Bjork: "Human Behaviour"

"A teenage Björk, in defiance of her stuffy music schooling, had studied not only Cage but also the radical turn-of-the-century composer Arnold Schoenberg, whose early operas developed a voice that flickered, glissando-style, between boisterous singing and speech. Schoenberg called the technique sprechstimme, but when you hear it performed now-even if not in Björk's own, meagerly bootlegged rendition of his Pierrot Lunaire-the style has arrived in the timeless preserve of the Björkian."

"a keening cry pitched between lament and yodel, like a glitch in a Celtic funeral song. (This melody provokes a unifying response in the many YouTube videos of "Human Behaviour" analysis: a pure, giddy squeal of musicological delight.) She erupts into heavenly registers and falls back into stutters and pyroclastic welps; she switches from operatic highs to humdrum lows, as if to parody the mixed-up nature of human affairs."

Björk's early solo work foregrounds startling vocal gestures that oscillate between lament and yodel, mixing operatic highs with stuttering lows and rustic inflections. The voice navigates conservatoire virtuosity and 'yokel' moxie, collapsing distinctions between elevated and vernacular styles and challenging musical gatekeeping. MTV-era visibility framed the vocal persona as eccentric even as the music combined earworm pop with avant-garde methods. Formal study of figures like Cage and Schoenberg shaped a sprechstimme-like approach that flickers between singing and speech. The lyric of "Human Behaviour" acts as a cri de coeur, asserting emotional truth over emotional security.

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