Army Of Me

Army Of Me
It’s actually written to a relative of mine who had been a bit out of order for a while. I’m not sure why I wrote it. Maybe I felt that Debut had been such a polite, shy album - there was a side of me that was so shy and such a beginner, I was very flattered when everyone loved Debut but also a bit confused because it wasn’t really me. Maybe ’Army Of Me’ was an attempt to balance it out.

Record Collector, August 2002, August 2002

Army of Me
It’s a song for the movie "Tank Girl", but it is actually about my brother. He is pretty lazy and likes things like food, sex, sleep - very basic needs. It’s just that he does it more than others. Then he started smoking, well, not cigarettes. It felt as if he was in a coma. He just sat on his butt complaining, "the worlds stinks, I can’t get a job, there are no good albums to buy and even if I wanted to buy them, I don’t have any money to buy them with. Blah blah blah." Self-pity from morning to night, which really pisses me off. You can stand a whining brother to a limit, but for ten years, from he was 14 to that he turned 24. I simply had enough. That’s it. Stand on your own legs, get a job, get a life. And if you complain once more, you’ll met an "Army Of Me"....

VeckoRevyn 1995-06-28

Björk à propos du titre Army Of Me
Army of me is about a friend of mine who for a very long time was in a way in a coma, not literally. But he would live his life every day and kind of not be alive and it used to be very frustrating for me. I used to shake him and try to wake him up and get him to do things but he wouldn’t. So that song about if you complain once more, you’ll meet an Army of me.

MTV (Europe) 1995-04

Björk à propos du titre Army of Me
I had written two tracks with Graham Massey before I did Debut : "Army Of Me" and "The Modern Things." Then I met Nellee Hooper and we ended up doing a whole album’s worth of stuff together, so I decided to keep those two songs, wait, and put them on the next album. Post then ended up being more schizophrenic with collaborations of a lot of people, so it was a better match. Graham came up with ["Army Of Me’s"] bass riff. I had written that melody earlier in Iceland. It matched very well together, I felt. I then did the sarcastic scratch noises in the chorus with a coin on a deep bass string that Graham sampled for me. My younger brother was having a bit of a crazy period at the time, so I wrote this for him. It is sort of a big sister telling little brother off song. The other song...

The Stereogum Interview, March 2008

Björk à propos du titre Army Of Me
Je suis probablement une chanteuse très particulière : mes mélodies sont très difficiles à chanter pour les autres, même si elles n’impliquent pas vraiment de technique spécifique. Army of Me est peut être la seule de mes chansons qui échappe à ce schéma. Je me souviens qu’en l’écrivant, j’ai essayé d’être aussi froide que possible, alors que mes mélodies sont en général chaleureuses, accaparantes. Là, j’avais tenté de rester distante.

Les Inrockuptibles n°491 (Avril 2005)

the Army Of Me-xes charity album
I was on the 12th floor in Manhattan listening to all the versions, and I could see into all these windows. I suddenly realised that in all the bedrooms all around the world, there are people so busy doing so many things. After that, I stopped walking past houses thinking, "Oh this is just a place where people are couch potatoes and lead mundane lives"

The Observer, 13 march 2005

the Army Of Me-xes charity album
Maybe we can’t do anything about Bush and Bin Laden and those guys are going to play their games whatever happens, but I thought , ’here’s something where we can have a say’ and I wanted to be part of it and join the conversation.

Scottman.com, Sunday 17 Jul 2005

the video for Army of Me
When Michel gets his strokes of genius and, in the video for ’Army of Me’, wants a dentist that’s a gorilla to find a diamond in my mouth, some people call it nonsense. But it’s probably the most realistic way of expressing what situation I’m in - all these people trying to take things away from me, and the gorilla finding a diamond that I don’t know I have and then stealing it. ’Army of Me’ is so much about me actually learning that I have to defend myself. I have to stand up and fight the fucking gorilla. Once I’ve got the diamond and I run away with it, it becomes massive ’cos it’s mine. But if the gorilla had kept it, it would have gone really tiny. That’s surrealism for me.

Les Inrockuptibles n°185