Happy 35th Anniversary to The Sugarcubes’ debut album Life’s Too Good, originally released April 25, 1988.
In 1986, Björk Guðmundsdóttir and a few of her friends had tired of the seriousness, the militancy, of their previous anarcho-punk endeavors. They were also looking for a fun way to shake up their native Iceland’s conservative mainstream. And so they decided to form an organization of sorts, christening it Bad Taste Limited, based on Picasso’s (roughly translated) principle of “the worst enemy of creativity is good taste.”
Bad Taste Limited’s aim was to allow free reign of the friends’ creative pursuits. They wanted to form a publishing company (several members of the group were aspiring writers), but they also wanted to open a bookstore, a café, an art gallery, a radio station, and eventually a record label. In other words, their goal was merry, freewheeling world domination and, if that wasn’t possible, then they’d settle for lighthearted domination of Iceland’s capital Reykjavík. The friends even came up with a cheeky scheme whereby they would honor public figures they deemed trailblazers in bad taste. (The first award went to the head of Icelandic TV’s arts department “for his incredible indulgence with public money and his own bad taste.”) “We were just trying to alter people’s perceptions of who is calling the shots on what is good taste,” said Bad Taste co-founder Einar Örn.
To top off their lengthy world-domination to-do list, a “bad taste” pop group seemed the epitome of the best type of bad taste. They decided on the name Sykurmolar, or The Sugarcubes, based on the cheap confection they’d eaten for energy while touring in a van as anarcho-punk band Kukl. The members of this new pop venture, The Sugarcubes, included Siggi Baldursson on drums, Einar Örn Benediktsson on vocals and trumpet, Þor Eldon on guitar, Bragi Ólafsson on bass, and Björk as their ethereal wild-banshee of a singer (and keyboardist).
The Sugarcubes’ first performance was at a music festival held in a sports arena, and they went on after a popstar named Leoncie who had a hit (unironically) titled “My Icelandic He-Man.” Örn had made a deal with a sugar manufacturer for a bulk quantity of sugar cubes to throw into the audience, which the audience unceremoniously threw right back (the Icelandic crowd, as usual, weren’t all that impressed with Björk and her irreverent compadres). “Icelanders are too cool for school,” she recently told Spencer Kornhaber of The Atlantic, by way of explanation as to why no one cared about her presence in a busy Reykjavík café, even after decades of worldwide fame.
By the time the Sugarcubes arrived on the Reykjavík scene in ’86, Icelanders had grown accustomed to Björk and her many musical endeavors—as well as her antics. After all, she had put out her first album of folk-disco covers, the self-titled Björk, in 1977 at the age of 11. The album went platinum and made Björk a star—or as much of a star as one can be in a country of approximately 220,000. Then came punk bands Spit And Snot, Rokka Rokka Drum, and Tappi Tíkarrass, which means “cork the bitch’s ass.” The punk vein continued with Kukl, which signed to a label run by English anarchist group Crass. They toured in a crusty van all over Europe, subsisting on bad food and the aforementioned sugar cubes, sleeping in squats, and siphoning gas from other vehicles whenever money ran out. Before disbanding, Kukl performed on Icelandic TV, with a very pregnant Björk baring her ample belly. It was, apparently, quite the scandal. Still, by that point everyone was used to Björk and, even if they weren’t, Icelandic blasé wouldn’t allow anyone to betray otherwise.
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For the rest of the world, however, it’s impossible to imagine a casual attitude towards Björk. “I saw Björk once in a fish market in Reykjavík. She was buying fish,” wrote Alex Godfrey for Vice. “Observing Björk in her natural habitat does not normalize her.” For me, I vividly recall seeing Björk’s video for “Human Behavior” and thinking, “Who is this magnificent weirdo?” Later, I would realize that I had actually heard her sing on the Sugarcubes’ infectious dance track “Hit” a year earlier, but nothing quite compares to the experience of the full Björk package: the racially ambiguous, elfin features; the bizarre hairstyles and frocks; the age-transcending attitude of mischief and experimentation in every gesture and facial expression. Never mind the reputation she’s earned as a musical maverick, outlier, and wunderkind.
It was “Birthday” that blew everyone away. After the music festival where the Sugarcubes were pelted with their own sugar cubes, promoter Jakob Magnússon couldn’t pay everyone involved. So Einar Örn suggested that Magnússon give the Sugarcubes some free time at his recording studio instead, which is where they came up with “Birthday,” the band shaping their haunting melodies around Björk’s lyrical saga of a five-year-old girl. Icelandic radio was characteristically nonplussed (“Everyone hated ‘Birthday’ at first,” said drummer Siggi. “They thought it was the weirdest motherfucker they’d heard”), but eventually the song was released in the UK on the Crass-associated One Little Indian label, and it caught fire when a Melody Maker writer declared it Single of the Week.
Although the accompanying instrumentation is moody and perfect, it’s Björk’s vocals that are the true star of “Birthday.” Whispering tendrils offset by guttural shrieks, huskiness paired with a pretty warble, breathiness juxtaposed with a muscular three-octave range. A childish impishness brushes up against a world-weary maturity, and the whole song sounds sublimely submerged. Major labels began courting the wildly weird Icelanders, but the band ultimately decided in favor of major-label licensing agreements through One Little Indian. Meanwhile, in the wake of the Sugarcubes’ overseas success, the Icelandic press pretended, haughtily, to have liked them all along.
To reflect the saccharine, good-“bad” taste behind the band’s formation, Life’s Too Good was released in 1988 in six different colors of blinding-bright neon sleeves. The album’s title came from an “optimistic complaint” by a starving-artist friend who declared, “Life’s too good” after being given a mug of coffee and a smoke. It’s a bouncy, buoyant pop album, but it’s also studded with discordant punk, while at other times it’s darkly goth, while also bursting with the unsettling dreaminess and wickedness of fairy tales. Perhaps most importantly, it’s Björk distilled down to her essence.
Nellee Hooper recalls going on vacation with Björk in Thailand not long after they recorded Debut, and how one night a restaurant owner, upon discovering that she was a singer, asked Björk to perform a few numbers. The place was full of older people who had never heard of her, yet when she finished they gave her a standing ovation. “To the older generation, she came across as just as much of a star,” he remembers. “She is the real deal.” Life’s Too Good functions in much the same way—as an artifact of a widespread not-knowing of Björk’s magic, but being able to get it, immediately, anyway. Life’s Too Good is also special because Björk is accompanied by her fellow Icelanders, people who have brushed shoulders with her at the fish market since childhood, which removes some of the exotic sheen of “otherness” that’s enveloped her as a solo artist.
“Traitor,” the album’s opening track, begins with casual, muted chatter in Icelandic and the idle playing of a harmonica. The song then abruptly bum-rushes us, with Einar sing-speaking and Björk’s vocals swirling in wild whirlpools over the top. The next song, “Motorcrash,” is cartoonish, a marching parade of DayGlo horns and rubberneck-y musical-theater as Björk observes the nasty crash from her bike—“Dangerous motorcrash / Terribly bloody motorcrash / Destructive motorcrash / Oh oh oh.”
No matter how many times you’ve heard it, the dreampop-y “Birthday” arrives as a glorious gift —a surprise all wrapped in shimmer and subtle horn and, good god, those beautiful Björk vocals. No matter how many gorgeous performances she’s delivered throughout her career, I don’t think there’s anything that surpasses “Birthday.” The song is meant to capture half-forgotten memories, the vivid, logic-defying feelings of childhood. Still, the song disturbs due to its being about a strange relationship between a little girl and an adult man who end up smoking cigars in a bathtub together at the end. (Björk, however, has assured that “nothing happens,” and it’s more of a non-sexual, imagined scenario on the part of the child.)
“Delicious Demon,” with its surreal opener of Yeeeehaawww, serves up nerd-punk Devo and Talking Heads vibes, with a little B-52s thrown in for good measure. It’s a fun, soaring, colorful romp that makes for a good road trip. “Mama,” on the other hand (Björk’s personal favorite), is breathy and gasping and full of pounding eccentricity, about a woman swinging her handbag back and forth on the street. “She’s drawing circles with her breasts in her jumper,” Björk narrates, and soon we have a picture of a sturdy, soft, maternal woman who radiates love and comfort and big-bosomed hugs from afar.
Originally titled “Hot Meat” (a vegetarian bandmember objected), “Coldsweat” channels a bit of Blondie and it’s all about manic, greedy, all-encompassing desire. The video was axed by British censors due to the supposedly “sexual” shots of Einar’s bare stomach decorated with jewelry. (As a solution, the jewelry portions were, quite comically, replaced by nonsensical shots of chimpanzees.)
“Blue Eyed Pop,” featuring some fabulous screeching shrieks by Björk, is about what it’s like to prepare for a night on the town in Reykjavík—the excitement and anticipation of what could possibly happen. “Deus”—with Björk’s high-pitched chirping of “Deus! Deus!” like she’s at a rave—is good-natured blasphemy, cheerfully declaring that God does not exist. Meanwhile, “Sick For Toys” is the most traditional ’80s pop song on the album, with a conventional melody, a cheesy rap, and a soaring chant of “Sick! Sick! Sick! For Toyyyys!”
Despite its sunny gallop and madcap progression, “Fucking in Rhythm & Sorrow” deals with suicidal tendencies, setting up a strange scene whereby a divorced woman arrives home to find a naked, distressed man in her flat. She then must talk him down off the roof—“Life’s both sweet and sour! / Don’t act / Don’t act.” Life’s too good, indeed.
The Sugarcubes would perform on Saturday Night Live, tour the world, and release two more albums before calling it quits, but neither record would reach the critical and fan acclaim of Life’s Too Good. To this day, despite the seriousness with which the world viewed them, Björk still regards the project as an offshoot of Bad Taste Limited, as a means to a greater end. “I always saw the Sugarcubes as a party band, a piss take,” she said, not unkindly given their initial mission statement. “We didn’t have this big ambition, musically, and to be brilliant. I used to look around and think, ‘These people should be writing novels, not doing bass solos in Texas.’”
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