Los Angeles Weekly  1997

By Ernest Hardy


"Ice Is Nice"


"Musical styles are like clothes you wear on different days," says 
Bjork, speaking by phone from her publicist's office in New York. "I 
don't mean the styles are trivial and you can just throw them away, but 
it's very important that on Christmas Day you wear your red velvet 
outfit. When you go to the beach, you wouldn't wear that, would you? And 
you wouldn't wear a bikini at Christmas... Actually, that's a good idea. 
Maybe I'll try that sometime."

The subject was remixers, and how the Icelandic 
singer/songwriter/producer and remixer-in-her-own-right (she retooled A 
Tribe Called Quest's last single, "Stressed Out") chooses to work with 
knob turners as disparate as junglist Dillinja and house master David 
Morales. What's the common ground between Tricky and the Brodsky 
Quartet?

"What they've all got in common," she replies, "is the only thing I'm 
interested in, which is human nature. Music is supposed to be about 
humans, you know? I don't like the kind of snobbery which puts music or 
people in rigid categories. Human nature is much more complex than 
that."

Fans of Bjork groove on her music - and persona - for the unforced 
contradictions embodied within. Her voice is that of someone firmly 
grounded in her own reality without taking leave of her senses. 
Idiosyncratic without pushing it, she's poetic, sensual, earthy, goofy 
and deep. Her latest release, Telegram (Elektra), a completely 
overhauled version of her previous album, Post, is all of the above. "I 
Miss You" is transformed from a feast of drum patterns and percussive 
sounds into a cool, midtempo hip-hop vibe; "Cover Me" amps its way 
through a booming drum-'n'-bass setting; "Army of Me," whose original 
foundation was a sample of the drums from Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee 
Breaks," is now an instrumental track, erasing the singer from the 
picture but retaining its kick.

Not everything works, though. The sweeping, beautiful build of Post's 
version of "Hyperballad" is jettisoned for a Brodsky Quartet string 
morass; it's now coy and cutesy. "Possibly Maybe," one of Bjork's most 
lyrically evocative songs, contains the lines "Since we broke up, I'm 
using lipstick again/I suck my tongue in remembrance of you." Those 
words capture every nuance of a failed love affair: the oppressiveness, 
the loss of identity, the great sex, the cost and rewards of starting 
over, and the erotic charge of memory. Mark Bell's remix feeds Bjork's 
vocals through electronics as an industrial-tinged groove crawls behind 
her, flattening it all to a rich but comparatively much flatter grind of 
grayness.

The one color missing from Bjork's palette is rock & roll, not only on 
Telegram but on her albums Debut and Post as well. In fact, the only 
time she's acknowledged rock's existence was on the Skunk Anansie 
remixes of "Army of Me," which were released abroad as singles. Does she 
feel that rock is an exhausted genre?

"I just think it's a generation thing," she says. "I was bored with it 
from my parents, who played rock music 24 hours a day in my ears from 
the day I was born. By the time I was 7, I'd had enough. For life. And I 
never wanna hear it again.

"There's nothing wrong with rock," she continues. "But for me, music is 
about freedom of expression and being able to say whatever enters your 
mind. We have language and daily communication with people where we 
always have to be logical and functional and all that shit. Music's been 
the only abstract area - and it's been this way ever since the monkeys 
decided to become men; it's where you hear five notes and they make you 
cry, or you hear two notes and you laugh your head off. Music's supposed 
to express things you can't even express with your best mate. So why go 
to as boring and traditional and predictable a form as rock to do that?"