Björk Is Building a Matriarchy
Midday on a Monday in Iceland’s capital of Reykjavík, Björk walked into a coffee shop and gave me a riddle. Just that morning, our interview had been rescheduled to an hour earlier than originally planned so that we could travel to a location unknown to me. Upon arriving at the plant-filled café where we’d agreed to meet, Björk thanked me for my flexibility. “We had to set our clock to the tide,” she said, brightly, as if I would know what that meant.
Björk looked very Björk, which is to say that she looked like no one else on this planet. Her Cleopatra hairstyle had been dyed with strips of white, pink, and mold blue, and the pendulous ruffles of her gown-like overcoat were patterned orange and gray-green. The whole look read as fungal chic, reflecting the earthy aesthetic of her new album, Fossora, which will be out at the end of this month. But she moved through the busy café unbothered, even un-stared-at, by the other patrons. “Icelanders,” Björk explained, “are too cool for school.”
Yet at age 56, having spent three decades as one of music’s most important figures, Björk has hardly gone unnoticed in her home country. When I checked into my hotel in Reykjavík—a city of 135,000 that blends the vibes of a mountain-climbing base camp and a bohemian port—a song of hers was playing in the lobby. The Icelandic Punk Museum, a tiny labyrinth in a converted public bathroom, is partly a shrine to The Sugarcubes, the rock band that brought Björk to international fame in the late ’80s. At a nearby bar, I got to chatting with a middle-aged man who said that Björk had babysat him when he was a kid.
Her influence is also inescapable worldwide. Starting with her 1993,and continuing through her acclaimed work of the past decade, she has carved a path with her and , her and , her and. Many observers have been confused by this brew, but for others, Björk is a comfort, an affirmation of their own inalienable originality. Today’s forward-thinking female and queer stars—as varied as Rosalía, SZA, Solange, Perfume Genius, and Lizzo—tend to salute her as a foremother. In Billie Eilish’s and , you can see a surging interest in Björk’s longtime quest: proving supposedly soft qualities—vulnerability, caring, wonder—to be forms of guts and brawn.
