Personally, I think a lot of these animal rights causes smell a bit. Of course people should treat animals with respect. They shouldn’t be used to test cosmetics or used to make music videos. But I don’t get the difference between eating some carrots and eating a rabbit. How much difference is there between cutting down trees to make a book and cooking up a lamb chop ?
Don’t misunderstand - I think groups like Greenpeace have done many brilliant things. But there are also problems with Greenpeace. When the orginization began, many of its members were from Germany. For them to march into Greenland and tell the indigenous people to stop killing seals is completly ridiculous.
What right have these people, from big industrial cities like Frankfurt, which contribute a lot of pollution, to tell people who live in harmony with nature not to eat seals ? What are they supposed to eat ? Snow ?
I think that’s more a British than an American thing. Americans tend to like things that are not what they see every day, they’re even a bit addicted to it - their Minnie Mouses, Donald Ducks, "Star Wars". But the British are more conservative. They’ve also got this Imperialist way of thinking. It’s just very hard to explain to a British person, I’ve got a British boyfriend and he kind of almost doesn’t get it when I explain.
It’s like sexism, it’s so deep that you don’t realise it, and the biggest sexists, they are the ones who think they’re not. It’s the same with British people. They’re so sure that they’re much better, they don’t even think about it. They tend to treat other people like rarities, like something you should keep in a box and put in a museum. They don’t deal with them as equals with feelings.
You can see that a lot in their films, how they portray Indians and Chinese people. It’s kind of like something pretty to look at and then throw away. An object, like a rhino’s skull from Africa. That manifests itself in the rock business as well, you know. They take someone like Ofra Haza... I guess I’ve been caught up in that as well.
Björk à propos de l’influence de Londres sur son travail
I’m still on my same indie label. When I went to London first in the 90s, I felt like “oh, I found my music” - It was really perfect timing for me because I’d been listening at home to like Kate Bush, Brian Eno, a lot of electronic music, Soft Cell. I was basically obsessed with electronic music but none of my friends were sort of listening to that but when I went to a rave in Manchester in ’89 and I was like “oh my god there’s a warehouse with people just playing just that electronic music all night.” Basically, all my dreams came true and I feel like I just discovered my branch on the musical tree which is basically electronic music I guess. And I’m sort of still on that branch — very happy there because a lot of other people have joined that branch after that that were from the next generation.
I know we’ve talked about China...but Shanghai is an amazing place. I mean, they are interesting times to be there. Because Shanghai is three times New York, like New York in the 1970s, or even the 1930s. They’re like in 2020s there, building skyscrapers with 90 floors. It’s very exciting in a way, you can feel it in the air – I mean, you don’t need to have a cappuccino to wake you up because the energy there’s just crazy. But obviously that kind of future of sorts comes with other things, and the human rights issues out there I have said enough about, I think. How they’re going to react to the Western World’s interest in them... I don’t know what will happen. But I think having the opportunity to see the East, like Korea too, is very important for political understanding. In some ways, they were trying to be so ahead of anything else.
Here were people my age writing a film about young people in England today and I was shouting ’Hip, hip, hooray’. It’s really difficult for me to say because you live here, but having moved from Iceland and now trying to get into the English vibe, I found everybody in England hooked on Victorian times. It’s like English people are ashamed of England today. They are upset that it’s not 1901 and all the films they make are about these times. There’s a lot of turn-of-the-century imagery in the pop videos.
I really respect England, it has a lot of good qualities, yet so much about it is the opposite to what I am. And I’m just basically a proud bastard. I can work a lot here and all my dreams can come true and I’m grateful for that. But I’m just a visitor. After all this has finished I’ll go back to Iceland.
There are a lot of really good things going on in England. Especially the generation of 18-to 23-year-olds. They’re very enthusiastic, very positive - musically, and attitude-wise as well. It’s not muso.
Before me were the Woodstock generation. Their roots were in rhythm and blues. My generation have our roots in jazz. Not that we’re actually playing jazz, but it’s just kind of Lego - building blocks we get to make things out of. Like, chord-wise, musically, that’s definitely where I come from. There are a lot of people of my generation making jazzy-house, jazzy-punk, jazzy-techno, whatever. A lot of these jazzy, funky sort of people are playing in London, like, really live.
A lot of people who were playing when I was brought up were misunderstanding jazz, in an academic way. They just thought jazz was like a formula, which is rubbish. Young people now are playing jazz when they don’t even know a note, ’cos they like the sounds, ’cos it’s in their blood.
« Quand je fais la vaisselle dans la cuisine, » dit-elle avec un accent cockney prononcé et quelques mots manquants parce qu’elle n’a pas parlé anglais depuis longtemps, « je regarde par la fenêtre et je peux voir GusGus s’agiter dans le studio. Quand je vais me coucher, j’entends les beats qu’ils font à travers mon mur. Je trouve ça rassurant. Ça me fait mieux dormir. »
When I saw there was a shop called Iceland I was totally confused. I thought it was the National Embassy. But when I went inside there was just loads of fridge-freezers.
There’s a lot of similarities between Iceland and Ireland. All the poetry, I guess, and the literature and the drinking. Do you play chess over there ? Chess is massive in Iceland. There’s a lot of chess-playing and telling stories while you’re getting hilariously drunk. Falling asleep on the chess table is very much part of Icelandic culture.
For me Icelandic is my instinct and English is me being clever. Icelandic is unconscious and English is conscious. And when I speak English, especially when I do interviews and stuff, I can very easily see myself from the outside and describe myself. But then again I would have to be pretty stupid not to have developed that thing, because I’ve done interviews now for 900 years. But it’s impossible for me to do interviews in Icelandic. I just listen to myself and I sound so fake and so terribly pretentious and so Little Miss Know-it-all, I just want to strangle myself. The Icelandic media is going bonkers because I do one interview there every five years...
I guess what was surprising was how much like a game it is, like chess or something. How you hold the objects, with what finger, and where you go, and then you do this... It’s almost one of the tricks, because obviously one of the reasons why you have a tea ceremony is to get a vacation from the busy world, just to clear your mind.
À un journaliste anglais trop curieux : J’aurais honte de répondre à vos questions dans ma langue natale. Mais j’accepte de le faire en anglais parce que c’est la langue des clichés et des propos superficiels.
