![]() ‘Hello! I am a Viking! My name is Björk!’ A friend of mine says that when record-company executives come to Iceland they ask the bands if they believe in elves, and whoever says yes gets signed up.”ījörk is probably the most famous Icelander since Leif Eriksson, who discovered America a thousand years ago. “Of course,” she added, looking at me carefully, “you have to watch for the Nordic cliché. You could say it is ‘Alice in Wonderland’ for the Arctic grownup.” I nodded, and glanced significantly at a snowcapped mountain ridge in the distance. It ridicules bureaucracy, it has black magic and Arctic magic realism. “It has a very Nordic feeling to it, even though it is Russian. “The book is very popular with Icelanders,” she said. She read Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel, on which the play was based, when she was a teen-ager, and it remains one of her favorite books. She held in her hands a program for the play “The Master and Margarita,” which she had seen the night before. We took a taxi into the suburbs, where Björk was working on a new album. The day before, an ice storm had rendered the city impassable, but some shift in the Gulf Stream had warmed the air overnight. It was a pale, mild morning in early January. She walked through the door of the Borg wearing a ladybug cap and white shoes with red pompoms on the toes. Now she is thirty-eight, but she still looks as though she could fall in with a group of fashionable delinquents. Parents shuddered when the singer bared her midriff on television while visibly pregnant. She sang in a band called Kukl, which means “black magic,” and she outraged older Icelanders with her antics. One of the gang was Björk Gudmundsdóttir, the daughter of an electrician and a feminist activist. In the early nineteen-eighties, it became the gathering spot for a group of aggressively bohemian teen-agers, who theorized punk-rock anarchy at the hotel bar. Eventually, the wrestler died and the hotel fell on hard times. The Borg opened in 1930, the dream project of a famous wrestler who liked to host swank parties for American military officers and the odd movie star. I first met Björk in the lobby of the Hotel Borg, a funky Art Deco place in the center of the Icelandic capital of Reykjavík. A little Justin, a little Karlheinz.” Photograph by Richard Avedon / © The Richard Avedon Foundation To find a sound she wanted, Björk played Justin Timberlake, then Stockhausen: “It’s very simple.
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