![]() Singer-songwriter Björk, the most famous Icelander since explorer Leif Eriksson, has been met with both praise and criticism, almost always directed at her difference – from Westerners, pop musicians, adults, even from humans. While the elements of excess and emergence are present in both accounts of the subject, Žižek’s and Björk’s respective focus on one of these concepts allow us to develop a fuller picture of subjectivity, particularly but not exclusively as it is engaged in musical activities. After an analysis of Björk’s music, centered on the piece “Black Lake” and from a perspective informed by Žižek’s account of subjectivity, we shift our attention to Björk’s thoughts on music in order to find elements that allow for the development of a subject of emergence. We open with a brief discussion of Žižek’s subject of excess, which we then relate to his approach to subjectivity in music. Such a subject is movement and activity exceeds the experiences, objects, others, and symbolic order that make it who it is and emerges through desire and drive, and through resonance and animation. In answering the question “who is the subject of music,” we argue that it is a subject of excess and emergence and we rely on the definition and development of these terms by Žižek and Björk. This study will attempt to understand how Björk’s idea of the self and body were transferred to the musical work. Through the concept of the rhizome and Actor Network Theory, I expand my analysis of motivic unity outside of the album, suggesting that the album can also be read as a network or as ‘elastic’. I will explore how Björk conceptualised and conceived Medúlla (2004), an album made almost entirely from human voicesI then perform an organicist motivic analysis of the album, studying motives used in different songs and links made across the musical foreground and background and the resulting unity. Often mechanical manipulation is an attempt to depict powerlessness, whilst her employment of beatboxers’ interplay with technology is to express the body. After outlining what I have termed ‘the elastic self’, which recognises both personal and external agency, this dissertation first examines how Björk uses technologies of the studio, using Actor Network Theory. ![]() 1965) released her fifth solo album Medúlla, made almost exclusively with human voices. In 2004, Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk (b.
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