Why Björk is selective with the use of her music in movies: “So often it is just a surfacy artificial thing”
A soundtrack can sometimes make or break a movie. If the song choices fail to match the essence of the film or distract too much from the action and drama, they can really ruin an otherwise good piece of cinema. Björk, the legendary Icelandic musician, is of the belief that you can’t just chuck any random song onto a soundtrack – it has to truly marry itself to the scene it’s scoring.
The singer emerged as the vocalist of The Sugarcubes in the 1980s before rising to wider fame as a boundary-pushing solo artist the following decade with the release of her 1993 album Debut. Before she became the experimental pop genius we know her as today, she starred in the 1990 movie The Juniper Tree, directed by Nietzchka Keene. The low-budget film featuring a 21-year-old Björk was received well, but it would be another ten years before the singer would star in another feature film.
In the meantime, she ensured that all of her music videos were suitably cinematic, even working with established filmmakers like Michel Gondry, who went on to create Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Then came 2000’s Dancer in the Dark, directed by controversial filmmaker Lars von Trier. The movie earned Björk significant acclaim, and she even released an album, Selma Songs, to accompany the film.
While the singer has only appeared in a small handful of movies, she has allowed some of her songs to appear on soundtracks, although she is highly selective with who she gives permission. “I just feel the bond between the music and the film has to be really deep and real, so often it is just a surfacy artificial thing, the film might be OK and the music OK but they are strangers to each other,” she once told 4UM.
While she wasn’t keen on ‘Army of Me’ being used in the commercial flop Tank Girl, it seems – “I was a little ignorant with the Tank Girl incident and after that promised to not do that again” – if the movie is right, she’s not averse to allowing one of her songs to feature. Thus, she was much happier to allow Spike Jonze to use her song ‘Amphibian’ in his movie Being John Malkovich because “I was very proud to be asked, Spike is a friend I had sort of watched him through the corner of my eye make his first film and I knew the connection was genuine, and I personally feel that that song and the piece where it got put match each other very well.”
So, while Björk was “proud” of the use of ‘Amphibian’, a Vespertine B-side, in Jonze’s film, she can’t say the same about Tank Girl, which made her more cautious of who she allows to use her music. She called it an “educating experience,” adding that it “influenced strongly that I have since said no to almost every single soundtrack request I have been asked about.”
Since the early 2000s, however, Björk appears to have relaxed a little in terms of who uses her music, with some of her songs appearing in movies and TV shows like Skins, Derry Girls, Sucker Punch, and Gilmore Girls. Still, compared to many other artists, her soundtrack credits are pretty slim.
