No Genre Boundaries: Björk names her favourite hip-hop album
Björk has never been known to write songs conventionally. There are normally things that most people focus on, like time signatures or keys, whenever playing a tune, but Björk is more inclined to casually take a risk whenever she performs and just see what comes out of it. That kind of musical bravery isn’t something that she picked up on a whim. She had been following the masters of years gone by, and it’s hard not to see how Public Enemy did the exact same thing on It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.
But when you look at both of them side by side, the angelic voice of Björk and the militant chanting of Chuck D is about as chalk and cheese as it gets. Then again, is Björk all that dissimilar to hip-hop when you break down many of her influences?
Sure, there have been a lot more worldly influences based on her work on experimental albums like Medulla, but a lot of her best material in the 1990s did borrow from hip-hop production. ‘Army of Me’ had a core sample of ‘When the Levee Breaks’ just the golden age of hip-hop, and there were even a handful of songs in her later years that had the same glitchy production found on everything from rap records to industrial projects.
That kind of otherworldly approach to music is something that the production crew, The Bomb Squad, knew all too well. Throughout working on It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, some of the greatest tunes came from finding the wildest sounds and trying to make something out of them, whether that was the stuttering beats on ‘Bring the Noise’ or what sounds like space lasers going off on the song ‘Rebel Without a Pause’.
But it’s not just the production that Public Enemy have going for them. Having one of the best duos in music history, hearing Flava Flav hype up Chuck D’s lyrics is still one of the greatest trade-offs the music world has ever seen. Although Flav’s lines were endlessly quotable, hearing Chuck shed light on the real problems going on in the world helped open people’s minds up to what they were using their platform for.
Acts like the Beastie Boys would eventually be inspired to use their star power to bring change, but Björk might have seen a fellow advocate willing to put their beliefs into their music. While it would be a stretch to say she was influenced by Chuck on an album like Biophilia, having a song centred around environmentalism saw her going down a similar path of using music to advocate for your beliefs.
There are even a handful of times that Björk managed to pull off a hip-hop production convincingly. Even though a record like Volta is far from the top of her classic albums, hearing her work with a producer like Timbaland to create some of her backing tracks is one of the most inspired risks she had ever taken.
More than anything, the common thread between Björk and Public Enemy was always about being fearless when making music. All the rules that people give you about art are just suggestions, so you might as well find a way to just do what you want to do.
