Björk and the Cyborg Manifesto

I actually wrote this in college in January 2012 as part of a writing course on the subject of “body modification” (don’t ask). In the class, we read “A Cyborg Manifesto,” and, while it’s a very unwieldy, often difficult to understand essay, I noticed parts of it that reminded me a lot of Björk. One of my hobbies in college was writing really esoteric papers about subjects that only moderately related to the course’s subject matter, and this was probably my crowning achievement in that area. I didn’t post it at the time because I wasn’t confident that it even made sense, or that I interpreted “A Cyborg Manifesto” correctly, but the release of Vulnicura got me thinking about it again and I thought it might be of interest to one or two people in the world. If you are insane and want to read “A Cyborg Manifesto,” you can do so here.

Enjoy.

In her 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway put forth what she saw as an “ironic dream,” a vision of a metaphorical cyborg that “can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves.” At the center of Haraway’s essay was the image of the cyborg, a cybernetic being that would resist traditional ideas of gender and boundaries between humans, machines, and nature. The cyborg was her image of a being that was not bound by Western ideas, one that “would not recognize the Garden of Eden” because “it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.” Haraway essentially saw the potential for the cyborg to be a utopian force, one that connects ideas that humans had previously seen as being incompatible with each other. As things like gender and the relationship between nature and technology continue to be questioned, Haraway’s theories become important to consider. Perhaps surprisingly, the person that might be the closest to her cyborg image comes from the world of music: Icelandic singer Björk Guðmundsdóttir. Through her music – particularly her albums Post, Homogenic, and Biophilia – and other forms of multi-media engagement, Björk has attempted to erase the dualities that exist between humans, technology, and nature much in the way that Haraway envisioned.

At the time of Haraway’s writing, Björk was in the short-lived post-punk band KUKL. She rose to fame as a member of the alternative pop band The Sugarcubes, but had her most success after the band broke up in 1992 and she embarked on a solo career. Björk is perhaps most recognizable for her signature singing voice, a robust soprano that is identifiably hers. Alex Ross, a music critic for “The New Yorker,” described it “instantly recognizable. You hear one or two notes from it and you know it’s Björk.” The individuality of her voice, along with her sense of eclectic experimentation, has allowed Björk to become a singer that transcends many genres and segments of listeners, much in the way Haraway’s vision of the cyborg would transcend limitations that humans had placed on themselves. In fact, according to NPR’s Guy Raz, Björk’s voice itself has utopian qualities: “There’s something celestial about that voice, as if it comes from a fantastic and colorful utopian world.” That sense of the utopian is significant in Björk’s work, and is part of how she shares similarities with Haraway’s cyborg image.

Haraway saw the cyborg as a being that could erase dualities, and much of Björk’s music is about that same idea. Peter Webb and John Lynch claim that “she sees herself as a generator of a type of energy that flows in circuits and which crosses time and space, whether pagan or electro, preindustrial or postindustrial.” It’s particularly present on her 1995 album Post, which was named by “Rolling Stone” as one of the 500 greatest albums ever, in part thanks to its ”utter lack of musical inhibition.” It’s perhaps the peak of Björk’s genre-hopping powers, as songs range from the grinding industrial opener “Army of Me” and the big band style “It’s Oh So Quiet” to the epic, jungle-beats driven “Isobel” and string-laden pop songs like “Hyperballad.” Post established Björk as an artist whose music was a unique distillation of genres. Haraway’s cyborg theory was based around shattering dualities, and Post can be seen as the musical equivalent of that: It blurs the line between experimental and pop, avant-garde music and dance music. And the natural emotion that comes from Björk’s voice, along with the sounds which are made by electronics and machines, makes it the closest thing musically to Haraway’s utopian vision of humanity and nature being intertwined.

Björk’s next album, 1997’s Homogenic, would further that relationship between humanity, nature, and technology that Haraway speculated about. After the eclectic sound of Post, Homogenic focused primarily on one style of sound, which was based around darker beats and strings. The album’s sound is cold and machine-like, at times sounding like an imagined soundtrack for cyborgs. She also sought to make an album that was an ode of sorts to her native country of Iceland. In the September 1997 issue of “Oor,” she talked about her thought process for the album:

Well, in Iceland, everything revolves around nature, 24 hours a day. Earthquakes, snowstorms, rain, ice, volcanic eruptions, geysers… Very elementary and uncontrollable. But at the other hand, Iceland is incredibly modern; everything is hi-tech. The number of people owning a computer is as high as nowhere else in the world. That contradiction is also on Homogenic. The electronic beats are the rhythm, the heartbeat. The violins create the old-fashioned atmosphere, the colouring. Homogenic is Iceland, my native country, my home.

Based on her own comments and the interpretations of others, Homogenic can be interpreted as a love letter to her homeland. It clearly represents one of the main dualisms that Haraway theorized about in “The Cyborg Manifesto,” which is the relationship between technology and nature. It’s best exemplified on one of the album’s standout tracks, “Jóga,” which Björk envisioned as being a national anthem type of song for her country. It uses violins and other strings to create a majestic, stately sound, while she sings lyrics like “emotional landscapes/they puzzle me.” The phrase “emotional landscapes” evokes feelings of both humanity and nature, but the song itself is futuristic, with an unprecedented mix of classical strings and modern electronic music. Along with the music video, which showcased the terrain of Iceland, “Jóga,” uses technology to create a musical landscape about nature and humanity, much in the way Haraway hoped her cyborg would.

Homogenic also included the most obvious example of Björk’s ideas of post-humanism in her music video for “All is Full of Love,” one of the singles off the album. The video shows two robots or cyborgs being built, with Björk’s face digitally shown on them. The cyborgs are completely androgynous, without hair or other traits associated with masculinity or femininity. The two begin singing at each other with Björk’s lyrics: “All is full of love/all around you.” Much like Haraway, Björk does not see human emotions and technology being independent of each other. In the video, she envisions a world where there are post-gender cyborgs, but they are still able to feel love and other human emotions, mirroring the utopian image that Haraway had dreamed of. More than any other song or video in Björk’s catalogue, it shows her breaking down the dichotomy between emerging technology and humanity that is also inherently present in her music.

Last year, Björk took possibly her biggest step yet in breaking down the nature/technology dichotomy with her Biophilia project. Designed as a series of interactive iPad apps to go with the album, it was an explicit attempt to connect science, nature, technology, and music into one package. In an audio message that appears on her website, bjork.com, she outlined her ambitious thought process behind the project:

With Biophilia comes a restless curiosity, an urge to investigate and discover the elusive places where we meet nature: Where she plays on our senses with colors and forms, perfumes and smells, the taste and touch of salty wind on the tongue. But much of nature is hidden from us, that we can neither see nor touch; such as the one phenomena that can be said to move us more than any other in our daily lives: sound. Sound harnessed by human beings, delivered with generosity and emotion, is what we call music. And just as we use music to express parts of us that would otherwise be hidden, so too can we use technology to make visible much of nature’s invisible world. In Biophilia, you will experience how the three come together: music, nature, technology… We are on the brink of a revolution that will reunite humans with nature through new technological innovations.

While Björk had always shown interest in the intermingling of technology and nature, Biophilia was an ambitious attempt to literally combine the two. For the album, she created instruments that made sounds based on gravity. Each song came with an iPad app that would feature some type of combination of nature and music in and interactive form, such as the app for “Virus” that allows you to watch the life cycle of a virus and then use it to create your own music. Each song tied human themes like love into ideas of nature (“Virus” compares being in love to the relationship between a virus and its host). Björk even took things one step further, setting up classroom workshops that sought to teach young people about music and science using her apps.

Biophilia can be seen as a culmination of Björk’s career-long efforts to destroy the perceived dichotomies that exist between humans, technology, and nature. When Haraway wrote “there is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic,” it’s not hard to imagine that she had a project like Biophilia in mind. In many ways, it’s a revolutionary album. The iPad app packaging was an unprecedented attempt to turn the old album format into something interactive, and it also attempted to be something more than just music as the project grew into a massive multimedia endeavor. For an artist whose trademark has been breaking down boundaries in music, Biophilia was perhaps her most ambitious attempt at it yet – and the closest that she’s come to approximating Haraway’s cyborg vision.

As Björk said, we really are on the brink of a technical revolution. As technology continues to increase and environmental concerns continue to be raised, at some point the two will need to be combined instead of being considered opposites. At its core, that’s the most important aspect of Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” and Björk’s music: The concept of erasing dualities and arbitrary lines. Each, in their own way, sees ways to unite these ideas in the modern world, to embrace technology without losing our humanity. On some level, Björk’s popularity despite being such an unorthodox artist is likely a credit to the ideals she portrays in her music. Haraway’s ideas of uniting people and concepts is something that seems to appeal to many as our society seemingly becomes increasingly fractured. Björk’s work shows the power of erasing these dualities, and the way music and art can be used to do it.

Revisiting “In The Aeroplane Over the Sea”

One of my very early posts on this blog was about Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over the Sea, which, at the time, I ranked as one of my favorite albums of the 90s. Revisiting this embarrassing post, something that really sticks out to me is how uncomfortable I seemed with liking the album. I started with a blatant admission that it’s not really my kind of music, then shifted into over-the-top, breathless praise, as if I was trying to convince myself as I wrote that I really liked the album as much as I was letting on. (“Maybe if I throw in a few more adjectives, I’ll convince them.”)

I did like the album, at first, but I think I did because it was an album I was highly incentivized to like. Over the years, Aeroplane has reached a status as one of those canonized albums that people use to define what indie music is. If you like Aeroplane, you’re one of the people who “gets it,” who appreciates music on a deeper level than most of the people around you. And one aspect of my personality is that I always need to be one of the people who “gets it” — once I choose something as a hobby, I like to build an obsessive knowledge about it. So when I started listening to music and wanted to build my collection, I started looking at a lot of critics’ “best of” lists, which Aeroplane was frequently near the top of. I knew critics loved it, and most indie music fans I knew loved it, so I gradually started to convince myself of its worth.

As it turns out, Aeroplane is an album that benefits a ton from this type of discovery process. If I had just listened to Aeroplane cold with no prior knowledge of it, it’s very possible that I would have dismissed it instantly, because Jeff Mangum’s voice is whiny, there are too many instruments, and the lyrics don’t make sense. But approaching it with the knowledge that people consider it to be a landmark, genius album changes everything. Suddenly, Mangum’s voice isn’t whiny, but is “idiosyncratic,” the excess of instruments is “bold” and “daring,” and the nonsense lyrics are “cryptic” and “haunting.” If you are actively looking for the genius in something, chances are you can eventually do enough mental gymnastics to find it.

I’m not sure when I stopped liking Aeroplane, and it’s still hard to articulate why (though I’m going to try). I think the core reason is that, to me, Aeroplane has always been one of those albums that is really about a story. Fans of the album know it quite well: Jeff Mangum was moved by the diary of Anne Frank, which inspired the music and lyrics on the album, and after its release had a nervous breakdown and mostly stopped recording music. This story plays a big part in why I bought into the sincerity of the album, which is a huge part of its appeal. These sorts of narratives that emerge can be dangerous, because they can cause a reaction to elements that aren’t actually present in the music itself.

In Aeroplane, one of those elements is Anne Frank’s story. It’s a very loaded story, especially for anyone who is Jewish like I am: it’s a tragedy that not only evokes memories of the Holocaust, but also memories of first learning about the Holocaust — for many young Jews, reading her diary in elementary school is when we first really start to grasp what happened and realize that, had we been alive at that time, it easily could have been us. And we hear it all through the writing of someone our age who lived it, which is a very powerful thing when you’re a kid. Given those memories, it’s easy to see why any sort of media relating to Anne Frank and the Holocaust can seem inherently moving — even if it’s not particularly good.

When I liked Aeroplane, my favorite song on it was “Holland, 1945,” which is also the most widely acclaimed song on the album. Not coincidentally, it’s also the song most directly about Anne Frank. On the surface, it’s just a reasonable up-tempo indie rock song, yet for me it always had this emotional weight to it, which I attributed to Mangum’s conviction and honesty. I think I was wrong: what makes “Holland, 1945” feel special isn’t Mangum — it’s the story that he’s referencing. Without the narrative thrust provided by Frank’s story, “Holland, 1945” is just another indie folk song.

Granted, part of art is often illuminating us about historical events, and making us think about them in a different context. I just don’t think Aeroplane really accomplishes that, because the album isn’t actually about Anne Frank: it’s about Jeff Mangum feeling really sad after reading Anne Frank’s diary. This is where the use of Frank’s story starts to get kind of gross for me: Mangum takes the feelings people have about Anne Frank and the Holocaust and tries to transfer them to himself, so instead of feeling sympathy for Frank, you feel sympathy for him because he’s sad about her diary. Given that the whole appeal of the album for me was that it was “honest,” recognizing this self-absorbed and manipulative presentation ultimately killed any enjoyment I could get out of it. I felt like I was tricked, which is not a good feeling to have when listening to music.

And because of how it uses Anne Frank’s story, Aeroplane has been credited with an emotional weight and “importance” that I don’t think the music itself actually earns. When I listen to it now, I’m never particularly impressed by the arrangements, Mangum’s singing, or even the lyrics. Almost everything I liked about the album existed outside of the music — it was always about the story, its place in the “Mangum as genius” narrative, or the feeling that I needed to like this album to “get it.” It’s an album I liked because I wanted to like it, and I didn’t know or think enough about music to recognize its flaws.

None of this is meant to imply that all fans of Neutral Milk Hotel are mindless sheep. But I think it’s undeniable that, more than any other album, Aeroplane has benefited hugely from narratives becoming attached to it, and the pressure to conform to indie culture by liking it. And has years have gone on, amid reunion tours and anniversary pieces, it has been spoken about in increasingly hyperbolic, uncritical tones by pretty much everyone (including me a few years ago) — which only adds to the feeling that the album is somehow beyond reproach, and it’s something you MUST like. Which is frustrating, because one of the most powerful parts of music to me is that we get to choose what music matters to us. At some point, Aeroplane mattered to me, but it doesn’t anymore and I see no reason to pretend otherwise.

Embrace the Hate

The internet is often assumed to be a venue for cheap snark and hating, a place where people go to vent about the crappy day they just had or the stupid TV show they’re watching. In my experience, it is the opposite: the default stance of the internet is a brand of dopey enthusiasm purveyed by websites like Buzzfeed. Everything is “amazing” or “the best thing you’ll see today,” negativity is perceived as “cheap” and “easy,” and any legitimate criticism of popular things you like can be shaken off, Taylor Swift style, with a “haters gonna hate” mantra.

I don’t have a problem with positivity, even though a lot of my online posting may indicate otherwise. I just think the current climate has skewed too hard towards being positive and “nice” instead of portraying realistic human emotions, which include disliking and being annoyed by things. In addition to Buzzfeed, popular music review sites like Pitchfork, who used to be infamous for their scathing criticism of bands, barely even publish truly negative reviews anymore, unless they’re running down the tattered remains of the Pixies. While this positivity seems wonderful on the surface, it ultimately cheapens our collective relationship with art.

In poker, there is a concept called “balancing your range.” The idea is that, in order to win, you have to play unpredictably. If you only bet big when you have a good hand, your opponents will catch on and stop calling your bets. Likewise, if you bluff every hand, they’ll start calling all your bluffs. But if you mix up your play enough, your bluffs will be respected and your good hands will get paid off.

I sometimes apply this idea to the way people talk about music. If someone thinks everything is good and is all positive all the time, their opinions start to mean less to me, because “good” is a relative concept that can’t exist without “bad” — if everything is good, then really nothing is. This shows the intrinsic value of hate: the music you hate provides a context that strengthens your relationship with the music you love.

One band I really started to hate in the last couple years is Arcade Fire. And since they’re a very popular band that most people I know like a lot, I thought about what made me hate them so much. The main reason I settled on was how pretentious the band is: every album cycle with them now is treated like an event, and they present themselves as an Important Band with Important Ideas. Then I listen to a song like “Reflektor” and it’s just a bunch of nonsense about how we’re “staring at a screen” and how technology is super scary. They consistently have the lamest possible take on any given subject, yet present it as if they just discovered gravity. If you look up “pseudo-intellectual garbage” in the dictionary, there should be a picture of all 19 members of Arcade Fire there.

In hating Arcade Fire like that, I learned something about myself: I don’t like music that is pretentious, and I don’t like it when artists tell me how to think. This knowledge could then be applied to a band I like, such as Broadcast, who I’m constantly gushing about. Broadcast were a band that very quietly released a lot of great music, almost never drawing attention to themselves. And their music embraced a subtlety and ambiguity that has made my appreciation for it only grow over several years of being a fan. They were an extremely intelligent band, but I never felt like they were trying to convince me of their intelligence in any way — it was just naturally present in their music.

These were traits in Broadcast’s music that I always loved, but never had really thought about or articulated before I hated Arcade Fire. In a weird way, my negative feelings towards Arcade Fire eventually manifested themselves as positive feelings for Broadcast and other bands I enjoy, sort of like a musical circle of life. I think this is how hating music should be viewed: as a natural part of our music-fan ecosystem, a normal and human reaction that should be accepted and even encouraged instead of being labeled as “negative” or being used as a reason to shun someone.

Unfortunately, any sort of criticism now is perceived as unsavory, and is often ascribed personal motives: “you just hate this because it’s popular,” “you’re bitter,” or whatever. There is also a strong “defend your turf” phenomenon, where everyone is super-defensive about the pop culture they consume and will attack anyone who slights it. All of this misses the bigger picture, which is that disagreement is good: it makes art interesting and helps define our taste compared to others. If everyone liked the exact same music, liking it would cease to mean anything in the first place.

This “negative = bad, positive = good” mindset can be surprisingly toxic, because it results in a climate where everyone just takes what is given to them, and people don’t think critically about the art they’re consuming or where it comes from. That not only leads to art getting dumber, but it also turns appreciation of it into a dull “this is alright” feeling characterized by a 7.5 on Pitchfork. People who truly love music should also hate a good chunk of it, and they shouldn’t be afraid to say so.