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Musicheads Essential Artist: Björk

Bjork performs at the Roskilde Festival in 2003.
Bjork performs at the Roskilde Festival in 2003.CARL REDHEAD/AFP via Getty Images
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March 13, 2020

March is Women's History Month. To celebrate, each weekday this month we'll be spotlighting a different artist with special coverage on air and online. For Friday, March 13, we're shining a light on Björk.

Few artists represent their homeland to the rest of the world the way that Björk does. She put Iceland on the musical map, introducing us to the country's amazingly rich and unique musical heritage and expanding upon it by constant innovation. She encourages and promotes other Icelandic musicians and staunchly defends the nation's pristine natural beauty through a variety of political events and organizations.

She first burst upon the world's consciousness in the band the Sugarcubes, who had a massive worldwide hit with the single "Birthday" in 1987. She's remained a critics' darling while selling over 30 million albums and having 30 singles hit the charts across the globe. Songs like "Hyperballad," "Human Behaviour," "An Army of Me."

She's also won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in the year 2000 for her role in Dancer in the Dark. In 2015, a solo retrospective of her work was shown at New York City's MoMA. As a singer, songwriter, DJ, producer, actress, and visual chameleon, over the past 30 years Björk has constantly been experimenting with the boundaries of how we can and should relate to music.

For example, 2011's Biophilia album was made with several custom-built instruments and was the first to include interactive versions of its songs — each one with an iPad-compatible app. She toured the world for two years with a hyper-visual stage show which became a full-length feature film in 2014. Björk’s a singular artist for Icelanders to cherish and for the rest of the world to hugely admire.