‘Pagan Poetry’: the Björk video banned by MTV
All art is subjective, right? There’s no one who embodies that spirit more than Björk, the multi-million-selling Icelandic powerhouse who has mastered the rare immeasurable feat of straddling both the waves of alternative and mainstream music at the same time.
But with her level of edgy artistic expression comes a fine line to walk – veer too far into safety, and you lose the eccentricity that gave you a career in the first place; leap way into the extreme and risk being ostracised by the masses. The latter fate was exactly what befell on her video ‘Pagan Poetry’.
Of course, Björk was never going to retreat into the safety net. Everything about her work was – and still is – enveloped in the indulgent and experimental, provocative and visceral. That was clearly the brief when it came to filming the video for ‘Pagan Poetry’, the second single from her 2001 album Vespertine. But the visuals on screen ended up being so outlandish and, well, NSFW that it then got banned by MTV, thus sending Björk to the depths of mainstream commercial music prison.
To be fair, it’s pretty easy to see why the video was never going to make it to air. All in all, the word that probably best describes it is ‘kinky’ – and even that’s putting it mildly. It firstly depicts stylised images – apparently taken from Björk’s own personal recordings – of explicit sexual activity, including fellatio, before showing various clips of women piercing needles through their skin. Ultimately, this culminates in a string of pearls being sewn into someone’s body. Yeah, maybe not what MTV had in mind.
However, it wouldn’t be doing Björk justice to dismiss the artistic expression in the ‘Pagan Poetry’ video purely as being too much for the mainstream. Those pearls being pierced through the skin, allegedly Björk’s, descend into an Alexander McQueen dress the singer is seen wearing in the closing shots, perhaps in itself evoking a commentary on the beauty and lust that women experience for the advantages of sexual pleasure.
Nonetheless, this analysis was hardly going to cut it in, making the airing of the video more socially acceptable. It was outright banned by the network and only ever played once on MTV2, years later, on a programme about controversial music videos. Well, it certainly fits that bill. Even now, after the days of MTV and its censorship are long gone, it’s still considered pretty explicit – the unfiltered version of the video has to be hunted down online, overcoming all the barriers of age verifications and content warnings before the full visual throttle is unleashed.
This probably goes a long way in explaining why the commercial success of ‘Pagan Poetry’ was fairly muted compared to some of Björk’s less controversial efforts. It also speaks to the cultural weight of MTV at the time – the banning of the video no doubt set the song off-kilter, though it was never bound to keep its singer down for long. You can’t imagine Björk having any regrets over this one, even if it didn’t cash in the most pay cheques, because what is art without causing a little bit of a stir?
