Bjrk's Homogenic
By (Author) Emily Mackay
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Bloomsbury Academic USA
5th October 2017
United States
General
Non Fiction
Composers and songwriters
Music: styles and genres
Music reviews and criticism
782.42164092
Paperback
160
Width 121mm, Height 165mm
154g
In recent years, Bjrks artistry has become ever more ambitious and ever more respected. With the release of her conceptual app-album Biophilia in 2011, and a huge retrospective exhibition at New Yorks Museum of Modern Art coinciding with her most recent album, Vulnicura, in 2015, her status as artpop auteur has been secured. The album that made all this possible, though is 1997s Homogenic, a turning point in Bjrks career and still among her finest musical achievements. Produced under great strain, it moves beyond the stylistic magpie rush of Debut and the urbanophile future-pop of Post, to something darker, stronger and braver, full of dramatic assertions of independence, sharp, stuttering beats, rich strings and raw outbursts of noise. It created, as the Alexander McQueen designed sleeve clearly asserted, a new Bjrk, one who would never stop hunting.
Positively bursting at the seams with information and fresh insight, Emily Mackays Homogenic is perhaps the pick of the bunch [of all 33 1/3s in 2017], a continually entertaining reading of one of Bjrks most vital, enduring albums ... As Bjrk primers go, this is certainly one of the best. * CLASH *
A scholarly but thoroughly readable analysis ... Strongest of all are the in-depth dissections of Homogenic's heady blend of patriotism and cosmopolitanism, the traditional and tech savvy, nature and technology. * Record Collector *
Emily Mackay is a freelance writer and editor based in Southend-on-Sea, UK. In her career, she has been to a party at Princes house, ordered out of a car at gunpoint by the LAPD and helped Thurston Moore steal a sofa. Her favourite though, was being driven around Reykjavk by Bjrk in her Landrover.