Why Björk felt rock music was too guitar-centric in the US: “Poor old Americans”
When her third and arguably greatest studio album, Homogenic, was released in 1998, Björk found herself in a position that would become quite familiar in the years to come: having to explain if her new direction in sound indicated a rejection of what had come before.
Was she a classical composer now? Had she retired once and for all from the more palatable pop/rock leanings of her Sugarcubes days? “It’s neither,” the then 33-year-old Björk told the Boston Globe. “I’m just doing what I want to do. I’m not on a mission to burn the guitars of the world.”
In many ways, Björk had more at stake with Homogenic than with any previous album she’d recorded, even including her solo debut a half-decade earlier. In the mid-1990s, the Icelandic star had begun generating press for a lot of reasons unrelated to music. This included some high-profile relationships (she was connected to both Tricky and Goldie, as mononym artists can’t help but be drawn to each other) and an infamous physical attack on a snooping reporter in Thailand.
Around the same time, an obsessed stalker had also mailed a letter bomb to Björk’s London address. The package was fortunately intercepted by police, but when the stalker was found to have taken his own life, the whole disturbing situation led to a period of exile for Björk, as she tried to focus on her work and a new vision for her music, with an emphasis on electronic beats and organic string arrangements.
The response to Homogenic when it finally emerged after two years of construction was certainly positive, but among American listeners in particular, there was also a consistent sense of surprise and borderline bewilderment, as if the thing had landed from an alien world. “Europeans have been doing electronic music for 50 years,” Björk said at the time, “so this is not so strange for them; it’s actually more roots music in Europe than rock music is. So I was thinking, ‘poor old Americans; no wonder they are feeling confused and dizzy.’”
Björk course-corrected on that line of thinking, though, when she saw a documentary about Lou Reed’s notorious 1975 instrumental record Metal Machine Music. Additionally, she said, “you’ve got bands like Devo. You’ve had electronic stuff for years.” The reaction to Homogenic in the States, then, was less about a total unfamiliarity with electronic music and more about a sort of weird allegiance to guitars – or at least the idea of the guitar as the essential vessel of rock n’ roll.
“I find it very strange that people take guitars for granted in rock, and everything else is strange,” Björk told the Boston Globe. “It’s like you’ve got a lot of green dots and you want it all to be green, and then you got one pink dot and everybody freaks out and loses balance and falls on their noses and breaks their arms.”
That might be a bit of an overstatement, if only because Björk is not your average “pink dot”. Countless artists, dating back to the 1960s, had experimented with pushing the traditional structures of pop and rock beyond the guitar, occasionally with substantial critical and commercial success. But Homogenic, as a reflection of its aggressively singular creator, did seem to be introducing more of a fresh starting palette rather than just tweaking an established formula. Any confusion or accusations of Björk “abandoning” rock n’ roll were probably more of a credit to just how far she’d come as an artist, breaking off the shackles of genre entirely.
“I guess I find it curious what people think,” Björk said, unknowingly at the beginning of a very long journey into the musical unknown, sadly doomed to shed a lot of her less-adventurous pop fans along the way. “I think that I’m quite a commonsensical girl, you see. And I’m quite pleased that I fuel the imagination of people so much that they make me ten times more interesting than I am. I’m quite flattered by that.”
