Pitchfork´s story on Björk is about the Icelandic pop icon, but also about resurrection
An analysis and a theory: the specialized music magazine published an article where they go through Björk’s work, but they also use a biblical format to tell that story.
Jesus Christ: Born. Grows up with a mission. Becomes popular. Preaches God’s message. Killed on the cross. He dies. Resurrects for three days.
Leaves a message of peace in the world.
Björk: Born. Grows up with a mission. With his first albums she becomes popular. Grows to be a referent of pop. She preaches it. Gets divorced and falls into a period of darkness, she dies. Resurrects and publishes her latest album.
Leaves a message of transformation in the world.
On September 20, 2022, the specialized American music magazine, Pitchfork, published an article about the Icelandic singer, Björk, that made it to the front page. It was titled: “Björk: Mother, Daughter, Force of Nature”.
Journalist Jazz Monroe chronicles his day in “Iceland with the experimental pop icon, digging deep into the triumphs and tragedies that birthed her remarkable new album, Fossora.”
The main piece is the long written article, which goes through Björk’s work and persona. Also, Twitter and Instagram updates on the publication of the article can be found.
The piece itself explores other types of narratives, beyond text, such as short video, photography, animation and gifs.
However, there is a second story. How the graphic part of the article was made appears only on Instagram.
All the people who appear accredited regarding the visual side shared the cover of Pitchfork on their profiles (in fact, that’s how I found out about the article) and narrated how they did their work. So did Jazz Monroe, who took care of the text.
The Pitchfork story is about Björk, obviously, but also about the work that went into telling that story. And this second part, this second narrative, appears in secondary spaces.
The fact that the story within the Pitchfork website itself has all these multimedia elements, and that there is also a parallel story that is narrated on Instagram (an almost transmedia approach), speaks of a product designed and created for the Pitchfork audience.
Passionate music fans?
Pitchfork has stated that they try to reach all music fans with their articles. In fact, on their own web it says: “With our loyal audience of more than 7 million monthly unique visitors, we are read daily by the most passionate music fans” (2022).
But in 2015, Conde Nast bought Pitchfork to add to its portfolio the ability to reach a very particular segment: “Millennial males”.
Conde Nast’s Chief Digital Officer, Fred Santarpia, said to the Times: The acquisition brings “a very passionate audience of Millennial males into our roster”.
Three years before that time, the Pitchfork site ran a poll of readers asking what their favorite music was and 88% of the people who responded were men, The Atlantic informed.
Even though ten years have passed from that moment, at that point Pitchfork was already incorporating stories focused on female, queer and LGBT+ issues to reach other types of audiences.
As inaccurate as they are, even today, there are several statistics sites that indicate that the majority of Pitchfork’s audience continues to be male and that, in addition, in more than 90% of cases they continue to use the phone to access their website.
This last piece of information may be a determining piece of analysis to understand why the majority of the pictures in the article are vertical and not horizontal (smartphones have vertical fitted screens).
However, a media can target (virtual audience, explained by Helen Fulton in the first chapter of Narrative and Media, 2005) and that may not necessarily be its audience (literal audience, also explained by Fulton).
What is clear is that the piece is aimed at music lovers and millennials, probably Pitchfork´s virtual audience.
In the article, it is assumed that a reader has, at least, heard about Björk. Part of the text takes time to remember and go through Björk´s career in music, and why she is so relevant to international pop. In addition, part of her childhood is narrated, her growing up.
However, the piece also brings new bits of information for those who already know her.
Some editorial decisions become clear, then.
The narrator writes from a hidden first person. Focalisation is in the journalist. That is to say, he does not allude to an evident “I”, but the narrated scenes agree with the use of this first person.
A mimetic story in which the narrator does not tell, but shows the character of the singer.
It is also the objective of the chronicle, of the chronicler, to show a unique view of what happened.
Unique, not only with respect to the journalist’s powers of observation, but in this case also unique because of the unusualness of the situation: Björk walking a journalist through Iceland and letting him into her house and songwriting sanctuary.
So, that “unique” experience is what justifies that the text is also aimed at Björk fans. It is, for them, newsworthy.
That is an editorial decision, that of a text in the first person that not only narrates, but also puts Björk in a position of opinion maker, in a position of story teller and, of course, analyzer of her latest album.
Fulton (2005) in Narrative and Media provides, from a post-structuralist perspective, a set of techniques and terms for the semiotic analysis of media texts.
In that first chapter, she mentions three: narrative as a cultural production, construction of the audience and narrative as a myth.
A biblical point of view
The latter poses an interesting form of analysis to find already known structures, or myths, in media narrative. The text begins with a scene from Björk’s present, which is not only a symbol of her current state of mind, but also describes her from other points of view.
It characterizes her, for example, through the tone of her voice, through aesthetics (makeup and clothes). The journalist then brings up Björk’s comments about volcanoes and Vikings, symbols of strength and brutality, while she drives a Land Rover quite bumpily around the island.
Then, that same Björk is seen from another angle, from everyday life. The rubbish left by her son that is inside the car comes up and her love for that white Land Rover.
That same car is the one that works as an excuse to start telling about Björk’s beginnings in music, which includes a video clip with a car.
The journalist then develops a few paragraphs that summarize her professional career, what her music means for current pop culture, and the themes she explores in her art.
And the narrative continues, but this time at her “cabin”. She also shows him the sanctuary where she composed her last album. Immediately, the journalist gives voice to Björk, who tells how the composition of the album began.
In that moment, he uses two words for the first time that describe that character of Björk that he tries to portray: “unhibited and volatile”.
Björk’s voice, from that moment on, gains strength with respect to her political, social and personal opinions.
Not only does she comment on her obsession with mushrooms, which she gave birth to on her album, but also talks about politics in the United States, how she grew up, funerals, her experimentation with audiovisuals, her children and how she raised them.
But she talks, above all, about a Björk who got over her divorce, who made her penultimate album to go through that stage of pain.
In contrast to this new album, on that one she went “to the sky” to make music. On this one, the latest one, she “came down to earth”.
The article closes with another scene related to the Land Rover, with Björk doing dangerous driving maneuvers, with a bar where she buys champagne and with a record store where the artist sees a young image of herself in the floor.
Monroe closes, then, back with Björk’s present, after going all the way through.
The construction of this plot, if it were to be reduced to basic concepts, would be very similar to the one that Jesus Christ lives until he resurrects.
That is, he is born and grows in anonymity until he becomes a preacher of faith. Then, he is known by many people and becomes a referent. Until he falls, he is sacrificed on the cross and betrayed by people close to him. He goes to heaven.
Then, he resurrects and leaves a message on Earth.
And Björk lives something similar. She is born and grows in anonymity until she becomes a renowned alternative pop artist. Then, becomes very popular and becomes a referent of the genre and international music. Until she falls, emotionally, due to a divorce.
In the article, she even refers to betrayal as one of the themes that she explores in that album. With the album, she goes to the skies.
Then, she resurrects with her latest album by coming back to the earth and leaving a message.
So, the story of Björk written by Pitchfork is the story of resurrection.
“We use existing narrative patterns to structure and make sense of new experiences”, said Rosemary Huisman (2005) in the second chapter of Narrative and Media.
She also wrote: “Your understanding of the experience itself is structured by the kinds of stories with which you are familiar”.
The story, apart from text, includes photography (archive and new, generated for the piece), short video that repeats itself in the start, gif image of the magazine cover, links and embedded video to Björk´s videoclips. They all serve as visual, or informative, support for the story.
“The straight ´just the facts` news story — the predominant form of newspaper and wire service reporting — elicited the weakest reader response of all”, wrote Maier (2016), after a study about how can journalism make audiences care.
This feature also speaks of targeting an audience that is exposed to media overload, “(…) narrative processing is generally more efficient”.
“Narratives are often associated with increased recall, ease of comprehension, and shorter reading times. In a direct comparison with expository text, narrative text was read twice as fast and recalled twice as well, regardless of topic familiarity or interest in the content itself”, wrote Dahlstrom (2014) in an article about using narratives and storytelling to communicate science.
Environmental activists: a dangerous approach
Grosser (2017) presents the idea of the Law of Narrative Gravity in an article about the the warping effects of narratives in media.
His theory “posits that the public and press are drawn to narratives, and the more widely accepted (or massive) a narrative, the more it attracts and shapes the perception of facts”.
The idea that the story is presented as one of resurrection gives it a tint of divinity that can be dangerous. In media there is a tendency to talk about famous environmentalists, or defenders of nature in a heroic way.
Examples of this are Greta Thunberg, the 19-year-old Swedish environmental activist who is known for challenging world leaders. More recently, Yvon Chouinard press has exalted the way in which he “transferred his ownership of Patagonia, valued at about $3 billion, to a specially designed trust and a nonprofit organization”, wrote The New York Times.
The same happens in this case with Björk who, in addition to constantly making natural references in the narration, released this album that defends issues of nature, specifically mushrooms, as a form of rebirth and healing.
The title of the article, attaching to her character three positive connotations (mother, daughter and force of nature), emphasizes this idea.
However, in the text itself an inconsistency is alluded to, which is Björk’s inability to let go of her Land Rover which is non eco-friendly.
That narrative, that point of view, is practically unexplored among the points of view that the journalist incorporates to tell his story.
