If Bjork died in a plane crash right after Birthday was released as a single, would the world be a better place?

that question is a little more cruel than I had intended. Was this her finest moment?

I did like Dancer In The Dark.

If Einar Orn died, that've been a better thing.

There are some sublime moments on POST, you must admit.

Seeing as Post and Homogenic are in my top 10 of all time, NO. Debut is also partially responsible for my love of music in general. I don't like Sugarcubes material as much as I love Björk solo.

She is possibly my favorite current artist, and even I am sick of talking about her right now.

The answer, however, is absolutely not. Post, Homogenic, and Vespertine are all almost perfect. 'Birthday' is great, but I have a soft spot for 'Planets'.

if Bjork died, the world would have less exposure to Matmos

i too have her on my top 100 favorite artist list,so short answer,NO!
i also believe her work solo is far better than her work with the sugarcubes...

In a track-vs-track showdown, I think I'd agree with "Birthday" being the finest thing she's been involved with. In a track-vs-track showdown, I would give serious consideration to the idea that "Birthday" is the finest thing anyone's been involved with.

I find it very hard to judge, though, because as Bjork gained in popularity and exposure her work lost that "who is that?" quality that the Sugarcubes material (and bits of Debut) had. This is completely unfair and maybe rockist and not at all a criticism of Bjork -- I just mean it in the sense that, say, the day you were shocked and excited to be acquainted with someone sometimes seems like a better day than some day years down the road when you know exactly what's she's up to.

I think that's an interesting point, but taking into account something like the "who is that?" quality seems to me like a popist thing rather than rockist (rock = concerned w/standing the test of time, pop = in the moment). And to answer the original question, no.

Bjork talks rrreally cute, no? Right, she doesnt. I LOVED her in the Sugarcubes. After that I lost interest quicker than ice melts in the blistering sun...

I'm with you, though the question does sound cruel. I didn't care for "Life's Too Good" and can take or leave Bjork's solo stuff. I know that to say so is something very like heresy but there you go. Bring on the Spanish Inquisition.

does anyone else find most of "birthday"'s parent album eh (or worse than eh?) it's a brilliant song. the new bjork solo is pretty damn good too.

bjork = the ari up of the 90s? my mom confused them the other day..."is that that bjork?"

(don't ask why i was listening to the slits in front of my mum.)

i would've hated the btich if that had happened - it's only with selma's songs and verspertine where, imo, sh'es come to shine

Bjork makes wonderful records which have consistently 'thought outside the boxes' of pop and rock, show tunes and folk, techno and avant, while tapping their power.

She has an excellent, totally unique voice (old lady meets swooping harpy), writes amazingly good offbeat lyrics, and had seemingly endless joie de vivre. She thinks fresh and liberal thoughts (the idea that nature and technology are not opposed, for instance) and presents them in exciting ways. In a music industry increasingly preoccupied by the belief that raw talent is irrelevant and that marketing is everything, Bjork remains one of our only avatars for creativity. In my opinion she puts just about everybody else to shame.

People who rate 'Birthday' -- a good but dated rock song (too much reverb, bad use of sampling, 80s indie sound values) -- above all Bjork's subsequent work are simply trapped in one of the boxes that Bjork long ago punched her way out of.

Word to Derek Birkett at One Little Indian for helping Bjork become the glamourous Queen of Strange she is today.

"People who rate 'Birthday' -- a good but dated rock song (too much reverb, bad use of sampling, 80s indie sound values) -- above all Bjork's subsequent work are simply trapped in one of the boxes that Bjork long ago punched her way out of" --or would rather drink directly from the spring, i.e., old Liza Minelli albums. Not sure how milking the same show-tunes-meets-Pro-Tools axis for an entire decade is "thinking outside the box," but every age has to have its sacred critical figures, I guess.

Yeah, all that is true, which makes me sorry that I don't respond to her music or her voice at all. Maybe I should try harder, but maybe I'm just a cold-blooded chanteuse aficionado.

If Bjork died in a plane crash, maybe not just after the release of Birthday, but sometime after the first Sugarcubes album had peaked, perhaps we'd get a flood of reissues of her earlier work and maybe some other Icelandic stuff from that period. No, wait - that stuff was already readily available, IIRC. I was really into Icelandic rock for a period. Birkett and Bjork were cohorts on the Crass label, go figure.

I wonder what her teenage album sounds like.

Yes. Dead Bjork=happy Adam.

I think there's a certain uniqueness about "Birthday" - not just that it's guitary pseudo-dream pop, but also that I think it's where Bjork's ability to express wordless emotions is displayed most directly (cue S. Reynolds discussion of "semiotic material"). While the trick is certainly present in a lot of her later work it's worked into a number of different distinct, "shaded" forms (eg. the single, amazing moan of frustrated intensity in the last chorus of "Pagan Poetry"), whereas in "Birthday" it spills out in unadulterated, glorious gasps of wonder.

There are however a number of good songs on Life's Too Good - "Motorcycle", "Deus".... Admittedly none of it sounds remotely like "Birthday", so it's easy to see why people might have been annoyed (such people should check out Stick Around For A Joy which has quite a few big bouncy pop moments and is light on Einar).

I can understand Bjork-hatas but I disagree with them. However the idea that her schtick is pro-tools meets showtunes is only true if you focus solely on, oh, one fifth of her oeuvre

People who rate 'Birthday' -- a good but dated rock song (too much reverb, bad use of sampling, 80s indie sound values) -- above all Bjork's subsequent work are simply trapped in one of the boxes that Bjork long ago punched her way out of.

sorry momus, i just don't buy it. i experience no inherent thrill when a record uses protools rather than a marshall stack. i fail to see the 90s continuing facination with the "syncretic hybrid" as a universal good. and i can't see "progression" as anything other than a typically effective snare for aging artiste types.

the notion that bjork thinks "fresh" thoughts - like the notion that technology and nature can be intertwined hasn't been bandied about by techno-gnostic cyber-hippies since the late 60s! - is all well and good, but in an arena (pop music) where "discourse" is usually a red herring, it's hardly essential. ("real" people, like, you know my mum - all those moribund "uncreative" types yr always going on about who should shut their yaps - remember her for her swan dress, not the neuvo-pagan schtick.)

i like bjork but increasingly - cf. the wire - she strikes me as the "gateway drug" for avant-wankers who want to experience pop music without engaging with many of the -real- avant-lumpen ideas which underpin "real" pop.

also notice how again momus comes off like random-enraged-googler who has found us ravaging his/her favorite artist.

Well, I suppose it would mean I wouldn't have the opportunity to cry from hearing "Joga", "Unravel" and "Cucoon" live.. And of course watching "Dancer in the Dark". And all the hip art people would be in love with Cyndi Lauper instead. =)

Wow, there's an awful lot of maliciousness on this thread. I have to admit that I'm no huge fan of Björk's solo work, but equating her death with personal happiness is beyond mean. (Okay, okay, I wished ill to Ween elsethread, so I can't really say too much about that with any authority.)

I do think that it'd be hard to top "Birthday" in a lot of ways, because for most of the world, that was the very first time any of us had heard anything like that emerging from a major label...the voice had no real comparison, and the music was wobbly and off- kilter in a way that wouldn't really be picked up properly until MBV got their mitts on it. I think the most notable part of the equation, and the most admirable, is that the band/label/whoever made the decision to lead off with this exceptionally bizarre song as the first single, and as the Sugarcubes' introduction to the pop music world, instead of something like "Deus" or "Delicious Demon", or one of the other songs that would fit much better with the pop charts. For anyone who liked "Birthday" there was very little else in their repertoire that really fit, and the rest seemed much more novelty by comparison, which means introducing the band that way did two things:

• Captured the attention of the jaded people who would otherwise have skipped "Deus" or "Coldsweat" as some cutesy B-52's-esque nonsense, and made them realize that maybe there was something a bit deeper happening here
• Raised the bar so high that those same people would never be fully satisfied with any of the followups

I have to admit that despite liking the first album quite a lot, the other Sugarcubes albums just never grabbed me in the same way, partly because they were a lot more refined, and sanded off most of the wonko parts that made even the more commercial moments on Life's Too Good so compelling, and also partly because the band was familiar to me, and the novelty (if you'll excuse the word) had long worn off.

Plus, by the time the second album rolled around, Einar's hollering had begun to bug the fuck out of me. I'm glad he's running a record label now, because I can actually begin to like him again.

where does the plane crash ?

heh i nevah wrote my how-my-dad-loves-it follow-up, did i? in which it is proved BEYOND ALL CONCEIVABLE DOUBT that bjork = simon&garfunkel!! i like her but she is vanguardy avant-garde in NO WAY AT ALL EVEN SLIGHTLY. i still haven't seen DitD, despite my (unrelated) argt that Lars von Trier = THE WORLD'S MOST MANIPULATIVE MAN AND THUS MOST IMPORTANT LIVING ARTIST. Actually LvT's films are only peripherally part of his art anyway, as the pretext for the documentaries he gets made abt himself.

Lars Von Trier = Evil Genius

The fascinating thing about DITD is watching a film so completely and purposely self-destruct.

well, no, wouldn't wish that on anybody, obviously.

but her vocal stylings have always sounded a bit too cannily similar to those of Ari Upp (of the Slits), to these ears.

Am I the only one who enjoyed Einar's contributions?

This question doesn't leave lot of gray area, does it?

Thing about Einar is that once you consider how much of an influence the Fall had on Iceland's music in the eighties, his interjections seem like a warped take on Mark E. Smith's ways.

When I was a Bjork obsessive at age 13 I used to hate Einar Orn with a passionate hate (words used advisedly). But when I last pulled out their albums I found that I really liked him - he acts as the perfect foil for the sweetness of Bjork and the music (the deliberate exception is "Birthday" which needs no foil). Bjork's entire solo career has struck me as being the search for a musical replacement for Einar: some complicating (even jarring) factor that serves to undermine and in doing so complement the inevitable directness of her singing... arguably Melissa's issue with Vespertine may be that she no longer hears that complicating factor in the music. I do, but then, I probably listen to much less glitch than Melissa does (feel free to dispute all this of course, Mel).

At the risk of reiterating myself about Vespertine, I will say that the lack of a "complicating factor" in the music is part of why I dislike it. It's missing the lush, alien quality that gave Post and Homogenic heft. It's the lack of the slight dissonance in the strings and unexpected shifts in melody that kill it. Its glitch aspects are nice enough, but they don't lend much otherworldliness or interest. Like I've always said, it really reminds me of John Williams circa Empire of the Sun, which is kind of the epitome of manipulative schmaltz.

...only for bangkok journalists...

EINAR ORN KICKS ASS!

And yes, Bjork is cool, too.

linda ronstadt doing "somewhere out there"

I never quite understood the seemingly unanimous hatred of Einar in critical circles. Einar's interjectory grunts and shouts seemed to me to fit in line with the group's skewed pop aesthetic. One theory is that critics needed some way to explain the disparity in their liking of Bjork solo vs. Sugarcubes, so Einar becomes the reason she was held back, rather than acknowledging that Bjork had indeed changed as an artist.

Einar's interjections were actually fairly tolerable on the first album, and I quite like some of them. I even like "Sick For Toys", which is mostly him. My dislike of Einar started on the subsequent albums where the hollering just became less interesting--it seemed forced, and he wasn't saying anything particularly compelling. The fact that the rest of the material wasn't quite so good overall didn't help, either. Perhaps Einar just became my whipping boy because I needed someone to blame? I dunno. Rumour has it that his new musical project is actually fairly good too, though I haven't had a chance to hear it yet. I'm willing to have my opinion changed on Einar, so perhaps my earlier comments were a bit rash.

Not being into the group when it actually existed, I read with a bit of a shock a short while ago that Einar and some other guy in the band gained quite a bit of infamy early on for apparently being the world's first openly gay couple within a pop/rock group.