Jazz Monroe at Pitchfork:
The story of “Human Behaviour” as we know it begins in 1993, when Björk swanned into London in a fluffy white mohair jacket. She was 27 and ready for adventure, so utterly international she could barely eat anything but curries, still high on her late-’80s supply of rave awakenings at all-nighters by DJs with names like Mixmaster Morris.
Björk saw through the idiot elements of British culture but decided to love it anyway, most of all its charismatic mavericks and prankster producers and the anything-goes musicians she took on tour under the banner of Immigrants United. Her creative soulmates were 808 State’s Graham Massey and Debut producer Nellee Hooper, whom she had found “too good taste, too expensive-sounding” for her industrial-techno soul, before he quelled her sophistiphobia by showing how rave and hip-hop beats might coexist with her voice in the plastic paradise of ’90s pop. “Human Behaviour” was Björk’s formal debut, the salvo of an album so buccaneering and multivalent it could have been called Polygenic. Originally written in her sardonic teens, the song and its lyrics fit the perspective of an outsider arriving in a big city: A child (or in some tellings, an animal) utters conspiratorial warnings to a confidante, marvelling at the oddballs of adultkind.
more here.
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