everybody knows i'm her man.
on the three cover stars of q magazine's may 1994 issue and the year (sept. 1997 to sept. 1998) in which they each released their respective masterpiece.
“Hips. L-”
I can’t read it without groaning. Or laughing. Or trying to do it with a funny voice. Let me try again.
“Hips. Lips. T-”
I’m obsessed with the fact that an editor saw this and was like, “Yes, this is exactly what we should be printing on the cover, I love it.” Okay, trying again.
“Hips. Lips. Tits. Power.”
It’s very 90s, no? They call it the “decade of the year of the woman” for a reason, yes? Meaning, every year, every alternative-adjacent magazine would write “199X was the year of the woman, look at all of these women who are making these great albums! We’re gonna show you how great they are by writing One (1) article about all of them grouped together even though they have nothing in common!" Let’s get one “Hips. Lips. Tits. Power.” cover star — who will forever be subjected to questions about being a woman rather than about being a genius (which she is), while her male contemporaries take liberal inspiration from her work (ever heard of a little album called fucking Kid A???) and are never asked about being men — in here so we can get her take on “the year of the woman” phenomenon:
“I think this is bullshit” sums it up better than I ever could. However, I’m going to go on and try anyway.
Three months after the clip above aired on Spanish television, Q Magazine published a profile of generation-defining artists Tori Amos, Björk and PJ Harvey titled, yes, “Hips. Lips. Tits. Power.” If I haven’t made it clear enough already, they are not lumped together because the writer, one Adrian Deevoy, believes they are the most important artists working, but because they all share a “special brew of spooky left-field weirdness” (fair enough, I guess that’s why I like them all) “and estrogen-marinaded musings.” The latter statement reminds me of when publicists lead their pitch emails with “*LGBTQ+ ARTIST* so-and-so does xyz.” I would assume that any artist’s work is informed by said artist’s identity, but is that the most important thing about them? Can I not pick up on that by actually listening? You’re implying the art can’t stand on its own.
And so, Deevoy does the same thing here repeatedly, though I’m sure it’s unintentional, because he’s never had to think about it before. Even a mere 30 years ago, we are far from that cultural sea change which we’ve still not seen the other side of. “Estrogen-marinaded musings” translates to “spooky left-field weirdness” translates to “utterly terrifying,” because all three of these artists are unmistakably feminine, but not in a way that is “for” men’s pleasure.
Well, if YouTube comments from older guys now tell you anything, they are attractive to men — as long as men don’t have to think critically about their intention. Each artist sees abrasion or repulsion within their own understanding of beauty — femininity that does not fall in line with what we’re taught beauty is, each one so much their own person outside of just being a “woman” that they stretch the boundaries of what a “woman” can be — and even now, men can just ignore that, don’t have to understand it. Any conventionally attractive woman with a microphone is there for their arousal and they can’t help but voice that arousal, as if we all asked. They were raised to believe, about any thought that pops into their heads, that we all always asked. Even when you’re not trying to be desirable and expressing yourself in the way any artist would, they’ll still think it’s for them. It makes me want to sink my teeth into something and spit the clean bone out.
Just within the piece’s intro, it gets worse: “But what sets these women apart from the mainstream soft soul of Mariah Carey and Dina Carroll is their extraordinary singing voices.” Imagine implying that Mariah fucking Carey doesn’t have an extraordinary singing voice when you could’ve left her out of it completely, since they don’t make a similar type of music at all. Is he correct when he notes that “Polly’s [voice] is as if an opera diva had eaten a drum kit—swooping and percussive”? Of course, but what the ever-living fuck does that have to do with any other woman making music? Why can’t it only be Polly — riding on the merit of her own artistic work? Why can’t Mariah create her own art without catching a stray bullet from some random guy writing an article she’s not even involved in? Because we can’t accept women as artists worth any merit, truly on par with their male peers, the obvious answer rings out, with Virginia Woolf’s vision of Shakespeare’s sister walking straight into the sea still walking in 1994. Still gasping, drowning, with no arduous fight, in 2023.
But Polly, Björk and Tori do not walk, and so, they are subject to this bullshit interview, which they make delightful and merrily take the reins of because they know it’s bullshit and they say so — no matter how much Deevoy reveals his thinking without just coming out and saying it.
Q: Do you, or have you ever, felt in competition with each other ?
Björk : No way.
Polly : No.
Tori : Never. It’s funny for women because journalists pit women against each other. If you think about Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton they were all much more similar to each other than we are. We have tits. We have three holes. That’s what we have in common. We don’t even play the same instruments. It really disappoints me when some sort of competition has to be manufactured for their little minds and fantasies. That’s not growing, that’s not support. There is room for everybody on the planet to be creative and conscious if you are your own person. If you’re trying to be like somebody else, then there isn’t. We see things from different points of view and that affects people in different ways and I think that should be encouraged. It shouldn’t be like, “Two tits too many.” Like with radio in America, they tell you, “Well, we’re already playing one female this week.” They wouldn’t think about that with guys.
I celebrate the joining of these three artists for two reasons and two reasons only:
At the time it was written, they were all at least friendly (so it’s not like, just three random names of Women In Music pulled out of a hat) after meeting at the 1994 BRIT Awards, where Björk and Polly performed a duet (“Seeking refuge from the corporate back slapathon, Tori sought out her fellow female singers backstage, harboring the suspicion that they might be soul mates. She was, she maintains proudly, correct.”).
I do think these artists are connected on a more complex level than just their shared sex organs. My goal here is to break that — along with my own personal connection to the work — down through the lens of the albums I view as each artist’s respective masterpiece.
In order to unpack each of these projects, we must fast-forward to the 13-month period (well, 12 months and 8 days) during which we receive all of this earth-shattering, life-changing (for me, at least) work: September 20, 1997 to September 28, 1998. Each album is not necessarily dictated by the artist’s gender, but is certainly informed by their identity, which often involves them either transcending or bucking against society’s conventions of what a woman can and cannot be. How a woman should or should not grieve. How she should behave, how should she react, what we will call her when she does not react that way — how we crucify her and which tools we should use to do so, even if she is one of our own.
We’ll round the three out with one of my top ten favorite albums of all time, but first, we’ll dive into an album I love which has only recently worked its way into my orbit.
part one: i can be cruel (i don’t know why).
AKA: Myra Ellen Amos is born in Newton, North Carolina, U.S.A. in 1963. She is a Leo sun, Libra moon and Scorpio rising. Tori is named “Tori” after a friend’s boyfriend says she looks like a Torrey pine tree. Tori plays piano. Tori is around 37 when she suffers her third miscarriage.
I will be transparent about this here and now: of the three artists here, Tori Amos is the one I am the least knowledgeable about. Yes, she wrote the line that birthed this newsletter’s name, but until recently, I’d always just admired her work rather than seeking to actively devour it, to understand the nuances. The problem for me, it turned out, was that I’d started in the wrong place.
Raised the daughter of a preacher, Amos would go on to dissect every moral lesson imbued within her during her youth with her incisive writing. She picks religion and gender apart with such cutting precision that can only be executed by someone who has learned the subject matter’s constraints and conventions inside and out. Of the three artists, Amos seems the most comfortable with displays of overt sexuality — of course, while asserting that she is in control at all times. She wields it like an axe and never once edits her thoughts before proclaiming them to be documented by whatever poor scribbling journalist’s pen crosses her path. The terror she produces is not merely a byproduct of her subversive thinking; it’s the exact target she’s aiming to hit.
It’s part of her legend now that at the age of five, as a piano prodigy, she became the youngest person accepted to the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. At age 11, she is asked to leave. If they bloom early enough, 11 is the age girls get dangerous.
In the Q interview, Amos is forthcoming about her childhood crushes on traditional rock stars, namely Robert Plant. Of course, as any woman who forged the way for punk will tell you, those crushes were expected — what didn't even occur to the women of the time was that they could ever be Robert Plant. 15-ish years on from the time those women — hacking at heads — first played, Tori Amos released her debut album Little Earthquakes and its follow-up Under the Pink in 1992 and 1994, respectively. Prior to this, Amos played in a synthpop-adjacent band called Y Kant Tori Read, and though she’s only armed with her piano now, she lets you know she is Robert Plant. Sometimes, if you like a boy enough when you’re that young, you more study him than love him. You follow the motions he goes through, his range of movement his god-given right. Soon, you do “him” better than he does, not that anyone can admit it. It’s his right when he does it, it’s lewd when you do. Not your place.
Those first two albums don’t lack in terms of charisma or lyrical depth, and certainly not in terms of personality, given everything I’ve just said about its composer. However, I will say that comparisons to Kate Bush’s first few albums in terms of arrangements weren’t all that far-fetched. Amos’ liquid, fluttery soprano didn’t help matters on that front either. It just sounded like other things I’d heard before; I still revisit lots of songs on those two albums, but Tori didn’t click for me until she was comfortable enough to get weird — which probably did Kate more proud than the pseudo-imitation did.
The eclectic, almost surreal progressive-pop of 1996’s Boys for Pele finally lit that spark for me. My understanding is that it’s still divisive among major fans, and all of that lies in its cryptic coding that takes both patience and a flair for difficult pop music to crack. The year Pele comes out is the year Amos suffers her first miscarriage, and this matters for the work that follows — allowing her to write from a darker, even more eccentric place.
Recording sessions for From the Choir Girl Hotel begin in September 1997 and its mixing and mastering are finished by February 1998, the same month Amos marries recording engineer Mark Hawley. The title refers to the “hotel” Amos imagines her songs “living in” — this is a recurring thing with her: she speaks about her work as if each song is a voodoo doll; animated things of dire consequence that push back at her, stick pins in each pressure point, laugh with her, give her the cold shoulder when they feel up to it. She goes further to insist that the recorded version is not the “final version” of these living things, but a documented image of where they once were before they inevitably shift. No version of Tori Amos is the final version, this just a document of her attempting to piece herself back together. She’ll shift when you turn your back.
Though I’ve only had From the Choir Girl Hotel in steady rotation for about a year now, it’s (as far as I can figure) an album about accepting your own limitations while damning the imagined limitations others put on you. I, personally, have no idea what the medical or health-related circumstances surrounded Amos’ miscarriages, but she gives the impression that she is both humbled by the experience and strengthened by the fact that she survived it. She gets bold about it: the alt-rock boys we all bowed to when Amos was being interviewed for Q never had to lose their baby. Through no fault of her own, she created and lost life — played God more than they could ever dream of. Yet, she is expected to pull ten times their weight just to “keep up” with them. Choir Girl is an exercise in self-soothing, but it’s a resignation letter as well: no more babysitting anyone unless it’s her own child.
Backed by a full band (including superstar session drummer Matt Chamberlin, whose name in any album’s credits tells you that whatever you’re about to listen to will blow your mind), Amos tackles herself to the ground straight out of the gate with twinkling, melancholy opener “Spark.” From an interview did for Deluxe Magazine upon the album’s release:
“Spark” is about when I miscarried in 1996. I was three months pregnant and very excited. All of a sudden I woke up one morning and started to feel bad. The songs started coming soon after. I was really angry at God. Going into a shopping mall and seeing some woman knock the head off her child, I’m going – ‘So this is fair?’ I don’t know where the spirit went, whether she picked another mummy, like, “OK, choose her, then! Hope you’re tone deaf!”
Here is the dilemma of motherhood as we now understand it: even as we become a more (with heavy quotes) “progressive” society, women are still never told they need to unlearn everything ingrained into their system about motherhood. This is the reason many mothers have two jobs — their real jobs and their “women’s work” at home, which their husbands are taught they’re too good to do. Men are “smarter” until a cleaning product is put in their hands, and suddenly they’re dumbing themselves down. They’ll “mess it up.” Similarly, women are taught they can be whatever they want to be until they attempt to become a mother. Then, they’re just a woman again, as we’re taught to understand and demean them — a doormat, someone who suffers and has chosen her suffering, someone we call “strong” to excuse what we make them endure. Many people still believe mothering is all that women were truly “meant” to do, and even if that woman is one of the most accomplished musical artists of a generation, she will be made to feel like less of a woman if she cannot accomplish this one task she’s supposedly “meant” for.
“She's convinced she could hold back a glacier,” Amos sings, “But she couldn't keep baby alive / Doubting if there's a woman in there somewhere.”
Poise is expected in these moments, and understandably, she refuses to provide it. “Can’t we get a little grace and some elegance?” Amos asks herself rhetorically between the chilly whispered vocals and spy-movie guitars of “Iieee.” “No, we scream in cathedrals,” comes the answer, before she (and maybe, if you want to go for a sardonic reading, the listening public at large) asks, “Why can’t it be beautiful? / Why does there gotta be a sacrifice?” We’re not supposed to see this mess, it’s implying. You’re meant to bear the weight on your own.
I think about this sense of sacrifice a lot — this maternal instinct that might lay dormant inside of me. I have no idea whether I want to have children, because whether I do will be determined by several other factors, the main one of which is my partner. It’s not just whether he’ll stay in the picture, it’s how he’ll change once a kid arrives. It’s whether he expects me to change, expects me to be less difficult. I can’t burden any child with just any father — certainly not a father who will act like what I know a father to be. Give me the times have changed speech, but I won’t know until it happens. I will have failed as a human being, let alone as a parent, if I make that mistake. I also don’t know if I want to burden a kid with me.
I wonder whether that learned instinct will ever kick in and I will yearn to be selfless, yearn to put myself through agony while a man stands there and watches. I wonder whether I will outgrow the dangerous swings of mood and temperament, outgrow my penchant for all things bloody and thrumming or whether a child and a partner will just have to live with that (as Amos herself wonders with reflexive shame on “Playboy Mommy”).
Amidst the icy, industrial tumble of “Cruel,” in a bemused, near-defeated croon, she wonders whether her unmotherly nature will ever bend once a child arrives: “I can be cruel / I don’t know why / Why can’t my balloon stay up / In a perfectly windy sky?”
First, it feels important to note that Amos and her husband do eventually have a daughter in September of 2000 — a happy ending I’ll report happily. Second, I need to talk about my favorite song on the album, one that refutes the question “Cruel” asks, clutching those it loves close to its chest for their own safety. We know how dangerous those future fathers can get.
“Raspberry Swirl”’s title is referring to exactly what you think it’s referring to. Amos has said she accepts a queer reading for this song, if that’s what people want to take from it, but it’s not the intention. Its slightly psychedelic, almost Madchester-y pulse soundtracks not a seduction, but a watchdog attack. She would die for her female friends, she asserts, and frankly, their suitors don’t deserve them. Both on a physical and emotional level, the partners can’t compete, so Amos has to protect those she loves fiercely in their place: “Things are getting desperate / When all the boys can’t be men / Everybody knows I’m her friend / Everybody knows I’m her man.” After a few times around that chorus, Amos growls that last “knows,” fangs bared instinctually against a learned fear — struck into her heart by those never forced to face why they might be fearsome. Those taught to dumb themselves down when they don’t want to deliver. Some women have the patience and grace to handle this, to be babysitters. In all sincerity, I salute them.
Tori is not one of those women. Neither am I.
part two: if i don’t find this time, then i’m better off dead.
AKA: Polly Jean Harvey is born in Dorset, England in 1969. She is a Libra sun but has plenty of Virgo placements in the rest of her chart. Polly plays guitar. Polly is around 27 when she breaks off her relationship with an older man who is arguably, at the time, more famous than she is. He will make a traditional breakup album which is more accessible than his previous work and people will play its songs at weddings and funerals. Polly will make a disturbing album which is less accessible than her previous work and it will be remembered as…well, a disturbing album which is less accessible than her previous work.
Another thing I want to make clear: this will not become a Nick Cave roast. If you’ve ever had a conversation about music with me, you probably know I’ll adore Cave’s work to the bitter end, no matter how hard he tries to embarrass me (and trust me, he’s trying). Just as a performer, I’m fascinated by the way he channels the divine, acts as secular shaman to call the elements to his side in his quest to decode and reframe this ugly, senseless world we’re thrown about in. She doesn’t necessarily seem to mind, but I rarely see PJ Harvey discussed in similar terms, despite the fact that she often does the same thing; she can never be the divining rod, just a woman’s body there to invoke the spirit, never claim it. I don’t care if she doesn’t mind, because I do.
I hate to make another comparison between Alternative Women Of The 90s (trademark sign), especially when it involves referencing overarching stereotypes of each artist, but I’ll do it quickly and painlessly, just to make a point about myself. These two at least play the same instrument, so I’m already doing a better job than our friend Adrian.
Liz Phair birthed every single indie singer-songwriter we all drool over now. She was always effortlessly cool in a way women were never allowed to be in their songwriting, straightforward and frank in expressing the insecurities both the characters in her songwriting and she herself experience. She feels like your savvy older friend who’s seen it all, tossing off beautiful turns of phrase in a laconic deadpan as she keeps it all tethered to the ground, even if the emotion feels massive in the moment.
If my friends’ twenties are lived and recounted like they exist in a Liz Phair song, my delusion reads like it sprouts from PJ Harvey’s pen. That swooping and percussive howl (“as if an opera diva had eaten a drum kit”) cannot simply say “Whatever happened to a boyfriend?” but “I’ll make you lick my injuries / I’m gonna twist your head off, see?” or “Raise me up, lord / Call me Lazarus” when singing about what could be a totally frivolous sexual encounter. Imaginary daughters are drowned, backroom abortions are woven into harrowing blues chants, men’s boots are pulled down from the self and we dance around to show them how funny they look to us as they burn us alive. Tarzan, we’re bleeding, stop your fucking screaming.
Throughout her near-mythical upbringing with her brothers in the isolated countryside of West England, Harvey didn’t really ever think of herself as a girl — at least, not until puberty made her physically face it. This is essential to understanding her music. She can also weaponize sexuality, but in the exact opposite way Amos does. To Polly, it’s almost a joke: finally confronted with the absurdity of sexism so late in her childhood, what can she do but perform it and wait for people to laugh? Singles from Dry, her 1992 debut — “Dress” and “Sheela-Na-Gig” — poke fun at the concept of performing femininity and slut shaming, respectively, but a genuine naïvety and sense of confusion run beneath the taunts. Is this really what will please him? Once she hears “yes” as the answer to enough of these questions about what her partner desires, she aims to scathe. No survivors are spared.
One day, I will look back on my youth and not be able to do it without mentioning Rid Of Me, an album that seemingly changed my chemical makeup. It sounded the way my own desire felt, embodying the disgust I could feel when it was returned — when their desire was only to fetishize my anger, make it into something they could feed off of, like even my rage existed for their pleasure. I still play “50ft Queenie” every time I’m about to walk into a meeting. One time, a guy went on and on to me about the guitar in it, and I said, “Yeah, isn’t it great that it…feels as visceral as like…you know…” Living. Existing. Wanting. I couldn’t finish the thought out loud, so he kept going on about the technical sound of it. Anyone can enjoy the album, but it so perfectly encapsulates the scrape and howl of being a certain type of young girl, of wanting to be wanted but knowing it can only be on your terms — terms the object of your desire can never make good on, can never just accept.
Few things broke my little teenage heart like Harvey’s insistence that it was all writing from a character’s perspective — in fact, she assured us, she was the complete opposite of the child-eating vampire woman everyone thought she was. Everyone smiled and felt relieved, I’m sure, but I felt betrayed. How does she turn the intensity off? Wasn’t that our superpower?
With Harvey especially, a younger me would project my own motives and actions onto her, which is completely unfair. I don’t know her personally, and therefore, she could totally be telling the truth about how she carries herself day-to-day. It might actually be advisable to let the nightmare material out through your work so that you can function as a real human being in your time off. Regardless, as I moved chronologically through her discography, I discovered that this must be the case, as nothing here becomes more even-keeled: enter To Bring You My Love, a delta-blues-inflected meditation on god and the devil by way of Captain Beefheart and a woman left with a kid she might not want. She’s, at once, a girl sucked into a monsoon, a pimp parading the lamplit avenue, a mourner killed by the weight of her devotion toward the deceased, a person possessed by their ability to love and the slim chance that they will ever be loved with the same ferocity, and god themself. Especially that last one.
In a dramatic left turn from her usual barefaced, dressed down (even masculine) stage attire, Harvey truly “performs” femininity like she never has before and never will again for this album’s tour, face caked in stage powder and stacks of lashes weighing her eyes down. She refers to this dragged-out version of herself as her “Joan Crawford on acid” look, and I’ve never loved her more or wanted to look like someone so much — grotesque and overwhelming and perfect. Her face physically melts on stage and my heart skips a beat.
As we build to the circumstances surrounding her masterwork, I’ll give a quick rundown of the events leading up to it: Harvey performs on a Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds song, Cave and Harvey have an intense romantic relationship for about a year, Harvey breaks it off — allegedly over the phone with no further explanation. As an older man, Cave will point out that his heroin habit probably didn’t help matters, nor did the fact that two artists so consumed in their own work are naturally selfish and maybe not inclined to be amazing partners (this especially rings true since I don’t think Cave’s ever spoken about Harvey’s music as if he’s actually heard it). Cave releases The Boatman’s Call, a solemn, piano-ballad-driven project that gets more intimate than even Cave ever realized he was capable of getting. It shoots him into a new artistic strata as a sensitive songwriter. People are destined to play “Into My Arms” at weddings forevermore, the end.
Meanwhile, Harvey has recorded an album with longtime collaborator John Parish, toured with trip-hop god Tricky and gotten super into Aphex Twin. She’s also entered a personal dark period, as she deals with both the hype surrounding To Bring You My Love’s follow-up and (as noted in what is maybe my favorite episode of Bandsplain) the guilt and shame that come with being the person to abandon a relationship — notably, a relationship with an addict. In that same Bandsplain episode, which delves into Harvey’s own musical document of the breakup, Is This Desire?, the legendary Ann Powers also makes note of how Harvey’s habit of singing from a male perspective has changed: the sense of humor or venom that she might’ve deployed in past writing is gone, and we’re left with only plainspoken character sketches of people struggling to co-exist as a higher power looms far above their heads. Though most of the track list pulls inspiration from specific stories by J.D. Salinger and Flannery O’Connor, Powers also suggests that, given the divine subject matter, Harvey is writing from the perspective of Cave — seeking to inherit god’s pen from him. The fight is not clean and is not won easily.
If he is one ghost haunting the sound, St. Catherine of Alexandria is another. Mentioned in the lyrics of album tracks “The Wind” and “Catherine,” she was martyred after refusing to marry Roman emperor Maxentius, insisting she was married to Jesus and had no intention to wed anyone else in her lifetime — he had her jailed and beheaded for it. I’m sure it was no coincidence that Harvey lived near a chapel named for the saint which was known for being the congregation unmarried women would visit to pray for a husband.
It’s not hard to follow the logic of her storytelling — following an array of fictional women characters who prove themselves to be illusive or appear to be running from the male voice narrating their story, all searching for something, erratic in their behavior while the man waiting on their return wishes they’d settle. Wishes this restlessness would cease. I mean, once you connect the dots, what she’s getting at isn’t subtle.
Blending her newfound interest in abrasive electro-industrial textures and trip-hop into more atmospheric soundscapes, Harvey brought in all-star producer Flood (along with co-producers Head and Marius De Vries) to make sense of her ambitious ideas, all of which sounded as tortured as our protagonists’ tales. "How much more can you take from me?" Harvey howls over the jagged rush of “No Girl So Sweet,” fidgeting under the story’s other figure as they pin her to the observation table and she pleads for the chance to move: “I'd like to take you inside my head / I'd like to take you inside of me / ‘You came from heaven,’ is all he said / ‘You came from heaven and came here to me.’” She can never be the divining rod, just a woman’s body there to invoke the spirit, never claim it.
Here, Polly squirms enough to break free, becoming more complex and unruly as the one she left behind simplifies himself in order to survive. She is too immense to be contained, and by the time she plaintively sings the question of the hour (“Is this desire enough?”), the answer is clearly “no.” Not for her, at least.
In 2004, Filter asked Harvey which album she was most proud of making, and she had this to say about her answer, Is This Desire?:
Again working with Flood, again trying to find new ground, but a particularly difficult time in my life. So, it was a very, very difficult, difficult record to make and still one I find very difficult to listen to, but probably my favorite record that I've made because it had a lot of guts. I mean, I was making extremely difficult music, experimenting with techniques I hadn't used before and not really caring what other people thought about it. I'm quite proud of that one.
My favorite song on this album is “My Beautiful Leah,” a short, terrifying missing-person flyer, searching for a woman on the run from her lover: “She was always so needy / Said, ‘I have no one’ / Even as I held her / She went out looking for someone / Looking for someone / She only had nightmares / And her sadness never lifted / And slowly, over the years / Her lovely face twisted.” After the word “lifted” on the album version, cymbals begin crashing like debris is crumbling from the sky, and it’s a perfect production choice. Even as this well-meaning person voices their concern, earnestly wanting to find her, Leah refutes his attempts through the sonic fabric of the song — thrashing, becoming thunderstorms but moving in too chaotic a fashion to strike him down with precision. By the end, Harvey lets out a harrowing “nnnnnnnnnnnNO!”’ between the narrator’s lines that sounds like it could come from a feral animal. Frankly, it’s my single favorite moment on the album.
The below clip is of Harvey and her band performing the track for the TV show Sessions at West 54th, hosted by David Byrne (!!!). In an interview segment from the show, he asks about creating in times of personal struggle and the fine line between humor and horror — the latter of which was often the raison d’être of her past work. Here, she became slightly more “serious,” perhaps, if only because she needed the focus to explore all of these disparate facets of herself at once. I am all of those women too. I feel I contain universes inside of me. Someone holding those universes is not holding them as a gift to bestow upon their partner; it’s all of the joy and terror I contain, and collateral damage comes from that as I learn how to bend each star within me. Those who’ve come before are simply not ready for its overwhelming splendor, and that’s something I have to accept.
Even now, all these years on, I ask: How does she turn the intensity off? Wasn’t that our superpower? Polly divines the elements down from the sky and says, it will be.
part three: i dare you, i dare you, i dare you, i dare you.
AKA: Björk Guðmundsdóttir is born in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1965. She is a triple Scorpio. Björk makes beats and plays (among other things) her otherworldly voice — which is one of the greatest instruments we as a civilization will ever encounter, I’m sure of it. Björk is 30 when her stalker sends a bomb to the front door of her London home.
Final full transparency moment: I’m regretting putting Homogenic last in the order, solely because I’ve spent so much mental energy attempting to get through the other two albums, and now, I have no idea how to even sum up what Homogenic (of all fucking things, one of my favorite albums ever made) means to me. But it works, thematically and in terms of personal narrative, if I save this one as my closer. So here it stays. I might get a little cosmic with my descriptions here, and you’re all just going to have to deal with that. Okay. Now, for starters, how do I go about “explaining” Björk? Let’s try.
Björk recorded her first album in 1977, when she was 11 years old. She insisted to her mother that she felt like a fraud in the aftermath, and told her she didn’t want to record under her own name again unless it was truly her pulling the strings, writing the work, making her own music. By the time she turned 21, Björk had already been in several punk bands which received widespread national attention in Iceland and starred in her first movie. She married her bandmate, divorced her bandmate, had a child with him and became internationally known as a member of the Sugarcubes — all before she turned 23. By the end of 1992, aged 27, Björk left the biggest band to ever come out of Iceland and moved to London to pursue a solo career. Working with producer Nellee Hooper, she created her house-inflected second album, her adult debut appropriately titled Debut, in 1993 — she’s promoting this record when she is interviewed for Q with her new friends Tori and Polly. For her 1995 follow-up, Post, she pulled from rave culture and the vibrant alternative dance and electronic music scenes in the U.K. to create music that she described to everyone as “promiscuous” — she collaborated with everyone, she shared with everyone, she pretended to be an extrovert for three years. To make the understatement of this long, strange decade we know as the 1990s: Björk was supremely accomplished and very tired by the time her 31st year came around.
Beginning in August of 1996, Björk employs audio engineer Markus Dravs to help make beats that she can use to build the tracks for her next album, letting him use her home studio while she’s on tour. Her main directive for what the beats should sound like is that they should feel “volcanic" — the sound of Iceland, for which she feels extremely homesick, compressed into explosive rhythms that she can create over.
On September 12, 1996, an obsessed American fan named Ricardo López mails a letter bomb to Björk’s London residence before returning home and filming his own suicide. Understandably, Björk is distraught. She sends López’s family a card and flowers and almost immediately leaves England. "I was very upset that somebody had died,” she says when she finally feels equipped to talk about the incident a year later. “I couldn't sleep for a week, and I'd be lying if I said it didn't scare the fuck out of me — that I could get hurt and, most of all, that my son could get hurt.”
She initially only plans to take a brief vacation at her touring drummer’s studio in the remote town of Málaga, Spain, but realizes it’s the perfect environment to create what she describes as her “selfish” record. She believes the isolation will be good for her to get back in touch with herself and where she comes from after the whirlwind of the prior three years. She decides her homesickness will serve her in creating her most patriotic, Icelandic work to date, and she flies both main co-producer Mark Bell and quite a few Icelandic musicians in to flesh out her vision. She concocts an effective mix of acoustic and electronic instruments to keep one eye looking forward while the core of the material still feels like it pumps blood. It is both cold and organic, angry and content with that anger.
When being interviewed by longtime friends about every studio album she’s released up to this point for her Sonic Symbolism podcast in 2022, Björk describes who Homogenic is, if she could spring up as a personification of the work: “I looked at her as an emotional warrior…someone who is not with a weapon — not to destroy — but to confront people and try to un-arm violence or weapons.” From an earlier interview, discussing the side of herself she’s put on display on album track “Bachelorette”: “She goes back to the city by train, which is why the beats of the song are like a train, and she prepares to confront all the people that she loves with love. It’s a disarming confrontation.”
It became one of my talents: attempting to weaponize my affection, to disarm with love — not in any truly toxic or dangerous way, just to keep the flow of that love going even when the other person’s tap ran try, when they snatched it away in a moment I’d annoyed them or disappointed them or they were bored with me. I’m mostly thinking about family here, I guess, picturing myself as a kid desperate for love and approval, as I’d imagine most kids are. I think about my platonic relationships now, which I leave in an uncomfortable balance by teetering between not expressing anything and then overflowing with adoration I can barely stand. I keep hearing Gena Rowlands’ character in Love Streams asserting, “Love is a stream, it’s continuous, it doesn’t stop.” “Your love is too strong for your family,” her therapist states, no sugarcoating it. What the fuck am I supposed to do with this? It just works itself into a cycle of me wishing things were different while trying to figure out why these things come up in such an overwhelming rush, burning right below the skin like a smack to the face.
I am now trying to temper my intensity and, I think, failing miserably. Which is fine. It’s whatever at this point. I think age has mellowed it somewhat (at least my emotions are rational now, even if they’re extreme) and maybe that will continue to happen as the years pass, but I think I also fear losing that rough edge — that aggression that makes me want to write long, exhaustive things like this. Or, that obsessive nature that keeps me up thinking about something I’ve watched or read or heard and connecting to sixteen other things I’ve watched or read or heard recently. Or, those few moments when I’ve decided I have feelings for someone and the sensation stays to gestate in my chest as long as no one else comes along — even if we go years without seeing each other. Or, the exact opposite of that feeling, when someone will work to worm their way into infatuation and I sit, unmoved, never to be convinced by their worming, even if I want to be. Or, the urge to be repulsive. Or, the urge to tear my skin clean off of me in order to start again tomorrow, brand new.
One time I asked my one of my friends if she ever felt like she just wanted to peel all of her skin off. “What, you mean like when you feel like you need to shower?” was her response. “No,” I laughed. I dropped the subject.
My fellow Scorpio Björk knows about being a Scorpio. She knows Pluto is its ruling planet, and that Pluto represents Death. Death (VIII) is Scorpio’s corresponding major arcana card in your typical tarot deck. After death comes regeneration — feeling all of your cells turn over in order for you to renew yourself. Björk uses Spain to peel her skin off, and she reports back in two parts:
Excuse me, I just have to / Explode / Explode this body / Off me
I’ll be brand new / Brand new tomorrow / A little bit tired / But brand new
She rocks back and forth, violently shaking herself free from the final layer of her last form’s death, her intensity met by the forces which surround her. Best of all, it’s a self-shedding mechanism. She relies on no one else’s stream of love or acceptance, no patriarchal nonsense or bureaucracy or doubt, as she’s full of that love as she is the air she breathes, she explains after “Pluto” self-destructs and “All Is Full Of Love” folds open. Maybe not from the sources you have poured yours. Maybe not from the directions you are staring at. I stare at the cars coming from either direction when I’m stuck crossing at the median and the light switches and think about all of that. Though support is helpful, I cannot expect a partner (or the idea of one) to fix everything. I do not let myself be hopeless anymore. It would take up too much space in my chest already filled to the brim. You have to trust it.
If From the Choir Girl Hotel describes that limbo space the exploding girl finds herself in post-crash, and Is This Desire? describes her stumbling out of the rubble — philosophically piecing together how she was held and why she cannot be held that way — then this third album is the stage of true acceptance. All three dealt with acceptance — of your own limitations, of your own emotional needs — but Homogenic is a celebration of your overflow, of your abundance, of being too much. It is angry, but not depressing. She considers it her “masculine” album in the sense that it takes up space, floods your senses with its demands. Björk sings of sharing love with others, but she does not let the bloodsuckers drain her (their desire was only to fetishize my anger, make it into something they could feed off of, like even my rage existed for their pleasure). I am not the hunter by choice, and I am not sentimental or soft in that state, but I accept the reasons why I need to be that person sometimes. I need those I surround myself with to accept that about me too. This is not to say I have perfected myself and it’s just a ticking clock that waits for someone else to fuck up; I will inevitably fuck up all the time. But, I want to stop hating myself for it. The strings that soar over “Jóga” are the singing heart that fuels that “state of emergency” I have to accept I live in. I want to translate it the way Björk has. I want to create something volcanic.
I am shocked by how many people I’ve met who are put off by Björk’s voice — particularly her phrasing, which I’ve always beyond-delighted in. She will never be a slave to a beat or time signature, letting the note roll forward from the back of her throat as if she can only summon it when it feels it’s ready. This makes it feel spontaneous, like she’s decided what she wants to sing the second her voice decides to propel itself into forward motion. It arrives sharp and ringing, unmistakably human. “There is a purpose behind it, where the drums are real hard and then the voice is beautiful,” Mark Bell notes in Björk’s South Bank Show documentary in a segment about the making of the album. “It’s just the contrast. For something to be beautiful, something’s gotta be ugly. If everything’s beautiful, then nothing’s beautiful.” This interview clip with Bell punches in while Björk is recording my favorite Björk song, “5 Years.” The aggressive slam and skip of the beat does not ever completely meld to the fever pitch the strings hit by the song’s rousing outro, but both things are required in order to make it forceful, to make it true.
It sounds like a playground taunt, like something you can just say without proof to back it up as there’s no way to quantify your stream if the tap keeps running dry: “I dare you to take me on / I dare you to show me your palms / I’m so bored / With cowards / Who say they want / And then they can’t handle / You can’t handle love.” That final crescendo should be enough ammo, screeching and slurring as the Icelandic string octet buzzes to generate enough noise representing all of the feeling Björk can contain, only able to march in line with the constant pant of the beat for so long before it erupts, all neon-like. It flutters back into place before vanishing into the ether, all spurred on by Björk’s final war cry, an offering of a hand but a warning as well, delivered four different ways — three of them chasing notes all over the staff in the fullest, roughest chest voice she can muster, followed by one where each word is punctuated.
I DARE YOU. I DARE YOU. I DARE YOU. I. DARE. YOU.
The warning erupts into drunken butterflies or tears that refuse to cease flowing, depending on what’s happening with you when you listen. I’m trying for more butterflies these days. I’m trying for more moments where arms interlink and let you lean against the wall of sound while the person who refuses to handle you is trapped on the other side. I’m trying to pull a Björk on a daily basis, in the sense that I say “I think this is bullshit” out loud a lot more often. I’m going to attempt to text my friends more often, leave victimhood in another time, in an old skin. I’m trying to share more things that make me genuinely happy, like so:
Björk : Are you being sued as well?
Polly : Yeah, I’m being sued at the moment. It’s really horrible.
Björk : I’m so sorry for you.
Tori : Do you want us to shoot the lawyer?