Possibly Maybe

Although the majority of Telegram has not aged well (why, exactly, did we all like drum ‘n bass?), I think the Telegram version of “Possibly Maybe” holds up next to the original. It’s no surprise: the remix was done by Bjork’s regular collaborator, Mark Bell.

Listen here: “Possibly Maybe (Lucy Mix)“

The original plays the song for its cinematic girlishness. As I listen, I can almost imagine it playing in the background of a scene from a snappy fifties comedy – Bjork is swooning while she talks on the phone to her swell new Manhattan boyfriend. The Telegram version, on the other hand, emphasizes the song’s sultriness. This time, as the song plays, I picture Bjork dressed in a cocktail dress, singing in a smoky cabaret.

When I replay the song in my head, it’s the Telegram version that plays, but that’s because that version also has some personal importance for me. It is the version I was listening to when I had my first kiss – with a boy. I don’t mean that it was playing when I kissed him. Instead, it was all I played about the time I had my first kiss, and I loved the line “I suck my tongue in memory of you” because that’s what I did, to remember the delight of his kiss. The hermetic, lazy sexiness of the Telegram version fit my mood so perfectly. All I wanted to do was lie around and semi-chastely fantasize about him.

(Total non sequiter. Said boy has since become middlingly famous in indie circles. I won’t give everything away, but he is in a band that likes to sing about hunks who breakdance. Speaking of which – we don’t really talk, and I don’t even think he remembers me (sob!), but the last time we spoke (several years after we dated), our entire conversation was him telling me, “Excuse me, could you get out of the way? I need to breakdance.”)

In either version, the song is exactly what many people miss most about post-Homogenic Bjork: it’s sweet, easy, pop-y, and just the tiniest bit forgettable. “Possibly Maybe” is a good song, but it’s not a great song: I don’t know anyone who likes Bjork who dislikes “Possibly Maybe”, but I also don’t think anyone really loves it, and it’s not a song that makes a very strong impression.

Apart from that, the only other thing I wanted to mention was my other favourite lyric. I love the line, “Who knows what’s going to happen?/Lottery or car crash/Or you join a cult.” It’s absurd, but it fits in well with the song’s feeling of slightly unhinged and self-delighted expectation. It also makes me yearn for the days when Bjork liked fun, absurd lyrics and didn’t feel the need to discuss suicide bombers.

Sadly, the video is one of Bjork’s lesser videos. There are no inventive conceits and stunning visuals. It’s just Bjork gussied up in various different outfits. In other words, I could totally see a Top Model photo shoot where the girls have to dress up like Bjork in “Possibly Maybe”. (The bitchy one – there’s always a bitchy one – would complain that she had to be “ugly striped-sweater Bjork.”) I would say the video is worth it for the shot of frizzy-haired Bjork and Bjork licking a watermelon, but the black light was ugly and unfashionable in the nineties and it’s still ugly and unfashionable. This video usually gets a skip on my Bjork Volumen DVD.

Show Me Forgiveness

It’s the shortest track on Medulla (by a second!), and also the only one that is completely a cappella in the traditional sense. Medulla has several bridge songs – songs under a minute that seem more like interludes than finished songs – and “Show Me Forgiveness” fits this pattern.

At the same time, it is one of the most capable (but odd) rejoinders to the charge that Bjork had abandoned pop by the time Medulla came out. The melody she sings is simple, pure and without dissonant notes or irregular rhythms. The melody is also probably one of the most memorable on the album. If the song were longer, and it had a verse-chorus structure, it could easily have been a standard pop song.

It is the lyrics that help push it even further as a stand out track. Lyrically, “Show Me Forgiveness” highlights Bjork’s strange yet liberating stance on self-perception. Since she’s a post-Christian and (up until Volta) a fairly unconscious feminist, she has no interest in asking God or her lover for forgiveness. In the song, she needs forgiveness for having “lost faith” – an irony, I’m sure – in herself.

With these lyrics sung into what sounds like a void, the song becomes a metaphor for the difficulty we all have with reconciling our “interior” with “outside forces.” To be able to forgive yourself, you need to believe in your own worthiness. For a post-Christian, this belief cannot be bestowed by God: it must originate out of nothingness. Confidence in one’s self is as fragile as a voice alone in a void. But that voice, out of necessity, can produce something strong and beautiful.

Alarm Call

I was having difficulty deciding what the first track review would be for this blog (or more accurately, what would be the highlighted song when I officially launched the site). I wanted it to be “Human Behaviour” because it was my first introduction to Bjork, and that felt like an appropriate beginning. But once I started writing, I couldn’t stop – the song suddenly became the encapsulation of everything I wanted to say about Bjork. And that is what this blog is supposed to do, not that one particular song. So, I began casting around for a new beginning.

I eventually settled on “Alarm Call.” It’s an odd choice, but I think, once I explain what the song means to me, it will become clear.

(I’m including the video, but the original mix of the song is what I will refer to.)

I bought Homogenic – without having listened to it – in my first week of my second year of University. I quickly fell in love with the big tracks – “Bachelorette”, “Hunter” and, a little later, “Joga.” But although it has since become one of my favourites, “Alarm Call” meant nothing to me for a long time. It didn’t have the sweeping strings and vibrant melodies of the other songs. Worst of all, it initially felt like a tepid replay of “Hyperballad”: mountains, things on top of mountains, Bjork on the top of mountains, Bjork possibly throwing things off the top of mountains, WHATEV.

And then the winter came, and I became depressed.

It’s all very cliched. My school work was difficult and excessively time-consuming and I was gradually discovering I hated my major (Chemistry: whodathunkit!). I was still living in residence, but I was surrounded by strangers. Most of my friends had moved out, and those that hadn’t were too busy to hang out with me. Two of my closest friends were drifting away, for various reasons. And perhaps most importantly, I was slowly and very pathetically inching out of the closet.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that it was all cliched, it didn’t stop the cliches from hurting any less. The cliche was happening to me, after all. I had spent my teenage years yearning to get out of suburbia and to become an adult, and now my life was unfolding very differently and much more painfully than I expected. I was confused and isolated and fairly hopeless. I had made a mess of my life, I thought, and I was letting everyone down.

And then, one day, in the early spring, I replayed “Alarm Call.”

One of the things I most appreciate about Bjork is that she wants her listeners to be happy. Not just happy as a consumer – Bjork wants you to be transcendently, ecstatically happy and fearless. Bjork wants to change your life.

And that’s what “Alarm Call” is – it’s instructions on how to listen to Bjork’s music. You take it up to the top of a mountain and you play it as loud as you can, and you have a fucking good time, because we’re not philosopher-saints, we’re regular, normal people and the only thing that matters is allowing yourself to be happy and making sure that everyone else is happy too. That is enlightenment.

The music is pleasant enough, but the song is mainly, and most importantly, that beat that sounds like a giant dancing from foot to foot and Bjork’s singing and lyrics, which are some of her most unashamedly joyous (listen to her growl!). They are ridiculous and they sound like they were written by someone who can’t speak English very well, but they are so important and so so so true:

Today has never happened
And it doesn’t frighten me

It doesn’t scare me at all

You can’t say no to hope
You can’t say no to happiness

It doesn’t scare me at all

The song meant so much to me that spring: my problems were all cliches – and the answers were all cliches. That’s why I had initially ignored the song. I hadn’t had the right experiences to illuminate the meanings of the words.

As you get older, you realize that the reason why truisms kick around so long is because they are, in some ways, true. “You can’t so no to hope/You can’t say no to happiness” – it only sounds ludicrously optimistic and out of touch with the world when you haven’t been through some serious crap. When you have, it actually sounds like the only way to live, as one of the only bearable truths in life. “Today has never happened/and it doesn’t frighten me” – that sort of thought can only come from someone who was once frightened of what today would bring, and who no longer feels that fear. If you have been through that, you know the rush that comes when you realize you no longer feel that fear, when you no longer feel like you have to punish yourself.

That spring, I came out of my depression (in more ways than one), and learned the exhilarating joy of not fearing the next day. I have Bjork, and “Alarm Call” to thank (at least partially) for that.

An appropriate beginning, I think.

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”?

An Echo, A Stain

Although “An Echo, A Stain” is not Vespertine’s most successful track as a song – I’ll go obvious and say “Hidden Place” is – it is the track that most successfully achieves the aesthetic that Vespertine seems to be groping for. While the other sweepy string tracks off Vespertine can sound a little too soupy and toothless, “An Echo, A Stain” manages to menace. Bjork tends to always open her notes up when she sings – it’s probably the attribute that her fans like the most about her and her detractors find most annoying – and here, even when she breaks out of the whisper, she keeps her vowels flat. Take the line “I’m sorry you saw that” – she sings “thaaaat” instead of “thaaAAATT!” It makes her sound a teensy bit not sorry you saw “that”, whatever nameless (and possibly horrible) thing “that” could be.