All of This and Nothing: Coldsweat

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

I'm counting this one as Famous. Maybe mostly because I don't want to believe it's been forgotten - but it is almost forty years old, from a band that turned out to be short-lived. As ever this year, you'll have to decide for yourself if you agree with me.

Coldsweat is how we - those of us who were there at the time, and maybe just those who were paying attention - discovered Bjork. It was the first single from The Sugarcubes' first record, back in 1988. It sounded something like alt-rock at the time - it fit into that universe - but it stood out, clearly quirkier and more particular and distinctive than the other things on the radio or MTV at the time.

(Because, yes, this is from the era when MTV dominated how an entire generation learned about new music.)

This is hot meat
This is metallic blood
This is hot meat
This is open sweat

Bjork has never been an artist who made obvious songs, singing about clear, easily-understandable things. And that was the case from the start, with this noisy, shrieking, clanging, compelling song about...well, I don't know. Meat and blood - you could make a case that it's a song about sex, I suppose. Not particularly happy sex, mind you, but some kind of raw, animalistic, tearing-each-other's-flesh kind of sex.

Or not. Like so many great songs, there's that sense of not-quite-knowability, huge lacunas that each listener gets to fill their own way, with their own ideas. That's what, y'know, makes it a great song.