POPSCREEN: Bjork

Wow. How does one describe Björk’s music video for her single “Wanderlust” in words that are commonly used in the English language? Ridiculous, pretentious, and just plain weird come to mind, though none of those actually describe the plot of this travesty. Allow me to do my best.

The video, presented in stereoscopic 3D, opens with a creature—best described as the bastard child of a yak and a mastodon­—lapping from a stream. There is, in fact, a herd of these creatures, and Björk sits among them, camouflaged in vaguely Asian clothing replete with an absurd hat and an old backpack. As she warbles unintelligibly, Björk sits atop one of the beasts and takes off down the river.

Now things get really weird. The yaks begin to flow into one another, like the water of the river, and Björk’s backpack grows arms, then a head, finally transforming into a strange clay woman-thing. Björk and this creature then perform oddly sexual backflips until their bodies become intertwined. The water beneath them sprouts eyes which belong to a giant dragon-lookalike river god with enormous human hands that open and close suggestively. A giant Björk then digs a hole, diverting the river into a waterfall. Small Björk and the clay being drop down, flying through a tunnel of water into the hands of the river god. This whole video lasts almost eight minutes.

I really wish I could make fun of this attempt at highbrow art, which combines both CG and puppeteering into a hodgepodge of crazy. But how can one find humor in something so truly bizarre, something so lacking in any kind of anchor to reality? So in the end, I think the only word that truly describes this deliciously awful music video is: “Huh?”

—Bram A. Strochlic