Björk – Violently Happy
Björk – Violently Happy (1990)
Directed by: Jean-Baptiste Mondino
The music video was directed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino. To shoot it, Björk flew to Los Angeles in January 1994 and she found herself involved in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and as such the shooting was postponed until the next day. Nettie Walker, Björk co-manager, recalled the event and described Björk’s peculiar behavior: “When she did the video for “Violently Happy” in LA, she was there in the middle of the earthquake. She described it like, a huge rumbling, deep in your stomach, which is exactly Björk, that she found it a brilliant rather than frightening experience. Everyone was trying to get hold of her to see if she was OK, but she had gone to the video shoot, dead on time, ready to start. That’s how Björk is, committed to doing something… She’s into this magpie mentality.” and this was further confirmed by Mondino, who added: “She said she was so happy to have experienced the earthquake, and on top of that she didn’t have her son with her so she was freer to experience it without fear… For me she is an iceberg, we only see a little tip of it”.
The video starts with a man, that seems to have white hair, shaking his head frantically in a padded room of a mental institute, where the entire video takes place. Björk appears in a white dress resembling an open straitjacket with pieces of hair surrounding her. Various scenes are intermingled: a girl seems to have cut down the hair of a doll to resemble hers, while various models look in the camera, some with scissors, others with dolls.
As the chorus start, a patient starts to cut his hair with an electric razors, and Björk herself appears to cut her hair with a scissor. Sounds of snipping of scissors are overlaid with the songtrack. During one scene, Björk carries a teddy bear and while the video continues and the patients dance and caress their dolls or cut their hair, Björk disembowels her teddy bear, removing all the foam rubber from it. The patients keep on dancing and acting emotionally throughout the room, and the white hair of the patient from the first scene is revealed to be shaving soap and he shaves his head with a razor. The video ends with a patient pulling a string from a doll, which garbledly pronounces “I’m the baby”. This sound sample and all of this doll’s samples are from the Disney show, Dinosaurs.
The video received lukewarm reviews from critics. Charles Taylor of Salon.com stated that “Jean-Baptiste Mondino’s “Violently Happy”, is what most people mean when they talk about how bad videos can be, as cold and pretentious and humorless as the worst fashion photography”.
MTV found the video a bit too violent so when they showed the video it received a formal warning from the Independent Television Commission.
