Just found this article online and it echoes alot of my own thoughts

Still crazy after all these years
WORDS BY LUIZA SAUMA
from the Independent



As the album release date loomed, the praise came thick and fast for Bjork Gudmundsdttir's latest avant-pop offering, Volta. Well, kind of. The NME might have maintained that "There's still no one like her", but elsewhere, an underlying nastiness persisted. "Songbird Bjork is still a bit cuckoo", screamed the headline in The Mail on Sunday. The review began thus: "Bjork Gudmundsdottir is famous, among other things, for her way with a bird costume." According to the Observer Music Monthly, the Icelandic musician is a "dress-eating", "ear-popping sprite". The music website Pitchfork, meanwhile, remarked that the singer hadn't made a good album since 1995's dance-pop extravaganza Post. That's 10 whole years wasted, then. She might as well give up, right?

There are few musicians working today who inspire such devotion in fully matured adults as Bjork. Fifteen-year-olds might quiver with delight when Pete Doherty pops a blister on stage, but that's nothing in comparison to the 35-year-old men who will turn to jelly when Bjork sings her heart out at this month's Glastonbury festival. She is, undoubtedly, a leftfield global phenomenon.

But, somehow, mainstream acceptance eludes her. Does Bjork care? Probably not - she's always been too much of a maverick to bother with universal popularity. But why is it that one of the greatest musicians of the last 15 years is still pigeonholed as an elfish eccentric, when so many of her male peers (Oasis, Blur, Nirvana, Radiohead - the list goes on) are so readily accepted into the pantheon of musical immortality?

It's true that Volta is far from her greatest work, despite Timbaland's beats and Antony Hegarty (of Antony & the John-sons) mooing all over it like a depressed cow. But all great musicians have their duds, and more importantly, at least four of Bjork's previous albums are masterpieces: her electro-pop calling card Debut; Post; the dark-edged Homogenic; and the glacial Vespertine, my favourite of all her albums. It goes without saying that, in terms of sheer invention, Oasis have nothing on her.

Bjork isn't the only woman genius who has struggled to graduate into the rock canon. After 30 years in the business, Kate Bush still gets lumbered with those adjectives reserved for super-creative women: kooky, eccentric, crazy. (And the birth of the "kooky" female musician can be traced back to Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell in the late 1960s/early 1970s - see sidebar.)

Bush retired from the public eye in the 1990s to live in the countryside and raise her son - a reasonable move, for someone who had been working since the age of 15 - but the newspapers had different ideas. She wasn't just taking a break, she was a "recluse". Recently, Bush ran into trouble with her local council in Devon, where she has a property, because neighbours lodged complaints about her apparently over-the-top security measures, including CCTV cameras that overlooked (or "spied") on a public beach. She removed the cameras immediately, but that didn't stop The Daily Mail from calling her "Garboesque".



I don't know Bush personally, but what I do know is that, whether she's a raving lunatic or just a careful mother, she's created some of the most thrilling pop music of all time. And something else she shares with Bjork: people seem to concentrate more on the quirks and rumours than the actual music.

Rowan Pelling - journalist and Kate Bush super-fan - has various theories on why brilliant female musicians never reach the god-like status of, say, Bob Dylan. "Music critics are historically quite macho," she explains. "So that Dylan worship, for example, is a given... I'm a huge Kate Bush fan; she sings the interior landscape for women, just as Paula Rego paints it. I think it leaves men bewildered." But what is it that makes an artist such as Kate Bush so peculiarly female? "There's a lunar quality to her songs, a strange balance, like it's on the edge of hysteria. I think it's something to do with creating life - there's something symbolically magical about it." Basically, it's about as far as you can get from "It Ain't Me, Babe".

But while women are quite willing to delve into Dylan, many (although not all) men seem less inclined to return the favour, as it were. As Pelling says, "I think it's too much effort for them to take that trip into a female place... Kate Bush isn't a gorgeous sex symbol or a blues diva - she's more challenging than that. But I think it's scandalous that she doesn't get that recognition on a global scale."

Think of the word "genius" and who pops into your head? Albert Einstein, probably. Or perhaps Mozart, Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci. Only a fool would still hold to Cyril Connolly's misogynistic maxim that "the enemy of good art [is] the pram in the hall", but even so, very few women are held up as "true" artists. We're all reasonably comfortable with chameleon sex-pots such as Madonna, good- time publicity machines such as Amy Winehouse and "tragic" blues divas such as Billie Holiday.

This is perhaps why Bjork and Bush (and more recently, Joanna Newsom) are so often described by the media in fairytale terms, as pixies and elves - no more human or real than goblins, unicorns or dragons. Pixies don't exist, but Bjork certainly does - as she says, "I have had to deal with the elfin, nave nonsense stamp all my life and I have never seen an elf and I don't think I'm nave."

Throughout her career, Bjork has been more outspoken, courageous and, yes, human than 20 Madonnas. No cult-like religions for her (she's a staunch atheist), none of the nutty diets or creepy plastic surgery that are the norm for women in the entertainment industry. Indeed, when she attended the 2001 Academy Awards in that infamous swan dress, on the back of her role in Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, she was the most accessible, likeable person on the red carpet. At this most conservative of Hollywood institutions, Bjork made a statement. By comparison, everyone else looked like a Stepford wife - or, indeed, a fairytale princess.

"It's interesting for me to bring up a girl," she admitted a couple of years ago. "You go to the toy store and the female characters there - Cinderella, the lady in Beauty and the Beast - their major task is to find Prince Charming. And I'm like, wait a minute! We've fought so hard to have a say, and not just live through our partners, and yet you're still seeing two-year-old girls with this message pushed at them that the only important thing is to find this amazing dress so that the guy will want you."

So it seems that the battle for sexual equality isn't over. In the music industry, we've only just begun. In the meantime, it's time for a reappraisal of our female music geniuses, of whom there are many. At their best, they are making music that speaks in a peculiarly - and for this music fan, reassuringly - female language, instead of denying, simplifying and sexualising it. At a time when little girls dream of growing up to be Kate Moss, we need them more than ever.

Bjork will be playing at Glastonbury festival (www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk) on 22 June. 'Volta' is out now



Further reading Good Bush tucker :Rob Jovanovic's 'Kate Bush: The Biography' (Portrait)

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