It’s Oh So Queer: Björk, Gay Icons and Embracing the Unnatural

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.

1. 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.

2. 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]

3. THE STUDENT – A Close Reading

And there was Björk lying on a black sand beach, waves from the sea rolling beneath her (Fig.2). I was extremely surprised to hear a string melody lulled on as if from the waves themselves.  I was shocked by the distance between the ‘weird’ Björk I had constructed from those X Factor performances and the one lying down here, eyes closed, as if listening to the sea.

“she seems to come from water”.^[6]

As the song builds towards its chorus, Björk swoons along to a stirring string arrangement, describing her ‘emotional landscapes’. Here was a convergence of the three media of a song, as defined by Christopher Ricks: the words, music and voice all swell in natural beauty.[7] The video swells too, mirroring the lyrics by expanding across vast landscapes, rocky plains, hills and lakes.

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): 

It was my art teacher, Ms Musselbrook, who pointed out that I had a particular aesthetic taste. In one of her classes, we had to choose and present two of our favourite pieces of artwork. I’d first chosen: ‘Ophelia’ by John Everett Millais.^[8] Then, Albert Bierstadt’s ‘A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie’.^[9] Even when I first loaded them up as grainy images on Google, I had fallen in love with them. I wasn’t sure why, but I did.

“Maybe you’re drawn to figures, to women, in nature”. It was a lightbulb moment.

There they were, for I hadn’t noticed them before, little figures on horseback riding close to a stream on Bierstadt’s canvas. And Ophelia lying gracefully, surrounded by plants and various flowers in her hand, lying just below the surface of a river, as if she too comes from water. And the lightbulb only got brighter.

From my childhood, I remembered watching Layla with her vines in the teen movie ‘Sky High’ (Figure 5). Florence (without her machine) running through the forest in the ‘Dog Days Are Over’ music video (Figure 6). Even Shelley’s dead lover in ‘The Cold Earth Slept Below’, which I’d been studying at school. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I had always been drawn to women in natural settings.

These were figures of natural beauty to me, the epitome of femininity was contained within these gentle, pastoral depictions. And here was Björk presenting herself perfectly, lying on a black sand beach, continuing the lineage of ‘natural’ women.

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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

 

6. 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.

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^[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).