Bjork: the last pop star?

This spring it might be difficult to escape Iceland's greatest export. There's a new album Vulnicura. There's a book, or rather a box of books, Bjork Archives, that includes essays by New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, professor of musicology Nicola Dibben, and a poem-cum-essay by Sjon, poet, novelist and Bjork's sometime lyricist (those are his words at the top of the page). And then there's a retrospective exhibition, Bjork, which opens at Moma, New York today, full of looks, Alexander McQueen dresses, videos and music, all of it an attempt to encompass the multifaceted multiplicity of her creative output over the last 20 years and beyond. A glorious consummation hopefully.

The question is, does it represent a full stop? Not for Bjork. No doubt she will continue to make music. But for pop? Perhaps.

Before we get to that, a history lesson. The shorthand version of the Bjork story goes like this. Icelandic indie kid who sings about smoking seagulls, comes to London, goes solo, taps into the city's burgeoning rave scene, reinvents her sound, teams up with everyone who is interesting (Nellee Hooper, Tricky, 808 State's Graham Massey), then becomes a star thanks to promos directed by the new pop video royalty Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham.

She becomes a star, gets death threats, dresses up as a swan and then, as the years pass, moves away from the dance floor to become darker and deeper and artier until we arrive at Vulnicura, her break-up album - a candid, uncomfortable account of the end of her relationship with artist Matthew Barney.

It is a great story too. Full of music that's all giddy rush (the joyful noise of her first two albums Debut and Post), glacial beats crashing like tectonic plates, rustling erotic sighs and political conviction (Bjork, remember, told us Scots to declare independence. Not that we ultimately listened). Of course there has been the odd sideways lurch into abstraction

The artist remains. It's the art form I fear may have gone.

This of course may be a fear of the middle-aged (and yes I am guilty), worried that the world we know is changing beyond our recognition. But I want to suggest something has been lost.

If you pull all of the books out of the Bjork Archive box you will also find a sheet of stickers which picture the cover images of every album she has ever released. There are the inevitable early images of the star looking all pixie-like and cheeky, but by the 1997 single I Miss You she's been transformed into a cartoon character. By the cover of Homogenic the same year she's an Alexander McQueen styled alien geisha. A year later she's a polar bear (Hunger) and in 1999 she becomes a robot kissing her double on the cover of All Is Full Of Love. Later records are a riot of masks, wigs and face paint.

On Vulnicura she has become landscape itself, a Bjork-shaped rock, her chest cleaved open.

Bjork's otherness - both visual and musical - is part of a familiar, thrilling narrative - that of pop music as a difference engine, a vehicle for locating yourself in the world when you don't feel part of it. Otherness has been part of the story of pop from the beginning. You can see it in its binary opposition to the mainstream in every period since the 1950s. In favour of youthfulness over age, then radicalism against conservatism. Blackness against whiteness. Gayness against straightness. Shyness against alpha maleness (hello Morrissey). Pop validated one's difference.

Bjork can be seen as a continuation of that process. She stands up for femininity, for female creativity, female sexuality that doesn't locate itself within the male gaze, for sonic adventurousness.

Sometimes her positioning has not been without struggle. Just this year she has complained that her male collaborators have often been given the lion's share of acclaim for her creativity, even when they have tried to correct that idea. It has been widely reported that the new album was produced by Venezuelan producer Arca when in fact he was only the co-producer along with Bjork.

We are still a sexist, racist, homophobic society. But not as we once were. And pop did that as much as anything else to bring about the change. Maybe more.

So I wonder if Bjork might be the last to represent pop as otherness. Because I'm not sure that idea still holds sway. Yes, the likes of Lady Gaga can use fashion and glitter and make-up to transform her look. But it's all surface. Bjork wants to tell you about the world beyond yourself. Pop these days is so often a glossy mirror reflecting back its own narcissistic reflection.

Of course narcissism has always been part of pop's appeal - to its stars and consumers. But the form is increasingly being subsumed back into the dead arms of light entertainment. Pop as utopian principle - which you can see implicitly in the shock of the new with Elvis, and explicitly in the way the Beatles embraced the avant garde - seems to have gone. Today's Google democracy means we don't need pop culture curators to show us the way, to offer alternatives. We can find connections at the press of the search button.

We can still get lost in music of course. That's the pleasure of it. To drown in a sea of sound. But Bjork - like Bowie - is now the stuff of museum exhibitions. The last pop star is still standing, heartbroken but proud. Pop music? It goes on. In perpetual motion. But is it going anywhere? Or is it spinning round and round and going nowhere?

Bjork Archives is published by Thames & Hudson, priced £40. Vulnicura is available now on download. A CD version is released on March 16.