Björk vs. Lady Gaga

When I first heard Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face,” I thought it was an outrageous and ridiculous excuse for a song. I still do, and from then on, I refuse to ever like Lady Gaga or her songs.

Meanwhile, I hadn’t become a Björk fan until very recently, when I found myself quite fascinated with the eccentric imagery in her music videos and also the honest sensuality in her lyrics. I didn’t like her before because what she’s doing doesn’t sound like proper singing. The first videos of her that I’ve seen were “Big Time Sensuality,” “Pagan Poetry,” “Cocoon,” “Hunter” and another video that features what looked like two sea mollusks mating to form a human embryo in the end. What made me like her was when I was driven by curiosity and watched almost her music videos on YouTube and was just struck.

Björk’s eccentricity is somewhat comparable to Lady Gaga’s. Like Björk, Lady Gaga stands out with her rather outlandish style of hair, makeup and clothes. Also like Björk, Lady Gaga frequently wears her costumes in public as a fashion statement.

But the contrasts about them are more obvious. Lady Gaga seems to be just a little more upfront about her eccentricity; Björk doesn’t always come out wearing a ridiculous costume. Although both singers are honest about their sexuality, their manner of expressing it in their music videos is slightly different.

Lady Gaga is sexy, and she shows it unabashedly. She displays her body and moves like a snake, not unlike Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera at the height of their career.

Björk, on the other hand, have been known to appear nude in a music video but is not trying to be sexy. In the music video of “Cocoon,” she is shown totally nude with red threads coming out of her nipples; in relation to the song, which is about sex and love, her bare body shows the persona welcoming the sensuality, and the red threads symbolizes the emotion bursting out of her and then engulfing her.

Meanwhile, “Pagan Poetry” shows heavily distorted images of—according to Wikipedia—sexual intercourse, fellatio and pearls being sewn into skin (perhaps a euphemism for semen and penetration?), and Björk wearing a dress covering only her lower half. She has pearls on her skin. Her breasts are bare. “Pagan Poetry” bears the same themes as “Cocoon,” and the persona is preparing herself for marriage and sex. I'm guessing the symbolism is similar. The nudity is a statement—a sexually explicit one, but not with the purpose of sexually exciting an audience.

Both Björk and Lady Gaga appeal to the lowest instincts of humanity. Their sexual honesty opens the audience's minds to the intimate points in their being that society tries to conceal in an effort to make us less like the "lower" species of this planet. They just showed people that they don't have to deny their animal instincts to be human.

However, I would like to stress that Lady Gaga's sexual appeal seems to be a little too distracting to get her message across—Björk's nudism, although also distracting, is more mind-provoking due to the fact that you don't see her going all over a group of sexy men. Her sexuality is not overblown that she would resemble a showgirl. Perhaps that's also what Lady Gaga is trying to put off: making people see the substance beneath the seeming lack of it.