SINGER, SONGWRITER, AND ACTRESS ICELANDIt takes a long time to fully become who you are.
—BJöRK
Björk stood in her living room surrounded by instruments: piano, drums, flute, oboe, guitar. She scowled as she read the letter from Fálkinn, her new recording company. They had given her a contract to make a record, but now they were telling her exactly which songs to sing—not so surprising, considering their singer was just eleven years old.
But Björk wasn’t having it. She stomped around the room, growling to herself.
“What in the world is the matter?” her mother asked.
“These songs are crap!” Björk answered. “I won’t sing them.”
Hildur was used to her daughter’s moods. She took the list and scanned it.
“You’re right. These songs are crap.”
That got a grin out of the young singer.
“I’m going to call them and tell them I won’t do the record.”
“Wait a minute, Björk. What if Sævar and his friends help you choose better songs and write some new ones.”
Björk smiled again. Her stepfather, Sævar, was a guitarist in a local band. His friends jammed at their house all the time.
“Yes, that’s what we will do,” said Björk.
Satisfied, she quit stomping around and picked up her flute. Before the letter had arrived, she’d been working on a song about her favorite Icelandic painter, Jóhannes Sveinsson Kjarval. She loved the landscapes he painted, especially those that focused on moss. Björk decided the song would have piano as well. And it would go on the album.1
This quirky first album would introduce Iceland to Björk’s unique voice and vision. Just a few years later, the world would discover her as well.
Björk Gudmundsdottir was born in 1965 in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland. Her mother was an activist and her father a union leader and electrician, but they divorced soon after their baby was born. Björk and her mother moved to a commune. Her mother soon remarried a musician, so Björk grew up in a house full of music. She took to it early: “I’ve always sung, ever since I was a little kid,” said Björk.2
Björk means “birch tree” in Icelandic, which is ironic because the country is known for its complete lack of trees.
At age five, Björk enrolled in a music school where she studied classical piano, oboe, and recorder. At a school recital, she sang the disco hit “I Love to Love,” and her teachers were so impressed that they sent a recording to Iceland’s only radio station. The station loved Björk’s voice and played the recording on air for the whole country to hear. Soon, a local record label came knocking, offering Björk a record contract. She was ten years old.
Björk always danced to the beat of her own drum. One day in elementary school, she decided that getting dressed for school was too much bother. So she took the sheet off her bed, cut a hole in the middle, stuck her head through, and wore that to class. “That was normal for me,” she recalled.4
Björk took two weeks off from school to make her first record, the self-titled Björk. The label gave her a list of songs they wanted her to record, but headstrong Björk hated their picks and refused. The result was a combination of original tunes, Icelandic folk songs, covers, and the one instrumental written by young Björk herself. It was “a surprisingly eclectic and accomplished album for one so young.”3 Björk is still quite proud of it to this day. One song became a hit in Iceland, and the album sold well in the small country. Overnight, Björk was famous.
Björk didn’t like all the attention, however, and promptly retired from music—though not for long. A few years later, when she was thirteen, punk rock hit Iceland, and Björk couldn’t stay away. With three friends from school, she started an all-girl punk band called Spit and Snot. (You read that right—most punk name ever.) A year later, in 1980, Björk graduated from music school and switched music genres again. This time she formed an experimental jazz-funk band called Exodus.
From there, Björk moved in and out of a number of bands. She played all different kinds of music and experimented with her singing style as well. She howled. She shrieked. She whispered. She wanted to have a unique sound—something all her own. And she found it. In 1986, she joined a new band called The Sugarcubes and married the guitarist, Þór Eldon. They had a baby together, Sindri, and then divorced. Fortunately, they stayed friends and the band stayed together.
The Sugarcubes were an art-punk band with a sound similar to popular New Wave bands of the day—The B-52s and Talking Heads. Their first album, Life’s Too Good, came out on Björk’s twenty-first birthday. With their quirky lyrics and Björk’s unique vocals, the album was unlike anything on the radio at the time, launching the Sugarcubes onto the world stage. Their first single, “Birthday,” topped the British music charts and was voted Single of the Week by Melody Maker (a weekly British pop/rock newspaper). The album got rave reviews, was played on radio stations in America and Europe, and sold more than a million copies worldwide.5
Björk and the Sugarcubes started their own music label in Iceland, called Bad Taste. The company is a record label, art gallery, bookstore, publishing house, and radio station whose motto is “world domination or death” according to vinylhub.com
The band did a world tour, and when The Sugarcubes first hit America, Rolling Stone magazine had this to say: “Singer Björk . . . is casting a powerful spell of her own with an astonishing voice that is unpredictable yet captivating in its wild extremes. In a single line, she swings from romantic cooing to an angry snarl, punctuating her chorus with Indian war whoops and breathtaking supershrieks.”6 A unique sound indeed! The band also played on Saturday Night Live and was the show’s first Icelandic band.
The Sugarcubes released a couple more albums and opened for U2 during their 1992 world tour. Lead singer Bono praised Björk’s talent: “She has a voice like an ice pick . . . Wherever I was in the stadium . . . it could travel through metal, steel, concrete . . . and straight to my heart.”7 When Björk decided to launch a solo career, The Sugarcubes broke up, but they’re still considered “the biggest rock band to emerge from Iceland.”8
Many people know Björk from her strange, artsy music videos. She has collaborated with many award-winning directors. Check them out on YouTube.
In 1993, Björk recorded a solo album called Debut (her first since age eleven). One single reached number two on Billboard magazine’s “Modern Rock” chart. British music magazine NME named Debut Album of the Year, and it went platinum in America. And at the 1994 Brit Awards, Björk won Best International Female and Best International Newcomer. Solo Björk was a hit!
From there, she went on to record seven more solo albums, in which she mixed nearly every musical genre—dance, electronic, house, techno, punk, pop, rock, jazz, and hip-hop. She also brought in a variety of sounds to accompany her vocals, everything from Inuit choirs and orchestras to household sounds, like shuffling cards and ice being cracked. Even with her avant-garde sound, several of Björk’s albums reached the top twenty on the “Billboard 200” chart, and thirty singles reached the top forty on pop charts around the world.9
At the 2000 Oscar ceremony, Björk caused a media frenzy when she arrived in a white, feathery swan dress that wrapped around her body. The iconic dress was later auctioned off for nearly $10,000, with all the money donated to the international aid agency Oxfam.11
In 2004, Björk performed the opening song at the summer Olympics in Athens. As she sang, her dress unraveled and flowed over all the athletes in the stadium to show a ten-thousand-square-foot map of the world.
As she gets older, Björk seems to be getting even better. Her 2015 work, Vulnicura, was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album, and one reviewer wrote of a 2011 concert, “The elemental timbre of her voice has grown more powerful with age.”10
Björk is also a talented actress. She starred in her first film back in 1986—a witchcraft movie called The Juniper Tree. In 1999, she agreed to write the soundtrack for another movie called Dancer in the Dark. When the director asked if she would play the lead role, she agreed. Good decision! Dancer in the Dark went on to win Best Film at the Cannes Film Festival and Björk won Best Actress. One of her songs was nominated for an Oscar, and she performed it on live television during the show.
Björk uses her art to help change the world for the better, both in other countries and in her own. She did concerts to raise money for tsunami relief in Southeast Asia and spoke out for Tibetan freedom during a concert in China. In Iceland, she raises money for the country’s music scene and fights to protect wilderness, both in the sea and on land. She founded a group, the Náttúra Foundation, which protects Icelandic nature and promotes sustainable industry. She’s also raising money to establish a national park.
Since this headstrong eleven-year-old made her first album, Björk has always been a star like no other. She has beautifully fused music and art for more than forty years. Her albums have sold millions of copies around the world, and she’s won awards and praise for her groundbreaking experimentation. Björk also made Rolling Stone’s lists of “100 Greatest Singers of All Time” and “100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time.” In fact, she’s been called “a true sonic innovator . . . the most important and forward-looking musician of her generation.”12 With her musical talents and one-of-a-kind sense of style, Björk paved the way for a whole new generation of artists. (You’re welcome, Lady Gaga.)