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Issue Date: October 7, 2001
Flourishing in the dark
Icelandic singer Björk gives convention the cold shoulder as she swans into the mainstream.
by Frappa Stout
Björk, an artist perpetually poised at the cutting edge of quirky, admits to an appreciation for pop culture -- without prejudice. Her opinion of Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys? "Incredible!"
Incredible? "Of course, I don't listen to them myself," she explains. "But I think people need them."
So Björk Gudmundsdottir, the tiny woman with a big name and otherworldly voice, likes the mainstream, even if she's not part of it. Maybe it's because she grew up outside its influence, on a commune in Iceland with her mother, seven other adults and no TV.
By her mid-teens, Björk had gone from rebellious punk to musical prodigy; she released her first album at 11 and started a record label a few years later.
Having conquered her own country, she broke into the American "new wave" scene of the 1980s fronting the Sugarcubes, purveyors of an edgy mix of punk and techno; they split up in 1992. Since then, all four of her solo albums have sold at least 2 million copies in the United States.
But it was her critically acclaimed acting debut and subsequent Oscar nomination for "I've Seen It All", a song from last year's film "Dancer in the Dark", that established her as a rising star.
She hasn't wasted any time since. Björk, 35, released her fifth solo album, "Vespertine", this summer and hit the road last week on a month-long American tour. The new CD is closer to what she calls "Björk music," melding soaring vocals and eclectic beats with traditional big-band sounds. The title, she says, refers to "things that flourish in the dark," even though "I'm much more of a morning person, actually. There's something powerful about the night, but I just can't stay up."
She rarely watches MTV, but pop culture loves the pixie singer. She professes to dislike the media attention -- she once attacked a reporter in an airport for harassing her son -- but her attention-getting appearance at the Oscars this spring, wearing a swan gown and dropping an egg onto the red carpet, belies that.
"I don't think too much about what people think of me," she's quick to say. "I made that decision very early, when I was about 5. All the kids in the street were going to do something very exciting but [then] decided not to because it wasn't the sort of thing you do. I remember thinking that was very sad."
A favorite pastime of her youth was getting lost; she hitchhiked around Iceland and spent weeks camping on her own.
Despite her modern sensibilities, Björk is very much a product of the island mentality: outdoorsy, freedom-loving and, for the most part, quiet.
"I come from a very big island, but there are so few people it's almost empty," she says. "You could walk or drive for just five minutes, and you could scream at the top of your lungs, and nobody would hear you."
Whether she's able to find the same peace on the island of Manhattan, where she's settled now, remains to be seen. So far, she thinks so. "New York is spoiling me, really. It's sort of like being in a no man's land," she says. "I don't know anybody and I can just do my music -- people are just leaving me to myself."
If she gets homesick, she can always go home to Iceland -- for a spell, anyway.
"It's classic for islanders -- they feel claustrophobic when they're on the island, but when they go somewhere else they miss it very much," she says. "It's like a healthy, strong elastic tied around your heart at all times."
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