Björk, “Human Behaviour” & “Big Time Sensuality” (1993)
- MichaelTurnerXY
- Dec 6, 2019
- 3 min read
Updated: Jan 5, 2021
When these two lead singles off her appropriately titled Debut solo album first came out, I wasn’t familiar with her earlier work in the Sugarcubes. I also had no premonitions of the massive, just absolutely massively transfixing place Björk would eventually occupy with entrenched regularity in my curious ears and ravaged heart:
Each of her subsequent albums (I could go on for days about all of them),
Her collaborations with everyone from Tricky to PJ Harvey to Madonna,
Her acting (alongside Catherine Deneuve, for which she won Best Actress at The Cannes Film Festival, then swore the experience was so miserable that she’d never act again) and Oscar-nominated soundtrack work (with Thom York among others) on Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark. If you saw Dancer In The Dark and didn't violently sob all the way through the end, are you even alive?
Her decade-plus partnership, collaborations and painful split from artist Matthew Barney (The Cremaster Cycle),
My tremendous good fortune at being able to experience the Björk retrospective at the MOMA in 2015, including the "Black Lake" sound and video installation. Despite the art world being reportedly underwhelmed, I’m a fan, not a professional art critic or museum curator, and I loved it. She’s a poetic, musical and multimedia savant and I relished the opportunity to immerse myself in a journey in physical space through the creative output of one of the world’s most peerless and visionary pop artists,
Not to mention the legend everyone my age remembers hearing, about the time she allegedly beat the holy living shit out of some woman in an airport for looking at her kid funny.
But what I did know was that "Human Behaviour" didn’t sound like anything I had ever heard before. First of all, I was fascinated with that jarringly unusual voice that could never have come out of anyone else. Its singularly novel authenticity established credibility with me as a listener immediately. And after processing the opening lyric, "If you ever get close to a human, and human behavior, you better be ready to get confused," it soon became clear that when it came to intimate emotional complexity, Bjork was not fucking around. I vividly remember watching the Michel Gondry -directed video with my brother and both of us laughing because, yes, the whole stop-motion psychedelia lacing that teddy-bear-and-cozy-night-terrors mise en scène was, well, objectively hilarious. But we weren’t laughing at it: this humor was self-aware, strange and disarming, campy and somewhat horrific, breaking through the mundane sensations of everyday perception to invite us on a penetrating journey into the deeply risky, passionate and tempestuous wellsprings of our secret inner lives. Given the astronomical degree to which my own secret inner life was growing increasingly more complex at that age, her act resonated with me on an almost instinctive level. To the uninitiated at first glance, Björk may seem an unlikely choice for being a gay icon, but she is, and this is a major reason why. After "Human Behaviour," the release of her next single to chart in the U.S., "Big Time Sensuality" juxtaposed its predecessor’s dark ebbs of nocturnal reflection with the flip side to the artist's emotional milieu: a joyful, exuberant, almost hypomanic anthem to the endorphin rush, the sense of hope, wonder and possibility that comes with romantic discovery: both the emotional and physical euphorias of new love.
Björk's later albums would continue to be massively impactful to me as we both soldiered on through the years, weathering trials and traumas that would later make Debut feel charmingly naïve by contrast. But I'm nonetheless encouraged and grateful – through it all – to still be able to connect to an early, inner version of myself that intuitively understands the line:
“It takes courage to enjoy it – the hardcore and the gentle, big time sensuality.”
* I didn’t include the official “Big Time Sensuality” video here because it was released with a heavily remixed version of the original track, and musically, it’s the album version that I love and remember. Visually, I love the video and remember it well, but I don’t have the same love for the accompanying track nearly as much as the original.
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