The Woman Who Fell to Earth
In a 1997 documentary about Björk, U2 frontman Bono spoke of the Icelandic pop star's voice as a weapon. "The girl has a voice like an ice pick. Such a pure sound," he gushed. "When The Sugarcubes played with U2, I would be preparing in the dressing room, and even if I couldn't hear the band ... I could always seem to hear that voice. It seemed to travel through metal and concrete and glass."
By then, Björk was four years into her solo career, having parted ways with her Reykjavík alternative band at the start of the '90s. She snowballed the momentum she'd gathered with The Sugarcubes and, in 1993, broke from rock into a mix of big-band balladeering and rave-inflected Europop with Debut, the album that laid the groundwork for her to become an international star and Iceland's most visible cultural export. When asked herself, the artist described her own singing as something that came naturally, a form of expression learned in childhood and preserved since then, as automatic as speech. "When I was small, my mother couldn't take a bus because I was always singing on the buses. I would stand up on the seats and shout out my favorite songs," she said during a 1988 magazine interview. "I've never learned to sing. I just sang. It's very easy, just like I can talk."
Yet as it rang across global airwaves, that voice thrilled listeners with its specialness — its unique pronunciations, distinct syntaxes, unselfconscious reveries and abundant power. Music writers splashed bewildered language over the sound: Björk's voice was "," "." It came part and parcel with the uninhibited persona, once summarized as," that manifested in the distinctive look and choreography of her performances and music videos.
