Photo: press
Bjork has said that female creatives are overlooked for their work in music production.
Speaking to Pitchfork about her new album Vulnicura, the Icelandic artist detailed how she constantly had to explain to journalists that she produces her records with the help of other artists, rather than it being the other way round: "I did 80% of the beats on Vespertine and it took me three years to work on that album, because it was all microbeats—it was like doing a huge embroidery piece. Matmos came in the last two weeks and added percussion on top of the songs, but they didn’t do any of the main parts, and they are credited everywhere as having done the whole album."
She continued to compare her situation to her male contemporaries, using Kanye West as an example: "I have nothing against Kanye West. Help me with this—I’m not dissing him—this is about how people talk about him. With the last album he did, he got all the best beatmakers on the planet at the time to make beats for him. A lot of the time, he wasn’t even there. Yet no one would question his authorship for a second."
Throughout the interview she explained how she gauges a lot of her creative energy on her own, and thus writes and produces around 80% of each release by herself before then getting someone else in to help with the finishing touches, yet is never credited for working in that way.
Concluding her point, she then compared her situation to women in music as a whole, stating: "It’s tough. Everything that a guy says once, you have to say five times."
Vulnicura has been cited as Bjork's most personal album to date, and was released yesterday exclusively on iTunes to counteract a leak earlier in the week.
