Here’s a Björk song that is both maddeningly catchy and relentlessly weird. That’s true of so many of them!
This was the first single on Björk’s first solo album (as an adult.) It was a bold choice! It’s not the weirdest song on the album, but it is far from the most conventional. The video was directed by Michel Gondry, the first of many.
Björk had written the melody as a teenager in the Sugarcubes, but they couldn’t figure out what to do with it. It is definitely not a punk song! The track was produced by the great Nellee Hooper. The timpani sample comes from the soundtrack of a 1970 film called The Adventurers. The film looks pretty terrible, but it does have a score by Antônio Carlos Jobim. Quincy Jones re-orchestrated it for an album featuring Ray Brown, Tom Scott, and future Björk collaborator Eumir Deodato.
The track also features a Korg Wavestation preset called “Pharaoh’s Jig”. Some producers take a dim view of using canned sounds this way, but my feeling is, if the results sound this fresh, then anything goes.
Hear a very different usage of this preset by Macintosh Plus.
What even are the lyrics to “Human Behaviour”? Genius lists many of them as “gibberish.” Google returns a highly dubious interpretation. In my transcription below, I wrote the words that I hear, but I will admit to guessing at a lot of them. It’s quite possible that Genius has it right. Like many songwriters, Björk works out her melodies using nonsense syllables. Unlike many songwriters, she likes to leave some of the nonsense syllables in the finished song. She isn’t completely alone in that practice – Peter Gabriel does the same thing in the intro to “Sledgehammer“, and Earth, Wind and Fire do it in the chorus to “September.”
At one point, I assumed that when it sounds like Björk is singing nonsense, she’s actually singing in her native Icelandic. She does do this sometimes! For example, she frequently uses the phrase allt sem hann sér, which translates as “all he sees.” However, Björk has repeatedly confirmed in interviews that most of the words in her songs that sound like nonsense really are nonsense.
“Human Behaviour” does have some English words too, and they are ear-grabbing. In this reaction video, when Björk sings that there’s definitely definitely definitely definitely no logic to human behavior, the guy responds, “Facts!” In a 2011 Q&A with The Guardian, Björk was asked what the song means. She responded:
[A]t the time I wrote it I was referring to my childhood and probably talking about how I felt more comfortable on my own walking outside singing and stuff than hanging out with humans… I experienced harmony with kids, the mountains and the ocean surrounding Reykjavik and animals I guess but found grown ups rather chaotic and nonsensical. When I went into sixth form school I choose science, math and physics and thought psychology, anthropology, sociology and history and such was for sissies. A huge majority of Icelanders do the same thing. They call subjects in school about people “kjaftafog” which means nattersubjects. As I got older and became a grown up myself I have learned to appreciate nattersubjects and recently read many books for the first time about psychology and I guess my last album volta had a anthropology angle on it… so I have learned a little about humans. Now I can keep up a conversation (still rubbish at small talk though) and through my experience probably understand them a little better…
Björk’s music sounds different from David Byrne and Talking Heads, but they have some profound overlaps in their aesthetics and songwriting approaches, and in their generally alienated outlook on their fellow humans. I can relate, unfortunately.
Here’s my transcription of the tune.
The timpani sample plays an A minor pentatonic pattern. The vocal melody is in A natural minor, but it centers D and de-emphasizes A so much that it thoroughly confuses my ear about which note is the actual tonic. Björk plays similar games in “The Anchor Song” and “Hidden Place“, using conventional scales and modes in unconventional ways.
In the “chorus”, the timpani sample shifts up a semitone to B-flat minor pentatonic. (This song doesn’t really have a chorus, I’m just calling it that because it occurs where the chorus would go in a normal song.) The vocal melody in this section is not in B-flat minor, though; it’s in G natural minor, a move that was probably inspired by the Iberian or Middle Eastern music that Björk also drew on for “Hunter”. But G natural minor is very much at odds with the B-flat minor timpani pattern. I assume that Nellee Hooper heard the vocal melody move from A to B-flat and shifted the timpani sample up a half-step to follow it. Björk probably liked the resulting clash and ran with it. The timpani’s pitch is indistinct enough to allow plenty of harmonic wiggle room anyway.
How do you play a song like this live? Early on, Björk did a few performances with a backing band miming awkwardly over Nellee Hooper’s instrumental. She got better results from radical rearrangements. For her MTV Unplugged performance, she sang the song backed only by a harpsichord. It is super cool how the chord changes from A minor to A major at the end of each phrase to evoke the Korg Wavestation percussion part.
Here’s a performance from the Vespertine tour, with Matmos and Zeena Parkins laying textures on top of the Nellee Hooper instrumental.
There are a lot of remixes of “Human Behaviour” out there. My favorite is this twelve minute epic by Underworld, which puts the vocals on top of a D minor backing. This makes more logical sense than the A minor in the original.
The Bassheads edit is cool too. (You can hear Bassheads in my massive remix of “Once In A Lifetime”.)
Many people have covered the song, with widely varying degrees of success. It’s always interesting to hear how they interpret the lyrics; sometimes they reproduce the nonsense syllables, and sometimes they insert their own words. It’s also interesting to see whether they make any effort to convey the murky groove of the original or just take it in a different direction entirely. Here’s a pretty cool arrangement by Chris Thile, Madison Cunningham and Esperanza Spalding.
Willow Smith, of all people, also recorded a version. It’s not bad!
There are lots of jazz arrangements out there. I like this one, though I could do without the animal masks:
And here’s the charming Vitamin String Quartet arrangement.
Here is my question: is “Human Behaviour” a pop song? It is built on a groove. Nellee Hooper has impeccable pop credentials. There are other songs on Debut that I would classify as definitely pop songs, however eccentric they may be. But “Human Behaviour” is too weird to easily fit the category. The angular and tonally ambiguous melody, the semi-nonsensical lyrics, the lack of a chorus or hook, and the alienated narrator all point toward “art”, whatever that means. I guess I would call this “art with a groove”, but then why should I even need to qualify? Why does a groove-based piece of music need to be strange and challenging to be considered “art” in the first place? Maybe the categories of “pop” and “art” were never that meaningful to begin with.