“Taking the piss”: how a joke sparked Björk’s most iconic move
By definition, Björk was never really one for artistic pleasantries. While many try to glide along the stream of mainstream musical conventions, the Icelandic singer never bought into the sell of expectation, knowing that the most impactful and resonant art stemmed from something much more real. However, once, she attempted to poke fun at the opposite approach, landing on a track that would become one of her most iconic.
While it’s easy to analyse Björk’s experimentalism by listening to her sonic choices alone, much of this also stems from her upbringing and her desire to create art that didn’t so much challenge as it brought new perspectives. By aligning this with her own personal thoughts and experiences, her music became her own, independent from what most others were attempting to innovate at the time. As she recently told The Guardian: “For me, listening to music with really charged lyrics, I was like, hmm, I don’t think this is the place to put that in. So, for me, it is quite separate. But, like everyone, I set myself rules, and then, obviously, I like to break them.”
As a result, she knew the limits of her power and enabled her creativity to flow from the boundlessness of her own imagination, even when it was grounded in something entirely real. One of the best examples of this achievement was Biophilia, which saw her connect the intensity and emotionality of nature with other aspects of existence, like the humanistic desire for belonging and connection.
As far as her own approach, Björk’s relentlessness comes from her fearlessness, making her process not merely about making music but about translating some of our most intricate experiences into artistic formats, no matter how sobering or revealing it may seem. As with most artists, however, there comes a time when traditional approaches are shelved for momentary lapses in other directions, and while Björk usually sticks to her own arena, this changed the moment she came up with the idea for ‘All Is Full Of Love’.
The closing track of Homogenic, ‘All Is Full Of Love’, wasn’t Björk’s usual game, mainly because it seemed far more commercial in nature and, by extension, easily accessible than most of her other songs. It also incorporated the one theme she usually steers clear of—all-consuming, sugary pop-inspired romance—embellished by arrangements that enhance the overall theme of caretaking: “You’ll be given love / You’ll be taken care of / You’ll have to trust it.”
While the singer appreciates the success of the song, she also once admitted that it started as her “taking the piss” out of similar-sounding songs, subtly aware of venturing close to realms she usually avoids without compromising on her signature ability to subvert that which she rejects. In short, by toying with conventional structures without actually adhering completely, ‘All Is Full Of Love’ delivered just the right amount of commercialism without feeling out of place, resulting in one of her most iconic songs ever.
On top of this was its accompanying music video, which enhanced its underlying meaning and crossover with technological implications by presenting two loved-up robots. Alongside her desire to explore one of humanity’s more basic instincts in the context of artificial intelligence, it showed that ‘All Is Full Of Love’ wasn’t just Björk playing up to commercialism but a ploy to challenge the parameters of intimacy in “love songs”, challenging a system that seeks to both quash human emotionality with technology and celebrate its obsession with sexual desire.
