Why Björk thought Bob Dylan was “boring”
In 2007, Icelandic musical sensation Björk spoke about the iconic Bob Dylan, and what she had to say was surprising, and even blasphemous for some, until you realised the contrast that lives in their differing styles of music.
The musicians from Reykjavik and Brooklyn, respectively, live in very different times, make very different music, and still they were compared to each other, which saw them both nominated for ‘Best Original Song’ at the 2001 Academy Awards: while Björk was nominated for ‘I’ve Seen It All’ from Dancer in the Dark, Dylan won the award for ‘Things Have Changed’.
However, it was not competition that struck a chord for Björk: rather, it was the flatness that has been cause for her criticism of Dylan’s music. “I’ve never really gotten into him. His voice is too nasal. And it’s like literature music. Quite boring three-chord structures serve as a bed for words. I’m too much of a music lover for that to happen,” she told Rolling Stone.
It is not unusual for critics to point out Dylan’s voice as nasally, gravelly, or akin to talking rather than singing, and although some have made such criticisms because of his performance antics, which are not to everyone’s liking, his voice has also evolved to become an exaggrated version of itself over time due to vocal strain, or changes in recording production and even his age.
Some listeners find his later vocal performances unintelligible, mumbling lyrics that are quite abstract to begin with, notably on albums such as Highway 61 and Blonde On Blonde, which include a lot of abstract lines, which won’t have been very comprehensible to many. There are then songs like ‘Tombstone Blues’ with lyrics that feel like an impenetrable puzzle toying with us, like “the sky’s not yellow, it’s chicken”.
It may simply be that Björk never had the chance to understand Dylan’s depth; after all, they don’t hand Nobel Prizes out for nothing. In an interview with Index magazine in 2001, Björk revealed that she often misunderstood the music that was mainstream in Europe or the US, due to the remoteness of her upbringing: “There were only two or three record shops in town when I was young, and what got to Iceland and what didn’t was quite accidental…Neil Young is one musician, and Bob Dylan another, that I just don’t know about. I keep waiting for that moment when I’ll drink a few bottles of wine with an expert, and he’ll know the lyrics, and he’ll explain what they’re about.”
The artist’s alternative musical tastes also sit quite far from Dylan’s, where her music has been praised as being unique, innovative, political, and requiring focused listening, and paradoxically, Dylan can be played during a long car journey, slipping away into the background as the landscape takes the fore.
Funnily enough, her political stance has also led to Björk playing a hand in Dylan being banned from touring in China. His 2010 tour was planned to take the folk pioneer to Beijing and Shanghai, but both dates had to be cancelled since the Chinese government decided to tighten its control over foreign acts.
The reason is generally believed to have been Björk’s 2008 performance in Shanghai, where, after performing her song ‘Declare Independence’, the singer chanted “Tibet! Tibet!”, throwing light on the territory that China had been occupying since 1951. The government said it “hurt the feelings of Chinese people”, and once again, Dylan’s feelings, or rather tour was hurt in the process as well.
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