OCEANIA
One breath away
from Mother Oceania
your nimble feet make prints
in my sand
You have done
good for yourselves
since you left my wet embrace
and crawled ashore
Every boy is a snake is a lily
every pearl is a lynx is a girl
Sweet like harmony
made into flesh
you dance by my side
children sublime
You show me continents
- I see the islands
you count the centuries
- I blink my eyes
Hawks and sparrows
race in my waters
stingrays are floating
across the sky
Little ones
- my sons and my daughters
your sweat is salty - I am why
I am why
I am why
your sweat is salty - I am why
I am why
I am why
SONG INFO
Performed by Bjork with the London Choir
Beats: Shlomo
Piano: Nico Muhly
Vocal samples: Robert Wyatt
Programmed by: Bjork, Mark Bell, Valgeir Sigurdsson
This song was premiered at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece.
"Basically, the Olympics people asked me to do a kind of 'Ebony and Ivory' or 'W
e Are the World' type song. Those are smashing tunes and all that, but I thought
, 'Maybe there's another angle to this.' When I tried to write an Olympic lyric,
though, it was full of sports socks and ribbons. I ended up pissing myself laug
hing." Bjork decided to call on Sjon Sigurdsson, Icelandic poet and previous lyr
ics-collaborator. Needing something epic, Sjon took a course in Greek mythology,
and then wrote these lyrics for 'Oceania', a kind of aquatic sojourn and the la
st song recorded for Medulla. "The Olympic version will be a little different. B
ut it will fit the occasion, I think, because the song is all about how the ocea
n doesn't see boundaries between countries and thinks everyone is the same. Sjon
came up with this beautiful last line that touches on how we were all little je
llyfish or whatever before we made it on to land. He has The Sea saying, 'Your s
weat is salty / And I am why / Your sweat is salty / And I am why.'" (Bjork 13 A
ug 2004)
"It was good discipline of me [to try to not use beatboxers], because it made me
do a lot of other things for rhythms, like including me and Mike Patton and peo
ple that aren't beatboxers at all, trying to do rhythms, patterns and beats - tr
ying to come around it the other way. Even the beatboxers told me that they had
never worked like that before, so I had them too go out of their normal way to d
o things. That was good. I kept Oceania til last, because I wanted to do it espe
cially for the Olympics. It wasn't til the last day of mixing that I though - oh
! I need the sirenes, if the Greek mythology! So we called up an English choir,
and we got 16 women. I had done an arrangement for piano on the computer that wa
s insane, impossible for a piano to play, and I got them to sing that, a bit lik
e sirenes. Then I called up Shlomo, who was recommended to me as the new bright
hope of the hiphop scene. He came the next day and I asked him to do a techno ta
ngo beat - which he did. That was the most fun part, in the end. Sometimes it's
good for you to work with a gun against your head and just go for it, because yo
u can sometimes sit too long with ideas. Sometimes adrenaline is a good thing."
(Bjork, XFM 25aug04)
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