MTV Newsroom › bjork

Over the past few weeks, I have been diving into my stash of old copies of Spin magazine, mainly entries from between 1996 and 1999 (the same era when music meant the most to me, not coincidentally). The search has yielded some awesome gems from the era, mostly because Spin was at the forefront of the "electronica" movement of the late '90s (wherein we were all supposed to trade our guitars in for samplers and artists like the Chemical Brothers, Aphex Twin and Roni Size were supposed to represent the future of rock and roll). So in the midst of all the indie rock that still sticks around the magazines, there is an alarming amount of page space devoted to breaking down wacky subgenres and talking about the business of making dance music. The December 1997 issue is an excellent example of this, as it focuses on American electronica and discusses the new album by Bjork (at the time, she had just released Homogenic).

It got me thinking: Wouldn't it be awesome to have Bjork back?

Of course, Bjork hasn't left us since 1993's Debut, which established her as an envelope-pushing songstress straddling the black hole between the universes of pop, dance, rock and Lilith Fair-style Earth Mother movements. She has bounded across genres and experimented with most everybody who is willing to experiment, and her personal relationship with experimental filmmaker Matthew Barney has only pushed herself even farther past the horizons of music. But as her goals have gotten loftier, so has her music become more remote and impenetrable. Her last proper album — 2007's Volta — was the Bjork idiom pushed to incredible extremes. Full of worldbeat experimentation, hallucinogenic a capella work, ramshackle percussion and great swarms of noise, Volta was thrilling on one level and frustrating on many others.

Since then, she has rolled out a handful of musical projects, including the charity single "Nattura," a song for the soundtrack to the Finnish children's movie "Moomins and the Comet Chase" and has recently stated her intentions to collaborate with Dirty Projectors and Antony and the Johnsons. But though these things are all interesting in their own right, it's not quite the Bjork of Debut or Post or even Homogenic. Those albums all balanced Bjork's stranger urges with razor-sharp songcraft and a knack for haunting melody.

It's obviously counter-productive to Bjork's entire ethos to wish that she devolve a bit as an artist, but that's exactly what I'm asking. Sometimes the boundaries created by the forms of pop music can actually help somebody like Bjork, as they will give her a playground in which she can spread her ideas around. I get stuff like Volta, but I miss stuff like "Human Behaviour," which combined haunting beat science with a thrilling melody and jittery counter-rhythms, all pulled together by Bjork's entrancing vocal chops.

Tags bjork, video