Los Angeles Times  1998-05-22

By Richard Cromelin


"Icelandic Wonder Straight Ahead"


   Pop music: Bjork, the international object of admiration, doesn't 
   make songs for MTV or radio but wants to make the perfect song.


Are we done with the Spice Girls? Get ready for the Ice Girl. As in 
Bjork, the Icelandic singer who has scaled the slopes of credibility at 
a remarkable rate, going from an endearing but inessential oddball to 
perhaps the dominant diva in the modern-rock field over the course of 
three solo albums.

It seems hard lately to find a published interview with any artist of 
note who doesn't mention Bjork as an object of admiration. She commands 
a seriously loyal fan following, and her latest album, "Homogenic," was 
voted one of the 10 best of 1997 in the prestigious Village Voice 
national critics' poll.

For someone who was dismissed as a novelty--even if an intriguing one--
during her career in the late '80s with the anarchic art-pop collective 
the Sugarcubes, this progress has the look of vindication.

"Well, that's not really what I'm after," says Bjork, 32, drinking a 
cappuccino in a shaded portico at the Chateau Marmont. She continues in 
slightly halting English decorated with an Irish-sounding brogue and 
London inflections.

"I guess I'm on this stupid mission--I know it sounds like a silly fairy 
tale, but I'd like to try to make the perfect song. I still haven't, and 
I've got 50 years to still try, and I'm willing to do whatever it takes.

"I'm naturally quite introvert, but if it's a question of going to the 
middle of England and becoming the most extrovert person in the 
universe, if it's a question of traveling the world like a lunatic on 
950 cappuccinos, I'm up for that. If it's a question of not 
communicating and going and isolating myself for 50 years so I can get 
as much work done as possible, I'm up for that."

Chasing the perfect song is one thing. Staying alive in the U.S. 
marketplace is another--"Homogenic," released last fall, has sold fewer 
than 300,000 copies here. But while her record sales have declined since 
her first solo album in 1993, Bjork's live fan base has grown. She can 
easily pack 3,000-capacity halls like the Hollywood Palladium, where she 
plays on Saturday.

"We know that people out there are very, very interested in Bjork," says 
her manager, Scott Rodger. "But America is very MTV- and radio-driven, 
and Bjork doesn't make records for either MTV or for radio."

That's not surprising. Even in her youth in Reykjavik, where she grew up 
as the only child in an extended hippie family, Bjork Gudmundsdottir 
enjoyed being the odd one out. "I would go to my grandparents' and play 
a bit of Jimi Hendrix, I would go to the music school and play a bit of 
Roland Kirk, and I would go to my parents' and play them a bit of 
Rimsky-Korsakov, Stockhausen....

"And I have to admit that I'm still guilty of that.... I sometimes get 
addicted to argument just for argument's sake. Just to make people 
question their standards."

In person, Bjork is friendly but guarded. She lives up to her image as a 
childlike free spirit when she indulges in idealistic, metaphysical 
musings, but her poetic leanings are balanced by a down-to-earth 
practicality. She's obviously learned that if you're pursuing the pure 
spirit, you can't be the guileless innocent.

"I'm quite introvert person, and especially with strangers I get shy," 
she says. "When I meet strangers, I think I talk very fast and I 
probably pretend that I'm a lot stupider than I am, which has worked 
wonders so far, I think....

"I show only a side of me. I have to protect a lot of me, not because 
I'm lying to you, but because if I give this other thing away, I won't 
even be able to write songs anymore."

Bjork's music reflects her passion for the abstract. It takes a step 
closer to purity on "Homogenic," whose crystalline sonic topography is 
the setting for enigmatic, evocative verses. Its subject, Bjork 
explains, is "a woman who was put in an impossible situation with a lot 
and lot of restrictions, so she had to become a warrior, but she fought 
back not with weapons but with love...."

Much of Bjork's music has been honed with key artists in the electronic 
dance-music world of London, where Bjork cut a high-profile musical and 
social swath (including a couple of media-genic romances) for four 
years.

She recently moved back to Reykjavik, where, she says, she can walk for 
10 minutes from the town square and scream at the top of her voice and 
no one can hear her. "A side of me is very lazy and a side of me is 
terrified of being a coward," she says. "I thought I was being a coward 
living in Iceland, so I thought the bravest thing I could do was to go 
to London, which is as scary as [expletive] for me, and then after going 
for four years on 900 miles per hour, then that was starting to become 
lazy. So the scariest thing I could do was go back home.

"I'm still the kid in the back of the class. I can spend a lot of time 
for myself and investigate and do treasure hunting and try to find my 
songs.... I have a quite comical sado-maso relationship with myself. I 
am a fierce master and humble slave."


* Bjork plays on Saturday at the Hollywood Palladium, 6215 Sunset Blvd., 
7:30 p.m. Sold out. (213) 962-7600.