Gay men are known for their divas.
From
Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Cher, Liza Minelli, to Britney, Kylie and
Beyoncé. There’s a long history of gay men revelling in the music of mainly
female pop stars (I say mainly - Bowie, Prince and Queen might have something
to say about that).
These
pop stars are often worshipped for their unapologetic sense of self or
empowering femininity and flamboyance. Some define this sentiment as ‘camp’. Or,
‘exaggeration, flamboyance and playfulness’ in other words.[1]
A
‘diva’.
And
queer people, particularly gay men, seem to be intrinsically drawn to such women,
often sparked by a revelatory ‘moment’ during their childhood or adolescence.
Think of The Spice Girls’ ‘girl power’, Madonna’s cone bra (Figure 1),
or Britney kissing her at the VMAs. These iconic displays of flamboyance in pop
culture are often cited as pivotal moments in the journey of a gay man. It's a
ritual akin to say, choosing your football team (because, let’s face it, it’s
always a successful Premier League team rather than your local one. Take my
brother who supports Newcastle. We live in Croydon).
When I asked my friends, these moments instantly came to mind: one remembers ‘screaming Bad Romance by Lady Gaga on Christmas Day at [his] 80-year-old grandmother’s house because [he] got the CD for Christmas’. Another remembers watching Britney Spears videos on MTV and ‘wanting to be a female pop star and having daydreams of this white blonde little girl’.
Many
theorists have attempted to explain this cultural phenomenon. Some believe it
to be a feeling of “shared oppression – gay men and women are both ground under
the wheel of hetero-patriarchy”.[2]
Indeed, it is often the most troubled female stars that become the most
worshipped, as their tragedies can mirror the sufferings of queer people (Judy
Garland’s substance abuse, Madonna’s public slut-shaming, Britney Spears’ very
public mental breakdown). Others believe it to be a way of “writing [a gay
man’s] way into the mainstream culture in which his own story could never be
told”.[3] In
this definition, the cult followings of heterosexual women is conceived as a
coping mechanism. By identifying with a pop star that exudes feminine
confidence and eccentricity, a homosexual man can escape from his reality,
where he could never express the same femininity or eccentricity under the
wheel of hetero-patriarchal culture.
I
must admit, most of the artists I listen to are indeed women. But they always
have been.
- THE
CHILD
I didn’t exactly
have a wide range of musical influences growing up. As I mentioned, I grew up
in a town near Croydon, and I feel my points of reference were typically
suburban. My musical taste was primarily informed by popular TV music
competitions like The X Factor. My childhood was full of those types of shows,
Simon Cowell plastered on our screen every Saturday night. The latest pop
music, ballads with dramatic key changes, disco numbers that my mum might’ve
sung along to in her car.
Then there was my
older sister, with her iPod Touch. She often lent it to me and we would
memorise song lyrics. It was loaded with the newest songs from MTV, normally
involving a lot of Jonas Brothers, Justin Bieber, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. Could
one of these artists spark an adoration of ‘my’ diva?
Not quite.
- THE
TEENAGER
I grew tired of
these songs quite quickly. I found them quite repetitive and went on the hunt
for something a bit different. In quite a typical 'I'm so quirky and rebellious' teenage fashion, I began to
explore independant artists and more 'alternative' music, albeit mostly by female musicians. Perhaps
this was a subconscious distancing from those X Factor shows and my mum’s radio.
It was during this time that I came across the name Björk. Repeatedly cited as
an influence by those artists I had already sunk my teeth into, she seemed to
be held in high regard by her peers. A promising résumé then.
But
I already had a vague association with the name. Like many other people, my only
point of reference for Björk was ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’. And even that was by
proxy.
I
had heard the song, and heard of its singer, from those X Factor shows. I
remembered ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’ being performed many times, normally during a
week when a contestant needed to show off ‘how unique they were’, their eccentricity. All words that could be attributed to a gay icon.
This
somehow necessitated them performing a cover of the song where they would whisper
and ‘shh’ to camera, taking on a raspy, screaming vocal style as they sang over
a big-band instrumental. Normally dressed in an Alice In Wonderland-esque
costume for some reason.[4]
Such
oddity or ‘camp’ should’ve been captivating - could this become my diva to be? Unlikely.
The
song featured seemingly random melodies, some whispered, some screamed. And
performed by a singer with an odd accent, it was a mix I disliked intensely. It
was esoteric, weird, ‘unnatural’ to me. It was screaming for screaming’s
sake. Being weird for weird’s sake. – which is how I assumed Björk must be by
extension.
Remembering
these X Factor performances from my childhood, I thought Björk’s music would be
more of the same: weird, loud and jazzy. But I gave it a go anyway. Having
typed her name into YouTube, and immediately scrolled past ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’,
I clicked on a video called ‘Jóga’.[5]
- THE
STUDENT – A Close Reading
I
was transfixed by this woman who seemed to come from water.
My
initial assumption had been wrong. From those ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’ performances,
I had constructed a Björk that was unnatural and weird for the sake of being
weird. From these opening seconds of Jóga, I constructed a Björk that was
anything but: wholly natural and gentle – like a wood nymph with an Icelandic
accent. I much preferred this Björk.
And I was beginning to understand why.
(Interlude):
But as the chorus of Jóga reached its
climax, Björk’s voice faded out and electronic beats drop in from nowhere,
booming and squelching. The seemingly stoic landscapes become digitally
rendered and suddenly break apart, like tectonic plates shifting (Figure 7).
I
disliked this ‘drop’. It was too unnatural, too random. It was too much of the
weird Björk from the ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’ performances. No, this wasn’t the diva
for me.
In
my head, my diva would be exactly be what Ms Musselbrook had pointed out.
Natural, feminine, pastoral. A kind of ‘Mother Nature’ if you will.
But
I replayed the video anyway. Both of my initial assumptions had been wrong.
Björk was not the odd, screeching woman I had imagined from the X Factor
covers, nor was she somehow Gaia reincarnate: idyllic and ‘natural’. She was
somehow both. Or at least somewhere in between. It was an odd combination.
She
had subverted my expectations twice. After the third replay, I put the song link into a Youtube converter and downloaded it.
- THE
MUSIC LOVER
Jóga
appears on Björk’s third solo, and probably most critically acclaimed album, Homogenic
(1997). Despite its title, the tracks are anything but identical. On the
contrary, ‘Homogenic embraced all of Björk’s most provocative
contradictions’.[10]
The
album’s opener (which precedes ‘Jóga’) combines stuttering electronic beats
with piercing strings as Björk boldly asserts ‘I'm going hunting/I'm the
hunter’.[11]
She half sings, half speaks the melody of ‘Unravel’, swaying back and forth in
distant saxophone and organ sounds.[12]
‘Pluto’ is an industrial drum and bass song where Björk shouts ‘Excuse me/But I
just have to/Explode/Explode this body’.[13]
So
much for pastoral tranquillity. She then literally screams the song’s
violent outro. This makes for some rather brilliant lyrical transcriptions
on music websites.[14]
Perhaps
it’s my X-Factor upbringing but if you described these songs as I have just
done to you, I may have shrugged my shoulders in confusion (just as you may
have). Not only do these individual songs sound unappealing to me, but they seem
to come from entirely different albums. In combination, they appear incredibly
random.
And just
because an artist fuses juxtaposing genres in an eccentric way, why should the
outcome be critically acclaimed, or even be considered successful in its
fusion? A meal combining of sausages and marshmallows does not
exactly sound appealing. Indeed, if my aesthetic taste leaned towards women
and pastoral beauty (thanks Ms Musselbrook), how could drum and bass fit
into that?
But
Homogenic’s disregard of perceived binaries, by combining ‘artificial’
electronic sounds with classical/folk instrumentation, reminds the listener
that these are both technologies, nevertheless. Indeed, for all the
‘unnaturalness’ and oddity that I had come to associate with an industrial
beat, it is worth reminding that this tool is just as unnatural as a string
section or a guitar riff. Or even the canvas that Millais used to depict
Ophelia. Björk herself explains it best: ‘Machines are just tools, and in that
way a synthesizer or a sequencer is no colder than a guitar or a flute [...]
it’s a question of how you use them’.[15]
And
it is this very use of her eccentric, eclectic style, by integrating ‘sounds
culturally coded as “natural” with other sound sources and compositional
practices conceived as “technological”’, which reminds the listener that they
are in fact, equally unnatural.[16]
Some critics say that, as a result, Björk in fact ‘naturalises’ electronic
beats. Indeed, the squelching, skipping beats on ‘5 Years’
personally conjures an image of her stomping on grapes.[17]
Part
of this naturalisation process perhaps results from Björk’s voice itself (the
voice, along with music, being another of Rick’s components for a song). From
the X Factor performances, I thought it was a weird and unnatural voice. Perhaps
that was because those contestants were imitating her, producing a shrieking
sound that seemed inauthentic at the time. But the Icelandic accent, the jagged
rolling of ‘r’s, all her vocal acrobatics, at first ‘weird’ to me, became
primal, ethereal, and very natural on Homogenic.
It
was this ‘natural’ voicing of Björk’s words that also aided my understanding of
the words themselves. As my negative encounter with ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’ can
attest to (The devil cuts loose/Zing boom), Björk often deploys odd metaphors
in her songs.[18]
Whereby many pop singers describe their hearts ‘skipping a beat’, Homogenic
describes how her ‘heart comes undone/Slowly unravels/In a ball of yarn’.[19]
She tells her lover ‘With a razor blade/I'll cut a slit open/And the luminous
beam/Heals you honey’ on ‘All Neon Like’.[20]
These odd lyrics seem random, even disturbing when written on the page. But upon
re-listening, with Bjork’s voicing and the cool ambient sounds, they feel like
very organic reactions to human experience. They become entirely natural. Even
her belted declaration of ‘I’m a fountain of love’ on ‘Bachelorette’ feels
familiar.[21]
And neatly continues my metaphor that she seems to come from water.
And
it was this way that Björk had used her tools that had made me hit replay on
the Jóga video in the first place. By combining aspects that at first seemed
random or eccentric, the very notion of a natural/unnatural or normal/weird
product had been collapsed.
And
with this collapse my eyes opened further still. My expectations of women and
beauty had to be undone. My expectation of a gay icon had to be undone too.
- THE
ACADEMIC
As I
transitioned into high school and university and listened to more and more
Björk records, I began to collapse these expectations that had plagued my early
reactions to her. The phrase that I used earlier in this essay to describe such
early expectations was: In my head, my diva would be exactly be what Ms
Musselbrook had pointed out. Natural, feminine, pastoral. A kind of ‘Mother
Nature’ if you will.
This
is what I had been drawn to throughout my childhood. Women in idyllic
environments is what I had perceived as beautiful.
Don’t
get me wrong, to this day, I would not downplay the aesthetic merits of this
type of beauty. I still find these figures (Florence, Shelley’s lover, Björk before
the drop in Jóga) incredibly beautiful. And such a tendency towards women in
the pastoral is not uncommon.
Indeed,
typically ‘women are seen "merely" as being closer to nature than
men’.[22]
Think Mother Nature, Eve, Venus. Even linguistically, la
natura in Latin becomes la nature in French and la naturaleza in
Spanish. I have always been complicit in this, finding beauty in women
maintaining a sense of the ‘natural’. It was what I expected my gay icon to be
after all.
But,
as Sherry Ortner points out, this association, once it becomes an expectation,
can become problematic. ‘If woman is a
part of nature, then culture would find it "natural" to subordinate
[her]’.[23]
This binary of nature and culture (and technology) becomes identified and
associated with the binary of femininity and masculinity respectively. Indeed,
the identification of women to nature, in which I saw so much beauty, can
become limiting as it excludes women from the realm of technology, culture and
eccentricity by extension.
This
is what I had seen in the Jóga video. I saw Björk lying on a beach as a string
arrangement played on and interpreted it as beautiful. When these landscapes
became digitally rendered and heavy electronic beats set in, I did not see
beauty. I saw too much ‘unnaturalness’, it was too odd and out of place. But
this is precisely what made me click the replay button. It was Björk’s
unwavering transcendence of these boundaries that was challenging and
provocative, but ultimately interesting to me. Her playful leaping from nature
and technology, oddity and gentility, masculinity and femininity, fascinated
me. It reminded me how false such binaries are in the first place. And how
playing with them is undeniably queer.
- THE
FAN – Embracing Oddity
If Björk comes from water,
then I dived in at the deep end. From the cosmopolitan city of Debut (1993), to the flute wonderland of
Utopia (2017), I had a Björk for
every mood. Even drafting this essay I switched my choice of album to analyse.
You might say that Björk was fast becoming my ‘gay icon’.
It’s a pretty unconventional
choice. Unlike my friends, who instantly fell in love with their respective
pop stars, it took time for me to dismantle my expectations of what a gay icon
should be. Where some pop stars presented an image of hyper-femininity, (which
I thought I would find in nature) it was Björk’s confrontation of these
boundaries that had intrigued me. To be sure, her subversion was not something
I immediately fell in love with, as my reactions to ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’ and
‘Jóga’ can attest to. But it was this very undoing of my expectations, this
provocative mixing, I would argue, that made Björk my icon.
And I’m not the only one. ‘Undoubtedly, [Björk] has made an immense contribution to queer culture [...] Her natural disregard for binary concepts of gender’.[24] Indeed, if we return to those definitions set out from the beginning, she exudes the ‘exaggeration, flamboyance and playfulness’ that gay men often look for.[25] Typical of queer culture, I began to embrace the aspects of Björk that had initially repelled me from her. Her oddity and camp-ness, for example,
with her iconic swan dress (Figure 8). Her defiant sexuality like on the album Vespertine, with its lyrics like ‘He slides inside/Half awake, half asleep’.[26] Even her violence in ‘Pluto’ from Homogenic. I learned to celebrate these aspects which had initially put me off Björk. She may not be widely considered as a gay icon, but I certainly treat her as one.
Liner Note:
I am yet to fall in love
with one of her songs though. ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’, despite it being her most
successful song to date, still doesn’t resonate with me. The odd screaming and
the jazzy instrumental haven’t grown on me yet.
Perhaps it reminds me too
much of those childhood ‘inauthentic’ X Factor performances. Or maybe it is a
terrible hipster-like insecurity that prevents me from enjoying her most
popular song. Or maybe it is one expression of femininity that my own internal
misogyny needs to dismantle in order to appreciate it. Or
maybe I don’t like big-band music.
Whatever the reason, I’m
still grappling with that particular song, but I hope I will like it. I hope in
five years’ time I will have to edit this part out of my coursework. Because it
was my very dislike of Björk that made me fall in love with her, and I hope the
same will happen with the first Björk song that I ever heard.
[1] Freya Jarman-Ivens, ‘Notes on Musical
Camp’ in The Ashgate Research Companion
to Popular Musicology, ed. by Derek B. Scott, (Taylor & Francis Group,
2010), p.182.
[2] Brian O'Flynn, 'They
just wanted to silence her': the dark side of gay stan culture’, The Guardian, (4 September 2018) https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/sep/04/they-just-wanted-to-silence-her-the-dark-side-of-gay-stan-culture. [accessed 14/04/20].
[3] José Muñoz
(1999), as cited in Louis Staples, ‘Why Is Judy Garland the ultimate gay
icon?’, BBC (24 September 2019), http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20190923-why-is-judy-garland-the-ultimate-gay-icon
[accessed 15/04/20].
[4] See, for example, The X Factor UK, It's Oh So Quiet for Kitty Brucknell - The X
Factor 2011 Live Show 2 (Full Version) (15 October 2011), available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCeokE_OkJE [accessed 11/04/2020].
[5] Björk, Jóga, (17 September 2019), available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loB0kmz_0MM [accessed 27/04/2020].
[6] Sean Penn said this during the
documentary ‘Inside Björk’ and it summarises my feelings about Björk perfectly.
Inside Björk, dir. by Christopher
Walker (London: One Little Indian, 2003).
[7] Christopher Ricks, Dylan’s
Visions of Sin (Canongate, 2011), p.20.
[8] See Figure 3: Sir John Everett
Millais, Bt, Ophelia, 1851–2, oil on
canvas, Tate Britain, London.
[9] See Figure 4: Albert Bierstadt, A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie,
1866, oil on canvas, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn.
[10] Philip Sherburne, ‘Björk: Homogenic’, Pitchfork (5 February 2017) https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22835-homogenic/ [accessed 11/04/2020].
[11] Björk, ‘Hunter’ in Homogenic (London: One Little Indian Records, 1997).
[12] Björk, ‘Unravel’ in Homogenic.
[13] Björk, ‘Pluto’ in Homogenic.
[14] Genius, ‘Björk: Pluto - Lyrics’, https://genius.com/Björk-pluto-lyrics [accessed 13/04/2020].
[15] Björk cited in Colin Berry, ‘Sno-koan’, Wired, (1998) https://www.wired.com/1998/06/Björk/, [accessed: 14/04/20].
[16] Nicola Dibben, ‘Björk Creating: Myths of
Creativity and Creation’ in Björk:
Archives, (London: Thames & Hudson, 2015), p.40.
[17]
Björk, ‘5 Years’ in Homogenic.
[18]
Björk, ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’ in Post (London: One Little Indian Records, 1995).
[19] Björk, ‘Unravel’ in Homogenic.
[20]
Björk, ‘All Neon Like’ in Homogenic.
[21] Björk, ‘Bachelorette’ in Homogenic.
[22] Sherry B. Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male as
Nature Is to Culture?’, Feminist Studies
1:2 (1972), 5-31 (p.12).
[23] Ibid.,
p.12.
[24] Lee Williscroft-Ferris, ‘Björk: A Queer
Icon’, The Queerness (12 November
2016), https://thequeerness.com/2016/11/12/bjork-a-queer-icon/ [accessed 30/04/20].
[25] Freya
Jarman-Ivens, ‘Notes on Musical Camp’, p.182.
[26] Björk, ‘Cocoon’ in Vespertine (London: One Little Indian
Records, 2001).
