Review
Genre and Mood
Björk turns It’s Oh So Quiet into pop by way of big band jazz, a cover played with theatrical relish. It is playful and exuberant, and its whole design is a joke about its own title: the quiet never lasts.
Song Summary
The song’s structure acts out its title and then contradicts it. Soft, whispered passages give way to loud, shouted sections in which the big band plays at full strength, then the hush returns, until the next outburst. Björk produced it with Nellee Hooper, John Altman arranged and conducted the band, and the track became the third single from her second album Post, released by One Little Indian on 13 November 1995. She said it was the last song they recorded for the album.
Musical Breakdown
The Hush
The song begins in its quiet state, the passages the sources describe as soft and whispered.
The Explosion
Then the big band crashes in and Björk shouts over it. The track keeps switching between the two states; no source maps every switch, but the contrast is the whole arrangement.
Concepts in Focus
A cover version is a new recording of a song by someone other than its first performer. This one has a long history: Hans Lang wrote the music of Und jetzt ist es still, recorded by Horst Winter in 1948, and Bert Reisfeld’s English lyric gave Betty Hutton the B-side of her 1951 RCA single. Her collaborator Guy Sigsworth found Hutton’s record and played it on the tour bus until it became, in her words, the tour anthem. People thought her version over the top, Björk said, but Hutton’s makes hers the ambient version.
The music video is the other half of the hit. Spike Jonze shot it in the San Fernando Valley as a Technicolor musical in the spirit of Busby Berkeley and Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg: Björk walks out of an auto shop washroom, dances with the workers, elderly women with umbrellas and a mailbox, and the street joins in. It won Best Choreography at the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards from six nominations and was nominated for a Grammy.
Artistic Context
Björk had sung old songs before: Gling-Gló, her 1990 album of Icelandic popular songs and jazz standards, is heard here in Björk – Kata rokkar. On Post, her second album, she made an exception: covering an old song, she said, went against her principles because she was so anti-retro.
Impact and Reception
It reached number four in the UK, spent fifteen weeks on the chart and went gold, topped the chart in Iceland and reached number six in Australia. Dotmusic’s James Masterton heard an Icelandic pixie meeting the sound of Frank Sinatra; Smash Hits gave it five out of five. Björk found it ironic that it became her biggest song, and said the best bit was the video. Play it loud, and wait for the quiet.
