How Exactly Is Björk Transferring MP3s?

By Rich Juzwiak | November 15, 2017 | 4:55pm

Entertainment

Today, Björk has unveiled the video for her second single off her upcoming album Utopia. “Blissing Me” tells the story of a budding romance, of “falling in love with love.” (Björk has called Utopia her Tinder album, as it’s the lighter follow-up to her 2015 break-up album Vulnicura, though she did recently clarify to The Guardian, “I would never be able to be on Tinder.”) “Is this excess texting a blessing? / Two music nerds obsessing,” sings Björk on her new bond, and then: “Sending each other MP3s.”

But the accompanying gesture she makes in the song’s minimal video, which also finds her crawling, spinning, and flailing like a baby who’s learning all the things her young body can do, is perplexing. Björk makes a texting motion but most smart phones are configured to make such file sharing impossible—you need a computer in order to transfer songs and place them into a player like iTunes in order to be able to listen to them. Maybe she’s being figurative, maybe her phone is somehow cracked to make this kind of transfer possible, maybe Björk has a Björkphone that’s like the Batphone but for music and with way more buttons/capability.

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Or maybe she’s lying with her hands.

Curious.

The song is… ya know, contemporary Björk. Harp-dominant and increasingly layered, it reminds me of something between the Vespertine b-side “Generous Palmstroke” and an original song Mokey would have played on Fraggle Rock. The melody here is more tenacious and dynamic than that of the first Utopia single, “The Gate,” but only slightly—the same four bars of melody are sung ad nauseam in “Blissing Me.” This is not the kind of track I’d spend the time tracking down an MP3 of and then figuring out how to transfer from phone to phone, but I might stream it a couple more times.