Generous Palmstroke

“Generous Palmstroke” is played in the final section of Inside Bjork, a DVD documentary that I unabashedly love. Sure, the celebrity interviews are thoroughly – I mean, thoroughly – unenlightening (Sean Penn?!?!). But Bjork is one of the few artists who is very capable of explaining her own reasoning in a manner that is both straightforward and not reductive. I watch the film when I’m feeling down because Bjork’s robust creative spirit (no matter what you think of her creations, she approaches the act of creativity in the exact right spirit) energizes me and gets me in a fighting and creative mood.

So, at the end of the film, Bjork is discussing how she still thinks she’s doing “pop” music (some people will find this an odd statement, I’m sure), and why she likes pop. Pop, she says, very quickly brings you to an emotional place that is very easily understood by everyone. She also says that her idea of pop is a modern continuation of folk music. I love this formulation, because it is so obviously against the grain of what most folk musicians think about their music. (Or, it should be against the grain of what they think about their music – how do these folk musicians deal with the obvious fact that their music is mainly for white, affluent intellectuals?)

At this point in the documentary, “Generous Palmstroke” is played as an example of Bjork’s “modern folk.”

It’s very Troubadour sounding: the clip-clopping beat, the harp plucking, Bjork’s simple (even for Bjork) lyrics and her quasi-iambic rhythm on the vocals. It’s like she’s saying to folk musicians: you think you’re folk – I’ll give you ancient folk. But Bjork uses this simplicity to hang hundreds of emotions on her performance: her vocals repeatedly circle from excitement to resignation to cheerfulness and then to despair. It all builds to a crescendo where even the simple formalities of the song are thrown out and the primal folk of the verses seems to be too cossetted and stilted to contain the song’s raw emotion. What can be more folk, more understandable, more ecstatic, than a person, accompanied only by an explosion of sound, singing at the top of her lungs, “Embrace me/Embrace me/Embrace me”?