Saturday, August 02, 2008

Saturday Song

Icelandic chanteuse Bjork is as well-known for her eccentricity as she is for her songcraft. After ditching her first band, The Sugarcubes, Bjork has shown an impressive command of vastly different styles in her solo career. This song "Play Dead", is pulled from her first, and most accesible album, appropriately titled Debut. Never designed to be released as an album track, the song was instead intended for a single-only release, the result of which was a Top Twenty hit in the UK and a Top Ten hit in most of Europe.

Its grandly theatrical, bombastic style prefaces similar works to follow, in particular the big band revival, "It's Oh So Quiet." The video for "Play Dead" features scenes from an obscure British film, The Young Americans, which flopped miserably upon theatrical release.

1 comment:

anita said...

On my god!!! I have such bizarre and amazing memories of the Debut CD. It turned out to be the strangest "soundtrack" of one of very oddest and most transitional parts of my life.

When I listen to that music now, it's scary because I don't know which came first, the strange experiences or the music. In other words, did the music so totally infuse the time that the two have since become indistinguishable for me? Or was my emotional state the same as hers and I was just totally identifying?

And, for the record, this wasn't a drug thing, I've never been into drugs, other than alcohol, so it wasn't that.