Björk, too, is verging. She has a lean to her, a tilt that makes us want to turn the music up or off, write her the kind of letter that would pause her just a moment. We want to catch up and relate. It's the frustrating, great compulsion that all famous people both smart and busy seem to provoke.

Nobody has us dancing to weirder music -- with new musicians, it's usually dancing or weird, not both -- than Björk. (It's not the kind of dancing that gets you a date. You do it in your living room, curtains down.) The persistent novelty of her sound and personality has gotten the Icelandic singer/arranger stuck in our notions of new, and we can't even hum more than a measure of her work. Björk belongs to that genre of musician that makes you feel genuinely odd. In 50 years, we will all talk about where we were when we heard that first song.

Before her recent and biggest fame -- she verged on making the Oscars different, verged on making Lars von Trier's film "Dancer in the Dark" tolerable -- and before the steady, measured ascent that preceded that, Björk Gudmundsdottir was a girl among eight adults on a purple commune in Reykjavik.

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She lived a long, quiet life there until she was 11, at which point she decided things were too slow and she'd become a great singer. So she did. With five years of music school under her belt, she entered a contest in 1977 and won a record contract. Her stepfather played guitar on the album, and it was soon a hit. Listen to her translation of "Fool on the Hill" -- it's the cutest Icelandic cover of a Beatles tune you'll hear.

She was precocious and lovable, and the record company positioned her to be a child star, Iceland's own Jackson 5 squeezed into a Gudmundsdottir 1. Instead, the 11-year-old, who comes from a working-class family, said no thank you. She slipped back out of the spotlight and stayed away for years.

As Björk describes it, her adolescent years were a saturation of Hendrix and Cream. She registered her boredom by leaving home and joining a punk band at 15. (Her parents probably saw it coming: At 7 or 8, she approached the adults in the commune and asked, "Why don't you stand up and do something?") She joined several bands over the next few years, worked at a fish factory and a Coca-Cola bottling plant and finally met the friends who would become her ticket out of Iceland. On a summer day in 1986, she gave birth to her son, Sindri. That evening she formed the Sugarcubes.

It was a hobby, she says of the internationally successful edgy guitar band. They offered a refrain heard from a lot of good young bands: We can't believe we're making it. Apparently by accident, the Sugarcubes informed the world that Iceland, in fact, existed, and that it could produce a hit pop record. It could even do so while one of the singers tended to her young son. There were MTV videos and extensive tours.

When Björk left the band in 1992 -- no major drama, it's just that six years was enough -- she got more deliberate. She left Iceland for London, and arty rock for techno and dance music. Her first solo album since childhood, "Debut," came out in 1993 and went gold in the United States. She was 28.

The next album came out in 1995. It was called "Post," supposedly because the songs are letters from London to Iceland. They combine techno with guitar with weird instruments (all elegantly, too: Play wine glasses on one of her albums and you won't look foolish). Björk saves tiring genres from themselves by mixing them into others, then sews it all up with her macho bellowing and breathy lilting.

"Most bands try to imitate others," "Ren & Stimpy" creator John Kricfalusi told Paper magazine. Kricfalusi directed her animated video for "I Miss You." "But Björk is as original as Elvis -- and she's got a cuter groin thrust."

She was suddenly everywhere, and was still trying to find the time to be as creative as usual. (Some Björk experts say she recorded the vocals for "Possibly Maybe," off the "Post" album, nude, standing in water, in a cave in the Bahamas. As the story goes, an extra-long microphone cord was used. Bats from the cave, if you believe the story, can be heard swarming around her.) She was too good and too busy to not become a full-fledged celebrity, and it soon caught up with her.

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