. Bjork, a mother to a son in her thirties, said recently to the Atlantic: “If you cancel everybody, that’s no solution …..” Younger males need to be able to grow and learn, especially when they are younger.
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Bjork gives a refreshing perspective to these timely themes on “Victimhood”, lamenting that she “sacrificed myself, took one of the team” and then concluding, “I heeded a call out for victimhood …. Now.” The strange and beautiful “Atopos” opens the album, a mix of Gabber techno beats with a sextet bass clarinets. She sings, “to list only the flaws is excuses not to connect” and, later, “to insist upon absolute justice at all costs, it blocks connection.”
Bjork’s tribute in 2018 to her mother is perhaps the most striking element of Fossora. Bjork shows how to properly mourn, which is a phenomenon that late Sir Roger Scruton said left Western society in a state of helpless sadness. Bjork sings in the same elegiac style as the Victorians and possibly the Vikings about the deeper spiritual connection she will have with her mother during the process of mourning. Joy is able to erase moping and sings, “the greater freedom I give you, you will give me.”
She proclaims the providentiality of the passing of the old order: “Nature wrote this psalm. It expands this realm.” The world is becoming more bizarre, and it could be that the old strangeos will become more like the most intelligent and admirable. The avant-garde might continue to be attracted to traditionalists, even among artists. Bjork inspires us to continue digging together on Fossora.
