Listening to the body: ​Pagan Poetry​ and ​B​jörk’s self-care eroticism

Abstract

Björk has been described as “impish”, “childlike”, “alien”, “nymphish” and “androgynous”,
but rarely ‘erotic’.1 Responding to Deborah Wong’s call for listening to “erotics” in music, and Holly
Watkins and Melina Esse’s locating of musicology’s material turn, I will explore ​Björk’s ​Pagan
Poetry as offering an intimate ‘safe-space’, empowering herself and the listener/audience through
its material eroticism. Released in 2001, the music video of ​Pagan Poetry was originally censored
in the US, because it contained significant nudity and footage of sexual intercourse. Björk’s erotics
are not superficial, but rather facilitate bodily attentiveness through her use of ‘natural’ sounds and
focus on the ‘secrecy’ of the downloaded medium. Contextualising her music with the ‘new
material feminism’ of Donna Haraway (1984), Karan Barad and Elizabeth Grosz, I will show that
Björk offers an alternative to the constructivist perspective of poststructuralists Judith Butler
(1990) and Foucault (1974). I will argue that ​Pagan Poetry displays an erotic essentialism which,
while potentially problematic, provides a ‘self-care’ embodied experience, which can, as William
Cheng notes (2016), act as a progressive political tool.

When listening to music, how can we not to pay attention to the body? That our
listening experience is embodied is surely evident to all but the most idealistic
musicologist. The ‘material turn’ which Helen Watkins and Melina Esse analyse (2015)
inspires my discussion of ​Björk’s ​Pagan Poetry​, (​Vespertine​, 2011). Musicologists have
tended to “sideline human bodies”, due in part to the“mind/body” problem, diagnosed by
Suzanne Cusick (1994): the assumed abstraction of the mind, and its control over the
body. Theorists such as Judith Butler (1990) posit social-constructionist perspectives on
the body, while ‘new material feminists’ such as Elizabeth Grosz (1994, 2011) have
highlight the need for bodily agency and the focus on ​felt embodied experiences. Bodily
attentiveness is a burgeoning topic among contemporary musicologists, from William
Cheng (2016) to Deborah Wong (2015), and from these, I draw my central focus on ​Pagan
Poetry​: Wong calls for us to listen to the ‘erotics’ in music, which, being linked to
embodied experience, have historically been sidelined by (ethno)musicology. I define

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/Björk-premieres-multimedia-biophilia-at-spectacular-iceland-
1

concert-20111013​; ​https://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/jul/08/popandrock2​;
http://read.tidal.com/article/Björk-utopia​; http://www.Björk.fr/Nylon
erotics not only as sexual arousal, but also intimacy, which, contextualised within Cheng’s
concept of ‘care’, becomes the political act of ​self​-care.
Why Björk? Many of her fans have “intimate, embodied experiences due to the
song topics and crafting of sounds” (Goldin-Perschbacher 2014). I am one such fan. If you
are interested in listening to erotics and understanding embodied experience in music, it
makes sense to start with the songs which give you that feeling. Björk’s ​Pagan Poetry
provides me with this intimate, erotic listening experience. Always politically minded, I
am driven to understand potential progressive uses of Björk’s erotics, related to William
Cheng’s notion of care. But how can I analyse Björk’s erotic music video as a cisgendered,
white man, given the problematic ‘male gaze’? Coined by Laura Mulvey in 1975, she
conceives of the ‘woman as object’. In ​Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema​, Mulvey
diagnosed the problem of cinema (and media more generally) as satisfying the pleasure
gained through looking at the human form. In this case, man is the “bearer of the look”,
and woman “the image” (Mulvey, 1975: 808). In film, she says, women are “simultaneously
looked at and displayed” (809).
Is Björk the object of my male gaze? Regardless, I must work to attribute her
agency, a key point of debate regarding her artistry: Björk has often expressed her dismay
at losing credit for her music and music videos.2 Part of the inevitable experience of
female musicians is being seen as passive: their agency in direction, composition and
producing erased. Björk has consistently been denied credit for writing and producing her
music, and for being involved with the direction and production of her music videos. The
fact that most of the credited directors on her music videos are men serves to obscure her
important role. Indeed, much of the footage in ​Pagan Poetry is ‘homemade’; some of the
most intimate and erotic moments in the music video are created and curated by Björk,
meaning perhaps the objectifying male gaze is stripped of its power through female
agency. It is by envisioning erotics as a way of understanding empowering self-care and
bodily attentiveness, however, that I hope to move beyond an objectifying perspective.
To understand embodiment in Björk’s music, it is important to define
poststructural accounts of the individual and the body, to which the Icelander offers an
alternative philosophy. ​Judith Butler draws on Foucault’s theories of sexuality to posit a
constructivist understanding of the body, and gender. In ​Gender Trouble (1990), she
analyses the Foucauldian power-knowledge systems which “construct” the “subject”.
Heterosexual hegemony, Butler argues, maintains artificial binaries of gender through

2
​See interviews with ​Pichfork, Slate, The Guardian​:
https://pitchfork.com/features/interview/9582-the-invisible-woman-a-conversation-with-Björk/​;
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015/01/21/Björk_pitchfork_interview_she_s_tired_of_not_getti
ng_credit_for_her_music.html​;
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/nov/12/Björk-utopia-interview-people-miss-the-jokes​;
dominant discourse, and reifies both gender and the body itself. In a Foucauldian sense,
while hegemonic discourse asserts that biological presuppositions “cause” sex and gender
activity, Butler argues that gender is in fact always “a doing”. Butler links this observation
to Nietzsche’s claim in ​On the Genealogy of Morality that “there is no ​being behind
doing...the ​deed is everything” (2008). In this sense, Butler claims, it there is no ​substance
behind the claim to ‘feel like a woman’ as the woman is constituted by societal discourse
and does not preexist. Arguably, Butler’s theory suffers from the same dearth of bodily
agency as Foucault’s constructivist accounts of the individual (1978).
The recent material turn in musicology seems to present an objection to Butler’s
poststructuralism. New material feminists such as Karen Barad (1999) and Elizabeth
Grosz (1994, 2011), influenced by Donna Haraway (1985), argue that poststructuralism
sidelines bodies by theorizing bodies as socially constructed. This leads to the
disempowering of, in particular, women’s bodies. New Materialists foreground
attentiveness to one’s body, queering the abstraction between the mind and the body. New
Materialists argue that strategic essentialism can be necessary to forward the material
needs of oppressed groups, and focusing on bodies can do this. Goldin-Perschbacher
argues that ​Björk engages in strategic essentialism to explore the experience of
womanhood and motherhood, claiming that ​“m
​ odern anxiety around essentialism can
limit exploration of the multiplicity of lived, embodied politics” (2014: 74).
‘Embodiment’ is a key concept figuring in Björk’s music and in contemporary
musicology more generally. The term refers to somatic (bodily) experience, as something
real and felt. Watkins and Esse argue that “indifference to studying sensations is the result
of lingering constructivism, hostile to essentialism, denying theories of embodiment”
(2015: 3). “Refusing to engage with somatic experience renders sensory and cognitive [...]
nonhuman organisms trivial and also sanctions lopsided accounts of human
embodiment”, the authors continue; this suggests that the bodily attentivity prioritised
through materialism can be queer both anthropocentrism and constructivism - a key
transgression of Björk’s music, as Marek Susdorf argues (2017).
In contemporary musicology, theories of embodiment have lead to a flourishing of
music and disability studies, and an increasing interest in ‘care’ and its relationship to
embodied experience, as in the work of Cheng (2016). The materialist turn recognises that
(particularly in musical activity) the body is not fully controlled by thought, prioritising a
political self-awareness (Watkins and Esse, 2016). The denial of embodied experience and
ingrained nature of individualism in neoliberal societies (Foucault 2001) means that
materialist theories tend towards the political; Cheng argues that a focus on care is queer
(2016). In this sense, Goldin-Perschbacher argues, Björk aligns herself with a queer
embodied materialist philosophy, antagonistic to Butler’s poststructuralism.
 A visceral aspect of embodied experience is the erotic, as Wong notes (2016). “I
want to make erotics audible”, she states (184). What can this mean? Perhaps “listening” to
where eroticism exists - and where it appears not to - as she highlights in discussing the
importance of listening to ​silence​, with relation to erotics. Intersectional analyses, Wong
argues, are often “short on sexuality”, and yet given that music is a “key sphere where
normativities are asserted and maintained” (181), musicology offers a unique position
from which to confront silences. In Björk’s music, erotics are deeper than surface level,
and key to embodied experience: a brief visual clip of the singer during an intense erotic
moment, on ​Pagan Poetry​, is not simply representative of sexual excitement, but also of
self-care and attentiveness.
Why the affinity between Björk and New Materialism? Her relationship with
feminism is complicated, related to the experiences of her mother and Icelandic
difference. As Kristmundsdottir (1995: 45) argues, Icelandic difference identity promotes
women as mothers, emphasizing a biological essentialism, which Goldin-Perschbacher
sees as related to the ‘nature-essentialism’ of Icelandic landscapes. Icelandic feminism
therefore problematizes feminist theory which prizes androgyny and performativity. In a
Guardian interview, Björk articulates her music in the 1990s as a reaction against 1970s
feminism, which “was making everything exhausted” - she disliked the rigidity and lack of
(bodily) playfulness.3 For this reason, Björk has always been closely linked to new
materialism (Susdorf 2017, Golding-Perschbacher 2016).
Yet little attention has been paid to the progressive possibilities of Björk’s
materialism in relation to eroticism. In what follows I will treat Björk’s ​Pagan Poetry ​as a
potential site for Wong’s “listening to erotics”, and for Cheng’s “care”. What I believe is
controversial in ​Pagan Poetry is not its sexual explicitness, but attention to the body,
brought about through Björk’s focus on erotics.

Pulsating, distorted footage of oral sex, wide-shots of a pearl and lace wedding
dress, piercing the skin of its naked wearer: Björk’s ​Pagan Poetry is unconventional.
Originally censored in the US, the video was later included in ​MTV2​’s “20 most
controversial music videos”. The ‘pagan’ in ​Pagan Poetry provides an immediate link to
ecology, embodiment and spiritualism, a theme which is echoed in the imagery of the
music video. Multiple shots of body piercings, ending in the final image of a ‘corset’
piercing, mixes bodily pain and pleasure, and perhaps symbolizes an aspect of (pagan)

3
‘People miss the jokes’ (The Observer, accessed 21/11/17):
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/nov/12/Björk-utopia-interview-people-miss-the-jokes
sacrifice which could be seen as an allusion to ‘giving’ one’s body away through eroticism
and sex; certainly, the final lyric “he makes me want to hand myself over” speaks to this.
CUT?((​‘P
​ agan Poetry​’ linguistically brings to mind embodied, ritualistic, earthly
eroticism, and the music consolidates this. Its lyrics foreground material essentialism, and
attentiveness to the body. Björk’s ‘naturalistic’ eroticism manifests itself in her writing,
problematizing anthropocentrism in a similar way to Donna Haraway’s ​Cyborg Manifesto
(1984). Haraway tries to sensitise us to our entwinement with objects and beings, or
‘critters’, both organic and inorganic. Haraway theorizes humans as “cyborgs” who are
“hybrids of machine and organism.” Björk’s relation to Haraway’s “cyborg” is analysed by
Eleanor Berry (2007) and Andrew Robbie (2007) among others. My interest, however, is
in Björk’s recognition of this material entanglement with the organic and inorganic,
which leads her to material eroticism. Problematizing the distinction between nature and
humans creates a sensual intimacy reflecting the song’s title. After the first verse, an
intimate voice sings, “swirling black lilies totally ripe”, a metaphor dense with biophilic,
erotic connotations. In verse three, Björk sings that “morse coding signals [...] pulsate” -
perhaps referring to some erotic act - wake her from “hibernating”. Here, Björk
intertwines ​bio and ​anthro​, simultaneously eroticizing the ’natural’, and decentering the
human, all the while promoting intimacy and eroticism. Björk also intertwines the human
with the technological, equating morse code to masturbation, and describing “a blueprint
of the pleasure in me”. The idea that pleasure might have a ‘blueprint’ speaks to Haraway’s
desire to sensitise us to our intermingling with organic and inorganic matter, and it also
infuses technology with eroticism. ​}}}CUT?
Sonically, ​Pagan Poetry ​is a microcosm of ​Vespertine as a concept album. In
Miniscule​, a documentary by Ragnheidur Gestsdottir, Björk claims she wished to create
“chamber music” from natural, and electronic sounds. The intimacy of the recording is
clear in the close-mic’ing of Björk’s voice; in ​Pagan Poetry​, frequent sounds of her
breathing are placed high in the overall mix, resulting in an erotic intimacy. In this way,
the final lyric, “I love him”, cannot be categorised as singing, speaking or breathing.
The primary musical concept behind the album hints at a ‘naturalistic’ intimacy:
Björk’s intention for ​Vespertine was to use “micro-beats” to “create a microcosm of thirty
or forty beats interacting”.4 Björk recorded noises from around her house in order to
create the foundation for these ‘micro-beats’, before inviting the creative input of
electronic music duo ​Matmos​. The duo added sounds like the noise of cards shuffling and
ice being crushed.5 These mundane and naturalistic sounds are intertwined with
electronic beats in ​Pagan Poetry. ​The significance of the intermingling of these natural

4
​Gestsdóttir, R. (Director). (2003). ​Minuscule​[Documentary]. One Little Indian
5
Ibid
and electronic sounds on ​Pagan Poetry is, first, that the use of ‘found’ noises, those
recorded by Björk herself, echoes the use of grainy, home footage showing her apparent
sexual pleasure in the music video, suggesting a material erotics. By drawing attention to
the ‘homemade’, natural qualities of both the video footage and musical beats, Björk
emphasises their materiality, while also imbuing them with an intense eroticism. In this
way, Björk projects a material essentialism which challenges both Butler’s constructivism,
and musicology’s prevailing idealism and anthropocentrism; focussing on the intimacy of
‘natural’ elements helps problematize abstract theories.
Second, Björk claims that she wished to provide the listener with a sense of
“secrecy” through the downloaded medium. The music-box and harp dominated sound of
Pagan Poetry is significant because Björk wished to use instruments which “sound good
after they’ve been downloaded”, and give the impression of “being in a little house, on your
own” (Pytlik 2003: 159).6 The idea of downloading ​Pagan Poetry and listening to it
privately is an intimate experience for Björk, which resonates with the concept of
self-care. Here we see how Björk’s music links the erotic with the nature of bodily
attentiveness: the “secrecy” of “being in a little house, on your own”, facilitated through her
music, implies eroticis which first connotes privacy, excitement, even masturbation. This
bodily essentialism suggests a resistance to Butler’s constructivism. Yet is also connotes
safety, comfort, and awareness of the body: key aspects of care. Musicology and sociology
has often considered headphones, and private listening as potentially damaging, physically
and socially (Blum-Ross 2015; Bull 2012). But what if private listening was conceived of as
a personal, aural ‘safe space’, which facilitates care? Who are we to deny the embodied
experiences of Björk’s listeners? Michael Bull theorizes the ‘privatization’ of audio spaces
as “audiotopias”, parallel to the potentially negative “toxicity” of personal listening.
Although Bull problematizes the notion of ‘toxicity’ in private listening, there are a
number of problems with his theorization. First, Bull’s conception of personal listening
experience is not wide enough, focussing on using iPod headphones in a ‘real’, urban
environment; this does not allow for listening through headphones in the privacy of one’s
own home, nor does it account for the agency of people with social anxieties. While he
notes the listener’s ability to “reclaim experience, time and place” through this practice, he
too readily accepts the “reality”, the ‘here and now’ of urban environments (2011).
Tellingly, he begins the article with a ‘quirk’ about how the iPod headphone listening of a
Muslim woman interrupted the ‘reality’ of court proceedings. Focussing on embodied
experience, it does not help to create a binary between private ‘audiotopias’, and ‘reality’;
Bull gives no reason for the primacy of ‘real’ environments over private listening spaces. It

6
Björk quoted in ‘Björk: Wow and Flutter’, Mark Pytlik (ECW PRess, 2003: 159).
is therefore best to conceive of the “little house” safe-space offered by Björk not as a
“buffer from reality”, but as an equal reality. Björk’s interest in the intimate sounds of the
downloaded medium promotes not exactly “the capacity to sonically privatize space”, as
Bull suggests, but rather the reclaiming of sonic space previously privatised by oppressive
forces from the patriarchy and phallogocentrism.
How is the empowering intimacy of Björk’s erotics felt through her music video?
Before analysing its content, I will consider whether watching ​Pagan Poetry on YouTube
creates the same private, intimate space as listening on a iPod. If we are to take YouTube
comments as indicative of the embodied experience their author, then the response to
Björk’s eroticism in ​Pagan Poetry is intense. ‘Joe W’ speaks to the intimate, embodied
experience of watching the video:

Similarly, ‘Adrian Rodriguez’ writes:

‘Oivalf Music’ notes that ​Pagan Poetry engages with the audience somatically,
implying that to watch or listen is not a passive experience, but rather one that is
embodied:

Given the mediation occuring between the author and the YouTube commentator,
and also between the audience and the video itself, it would be dangerous to read too
much into these responses; yet it would be counterproductive to discount them. If
anything, they suggest that the “secret”, intimate bodily experience sought by Björk
through her sonic sculpting of ​Pagan Poetry is apparent through the video as much as it is
through the audio. They also confirm Goldin-Perschbacher’s assertion that Björk’s fans
enjoy “intimate, embodied experiences”. Inevitably, however, YouTube commentators’
responses to Björk’s eroticism are not all so subtle:

The material essentialism of Björk’s video for ​Pagan Poetry is striking. It is

comprised of footage showing nipples, earlobes and other body parts being pieced, and
home-shot scenes of sex with Björk’s then-husband Matthew Barney. During the
climactic choruses, we see footage of Björk lipsyncing, wearing an Alexander McQueen
wedding dress made entirely from pearls strings, apparently piercing her back in a corset
pattern. The footage is frequently distorted through filters, and, through animation,
transforms into pulsating lines and swirls, at one point resembling the style of painter
Joan ​Miró​.
In the most literal sense, Björk draws attention to the body through traditionally
erotic areas such as the nipples, and by including footage of sexual intercourse. Many of
these shots are distorted in some way, but some are undistorted close-ups; one is an
intimate portrait of Björk’s face during a moment of apparent erotic stimulation. Mixing
images of sexual intercourse with piercings eroticizes both the act and the body, but it also
draw attention to the ​feeling of the body. Drawing on David Hesmondhalgh’s observation
that “music often feels intensely and emotionally linked to the private self” (2013: 1), I
argue that the combination of Björk’s music and video in ​Pagan Poetry creates a visceral,
embodied experience.
Björk constructs a synesthetic effect which highlights the embodied nature of her
experience. The synthesized music box and harp which begin ​Pagan Poetry is paired with
footage of a string of pearls, coming gradually into focus. The sharp, metallic music of the
music box and harp is heard accompanying footage of a nipple and earlobe being pierced;
each shot emerges in and out of focus, or becomes clear through distortion. I believe this
visual ‘sharpening’ is somehow audible: I can ​hear the piercing of the skin, and the timbre
of the music heightens the sharpness. This speaks to Yi-Fu Tuan’s theorization of the
“synesthetic tendency” (1993:168), a loose association similar to Nabokov's use of the
phrase “polished ebony”. This synesthetic tendency highlights the embodied materiality of
Pagan Poetry​: we may not ​feel the pain or pleasure of Björk’s piercing or sexual
stimulation, but ​feel something. Perhaps this intimate embodied experience is related to
Björk’s “little house” metaphor; if Björk intended to create a sense of intimacy and
“secrecy” by using synthesized instruments which would “download” effectively, then this
effect surely remains when I watch ​Pagan Poetry on ​YouTube​. The private aural space
emphasized by Björk in her music parallels the intimate visual symbolism of the video,
resulting in an erotic, embodied experience.
If Björk’s essentialism and eroticism leads to an empowerment of the private self, it
can also lead to problematic universalising. Although Goldin-Perschbacher argues that
“modern anxiety around essentialism can limit exploration of the multiplicity of lived,
embodied politics” (2014: 73), this universalism can excuse damaging imagery. Björk’s
biophilic essentialism leads her to espouse values of universal peace and love: when
working with Malian Kora player Toumani Diabete in ​Volta (2007), she referred to “one
tribe” humans, promoting the album as “tribal”, and “techno voodoo”.7 On the album cover
of ​Homogenic (1997), Björk appears in another McQueen dress, supposedly embodying a
futuristic pan-humanism, but instead creating deeply orientalizing imagery. Björk’s ​Pagan
Poetry is not exempt from the problematic effects of her essentialism: the song has been
described by David Fricke of ​Rolling Stone as featuring a “flotilla of music boxes with an
Asian-teahouse touch.”8 The danger of Björk exploring embodied experience is that, in
this case, it seems paradoxical to position her music outside the materiality of social power
dynamics. Björk cannot, ironically, ‘transcend’material issues like sexism and racism.
It seems to me that existing literature on Björk has yet to locate the politically
beneficial aspects of her music: embodied, erotic experience in music as a safe-space.
Previous work (Goldin-Perschbacher 2014, Iverson 2015, Susdorf 2017) has focussed on
the empowering materialism of the Icelander’s music, as a foil to abstract poststructuralist
theorists such as Butler and Foucault. To an extent, I have shown this to be a possible
interpretation of ​Pagan Poetry​, with Björk’s erotic materialism offering opposition to
those theories. But Björk’s eroticism gives us more than merely another way of
understanding gender or agency: it gives us the means to attend to our own bodies.
Self-care is an important concept to modern intersectional movements, such as
third-wave feminism. It is a political protest against idealism not only limited to the
academy, but the wider social sphere. The private “little house” built by Björk through her
language and music is a positive, self-affirmative concept, a place to explore the erotics of
one’s own body within an oppressive society.

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7
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/01/arts/01iht-pareles.1.5515016.html
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http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/vespertine-20010820
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‘Reaching ‘Utopia’ with Björk’ (Tidal)

http://read.tidal.com/article/Björk-utopia​. Accessed: 01/12/17

‘Björk in Paradise’ (Nylon, quoted at Björk.fr)

http://www.Björk.fr/Nylon​. Accessed: 01/12/17