http://www.timeoutny.com/features/104/104.feature.bjork.txt.html TimeOut 1997-09-18 By Bob Kemp Photographs by Francois Dischinger "Fire And Ice" Bjork has a reputation as an airy fairy. But with Homogenic, Iceland's avant-pop diva says she wants to "cut the crap." "Yo, I got some Baaa-Jork tickets here!" hollered a ticket-hawker outside Björk Gudmundsdóttir's 1995 concert at the Academy. He was so persistent and loud that ever since then, it's been difficult for me to refer to her as anything else. So when I finally meet the Icelandic avant diva at the café under Takashimaya on Fifth Avenue, it's a relief that the introductions are brief: I don't have to say her name. As it turns out, Björk (pronounced, once and for all, bihz-erk) hasn't much use for niceties; she eyes strangers with the caution of someone who's been burned. She's certainly had her share of detractors--ranging from a journalist who insinuated in print that she's an irresponsible mother to a weird fan so angered by her relationship with a black man (jungle-music titan Goldie) that he sent her a letter bomb (it didn't go off). Despite Björk's initial suspiciousness, it doesn't take long for the 31- year-old to relax a bit. In town to talk about her new record, Homogenic, she growls with delight when wasabi is brought to the table, describes things she likes as techno and occasionally punctuates the conversation by sticking her fingers up her nose. "People think that I go out of my way to be strange," she says in her curious cockney/Nordic chirp: "When I talk to them, I'll do something like put forks up my nose. But it's not about that at all." Well, she may not intend to be odd, but her uncommon qualities have exerted an indelible, distinctive influence on pop music. Björk professes to be ignorant about her influence, but for all the sense of guileless wonder that suffuses her work and her public profile (entire ecosystems have been decimated so that magazines could print descriptions of her as "elfin" and "childlike") she's proudly aware that she's special. "I'm not pretend humble," she says. "I hate that shit." Raised by hippies in her native Iceland, Björk grew up surrounded by music, which led to her preternatural, shriek-and-purr singing style. "I sing the only way I can sing, and I've been singing since I was little," she says. "Most of the time when I was walking, I would sing to myself-- that would be my natural way of expressing myself. To me, it's as important as to eat or to sleep or fuck. If I don't do it for a week, I go a bit funny." When asked if the way that she sings was just there as a child, she bridles: "You think I didn't learn anything for 20 years?" During a ten-year stint studying classical music, Björk became besotted with the Icelandic variant of punk rock. After participating in "hundreds" of bands, she formed the Sugarcubes with other Reykjavík hipsters in 1984, releasing Life's Too Good in 1988. After four years of touring and making records that "took the piss out of music," the Sugarcubes disbanded, and Björk's next moves would forever outstrip her previous ones. In 1993, she collaborated with Soul II Soul supremo Nellee Hooper on Debut, an unprecedented fusion of fanciful songwriting and club-savvy beats. Selling millions of copies, Debut was omnipresent in 1993: Every public space seemed filled with its first single, "Human Behaviour," which eventually reached No. 2 on the modern-rock charts. And the album as a whole sent a signal to non-beat-oriented pop artists: "Head on down to your local remixer, but quick!" Björk continued on a more effervescent tip with 1995's Post, which found its emotional center in three string-laden compositions, chief among them "Isobel," a sweeping orchestral number. "A lot of things from Debut and Post were like duets, which I thoroughly enjoyed," says Björk. "It was me doing the music and Howie B., Tricky, Graham Massey and Nellee Hooper doing the beats." Although Homogenic's "Bachelorette" is close kin to Post's "Isobel," the new album is altogether less collaborative than the first two. After finishing her tour in 1996, Björk set up a studio on the top floor of her London home and compiled a library of noises and distorted beats with her chief collaborator, Mark Bell. She finished Homogenic earlier this year in Spain, and it's the logical extension of the seamless Björk oeuvre. She calls the record "Icelandic techno," adding that it's her "attempt to be truthful about my origin." Over loping, crackling beats, electro-burbles and grave string charts, Homogenic combines organic and mechanistic elements to reflect an Iceland in which late-20th-century modernism coexists with primordial splendor. "I'm trying to take two things and make them the same," Björk states. "When I walk down the street and close my eyes, I hear car alarms and sirens and voices and the wind. People are living in similar soundscapes all over the world, and that's what music should be made of." Music should also come from a distinctive personal context, which Björk certainly provides. The most telling phrase of Homogenic occurs in "5 Years," in which she says that she's "so bored of cowards who say what they want, then they can't handle." In person, she echoes this sentiment: "I've been very patient, and I'm just not anymore," she says. "I've got a sense of the clock ticking, and I'm getting older. There's less time for explanations. And this album is very much about bringing the news--not in four hours but in two minutes. Cut the crap." To this end, Björk begins with herself, exploring her restless nature with the album's first words: "If travel is searching / And home has been found / I'm not stopping / I'm going hunting," she sings on the ominous "Hunter." Later, she makes lyrical detours toward describing romantic turmoil ("Immature") and--most surprisingly--romantic redemption ("Don't get angry with yourself / I'll heal you," she coos in "All Neon Like"). "I used to think the most terrible crime you could commit is to write a love song," she says. "You can be onstage; a lot of people bought the ticket, and you think, Fucking hell, there's no way I've got a right to sing about myself here. But you get older and you realize the more selfish and personal you get, the more universal it gets somehow." Universality is what Björk embodies, with an effortless international scope that involves none of the airy platitudes you might expect from a woman who's often been compared to a daffy pixie princess. "There's a lot of pop music that is escapism, trying to paint this imaginary, beautiful paradise, this place you never go to," she says. "It's very important that pop music take reality and make magic out of it." Homogenic (Elektra) comes out September 23.