The Depths of Haunted Minds: the greatest albums of the 1970s, according to Björk
While it might be easy to describe the artistry of Björk using words like “dark” or “melancholy”, the beauty of her vision feels far more expansive than that. After all, how “dark” really is it to transform real facets of life into art when those facets reach deeper than the surface of everyday existence? Ultimately, these nuances appear more naturally beautiful than anything else, urging us to question what it means to be human.
Throughout history, many artists have been labelled as merely “experimental” or “sorrowful”, and while these aren’t ever really bad descriptions, neglecting to venture further into any other potential interpretations or analyses makes it feel somewhat reductive. Björk, for instance, might be best suited to tags like “experimental”, but her art also reaches far more corners than simple deductions.
One of the most obvious examples of Björk’s penchant for exploring beauty and existence is Biophilia, the record that tackled the human relationship to nature and how perspectives are shaped by how distant or close we feel to it. Ultimately, if for nothing else, it focussed on the wonderment of searching for meaning where meaning cannot be reduced to simple humanistic vernacular.
For this reason, among many others, Björk actually shares many similarities with her favourites than it perhaps seems on the surface. Joni Mitchell, for one, is often shoehorned into categories like “confessional singer-songwriter”, but she also crafted an artistic identity based on the power of humanistic flaws and uncertainty during times of trouble.
Björk’s detached yet intricate perspective on what makes us human creates a natural connection with socially constructed biases and issues like feminism and humanistic disparities, themes that Mitchell also oscillates between in her own work to varying degrees of lucidity. These may not be explicit, but they’re there in the fabric of Björk and Mitchell’s cognition, like through-lines that exist in the makeup of being.
While naming her favourite albums of all time for The Rest is Noise back in 2011, Björk mentioned Mitchell’s 1977 classic Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, a record that brings together varying themes of finding yourself in a broken world and navigating the storm of adversity. Perhaps more understandable than that, however, is that Björk’s second 1970s choice was something more aligned with her vision—Nico’s Desertshore.
Released in 1970, the record explores everything you might expect from Nico, from doom and gloom to death and destruction, through the overarching lens of human fragility. Desertshore is melancholic but in a more complex and ambiguous way, beginning with a sense of foreboding energy that eventually becomes something more haunting and dreamlike, much like many of Björk’s records.
In fact, many of the songs seem well placed on something like Björk’s Homogenic, with an inexplicable allure beneath the service that beckons further exploration. At the same time, both artists feel distantly tied to the endearing nuances found throughout Mitchell’s work, too, particularly in places where vulnerability and existence reveal answers about what it means to be a broken human.
