Bachelorette

What is Björk singing about and who is she singing it to?

I didn’t get Homogenic out of my system with the last podcast episode/newsletter. While “Jóga” is my favorite song on the album, the one that made the most immediate impression on me was “Bachelorette.”

I included the audio-only version above because Michel Gondry's video overlays a complicated meta-narrative that makes it hard to focus on the song.

The publisher is played by Toby Huss, who has appeared in three of the best TV shows of all time: Seinfeld, King of the Hill, and Halt and Catch Fire.

Here’s a live version of “Bachelorette” from the Tonight Show in 1998.

Here’s a version from the 2009 Voltaic tour, with brass instead of strings.

Björk commissioned several remixes of the song. My favorite is the one by RZA.

I said that “Bachelorette” made an immediate impression on me, but it wasn’t a positive one. I was intrigued, but I thought the song was melodramatic and awkward. I still do! I have just come to understand that the melodrama is self-conscious, and that the awkwardness is what makes the song interesting. Almost every Björk song has annoyed me on first exposure. This is because they are full of genuinely new ideas, or at least, ideas that are new to me, and those are always difficult to assimilate. Sometimes Björk scaffolds her new ideas with familiar forms and tropes. “Bachelorette” is formally predictable and repetitive, but within that familiar framework, there isn’t much to grab hold of except for the song itself, and that took some work on my part.