Let Us Revisit The Wild Time Björk Dismantled Her Television During An Interview
"This looks like a city; like a little model of a city. And all the houses, which are here, and streets...this is maybe...an elevator."
Some musicians are not at all like the songs that they write, and it’s often important to extract the art from the artist. Then there’s the case of Björk.
Björk could idly hum the phone book and it would be a Bjork song. Hell, Björk could come to your door asking for donations to fix the local church and it would be a Björk song. She doesn’t just make art — she embodies it. There’s no clear line between the work that she creates and the way that she holds herself in the world, or the way that she talks. She just is who she is, all the time, effortlessly and endlessly.
Which might be the only way to explain the wonderful chaos of a 1988 video interview in which the Icelandic singer-songwriter explains how a television works.
Back then, she was yet to go solo, and was best known as the lead singer of the band The Sugarcubes. The group would break up a mere four years after the interview, and Björk would ascend to global stardom on her own shortly afterwards. But at the time, she was a cult property — and what better way to get to understand a cult property than to have them pull apart a TV?
In the video, the musician wrenches open the plastic casing of the set and starts talking about what she can see inside. “This looks like a city; like a little model of a city,” she says in her trademark, sing-song voice, pointing at the wires and electricity. “And all the houses, which are here, and streets.”
But the real kicker comes at the end, when the musician describes once being told by an Icelandic poet that TVs are made up of “millions and millions of little screens.” Disturbed by that description, Björk started to get headaches, and feared that TV sets were hypnotising her.
“[But] then, later on, when I got my Danish book on television, I stopped being afraid because I read the truth, the scientifical truth and it was much better,” she says. “You shouldn’t let poets lie to you.”
Basically, the whole thing is an ecstatic work of art, and you should watch it, over and over, as a little treat.