![]() When she’s backgrounded, you wonder what she might have said. You can hear the brassiness, the voice-crack she would later use to such gutting effect. In Kukl, even as one of two lead singers (the NME once called the other one “the plainest boy in history”), Björk was recognizably Björk. The collection of big fish hit it off, naming themselves Kukl (meaning “sorcery,” more or less) and rapidly signing to the heavyweight UK anarchopunk label Crass Records. At the tail end of her time in Tappi, Björk joined an all-star sendoff assembled for a state-radio program about to be booted from the air. There was even a futile attempt to help a local jam band break the Guinness record for longest continuous performance. There was the all-girl punk rock fuckaround Spit & Snot (for which she played drums), a jazz fusion act, the theatrically post-punk Tappi Tíkarrass (featured in the crucial ’82 documentary Rock In Reykjavik). Her initial recording foray aside, Björk’s career in Iceland was spent forming and joining bands. ![]() At a weekly school talent show, Björk caught her teachers’ attention with her rendition of Tina Charles’ 1976 UK chart-topper “ I Love To Love“ before 1977 was out, she had an LP - loaded with chipper marimba pop and insistent disco - on Icelandic shelves. Musicality was easily discerned and swiftly transmitted. The year Björk was born, Iceland had fewer than 200,000 citizens: a smaller population than Cape Coral, Florida. Much was made of Björk Guðmundsdóttir’s early childhood on a commune, but her home country of Iceland was, in some sense, already pretty communal. But her openness - a big time sensuality, as she once put it - tends to fuse them in unique ways. ![]() Consistent tensions have included the body and anima, the auditory and the visual, nature and technology. For much of her four-decade career, Björk has been the preeminent pop artist whose tonic note has been wonder. It elicits the usual critical discussion about contradictory impulses: low and high, sincerity and irony, culture and its jamming. Often, that pop is cut in an arresting direction: perhaps arch, or giddily self-referential, or interrogative. Our first ranking of Björk’s albums from worst to best originally ran on February 22, 2013.Įvery age wears the art-pop that suits it. We’re refreshing and revising our old Counting Down lists to make room for new albums and insights that have come along since their initial publication. ![]()
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