Listening to Marry Me, the excellent debut album by St. Vincent, a thought suddenly struck me: it must be very tiring to be Björk.
This isn’t to say that St. Vincent, the recording name of American singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Annie Clark, sounds anything like Björk. In fact, she doesn’t at all. Not one bit. Yet, and this is the crucial point, almost everything I read about her somehow shoehorns in a mention of the elfin Icelander (you can Google their names together to see for yourself).
Why? Because St. Vincent has committed the twin crimes of making music that deviates from standard-issue mid-range pop, and being female. And, as anyone who has taken Music Math 101 will know, “weird” plus “woman” almost always equals “Björk.” (This is after extensive research revealed the previous answer of “Kate Bush” to be outdated, which is ironic as, in this case at least, the earlier comparison is probably closer to the mark.)
This formula holds true for just about every female singer/songwriter hanging around on the fun side of the fence right now. I have been enjoying a rich seam of music by women recently, from the mild, relatively mainstream kookiness of Feist, through the progressively more out-there recent recordings of Regina Spektor, all the way to the genuinely awesome French loopiness of Camille Dalmais. They all share two things: an admirable streak of fearless individualism and a tendency to be mentioned in the same sentence as a certain recording artiste from Reykjavik.
The “B” word has become a lazy shorthand for describing any female musician who dares to deviate from the norm, which is a shame. In reality, the only thing the singular musicians mentioned have in common — Björk included — is a creativity that conversely makes them sound different from anyone else and each other. Their music defies easy comparisons, which is probably why they all get lumped together.
