Editorial: We Celebrated The Passionate Amateur For A Long Time

We’re ready to move toward venerating the dedicated professional

While Björk has been on the cover of The Grapevine eight times, it never happened while I was editing. I was somehow the only holdout. On the occasion of a significant birthday for her, and on the enthusiasm of an exceptional cultural critic, Arnar Eggert, I have fallen in line.

I should first explain why I never put Björk on the cover. My reasoning is that there was too much of a clash between the presentation, style, and actions of the multi-hyphenate artist, and our rugged and ragged street paper. In our paper, using actual newsprint and paid for with ads from small businesses, the stories that sing often are hardscrabble or grassroots.

As a magazine, we used to spend an inordinate amount of time at Smekkleysa record shop, the store run by Björk’s The Sugarcubes bandmates. In fact, Einar Örn provided our moniker. A mantra at Smekkleysa was Einar Örn’s line “Það skiptir ekki máli hvað þú getur, heldur hvað þú gerir.” (It doesn’t matter what you can do, it matters what you do.) We felt we were following this mantra. We didn’t know how entirely to run a magazine, but we were putting one out, making deadline.

Björk has a three-octave range. She acted in one movie, and she won the best actress award at Cannes for it. If you peruse YouTube, you can find scores of live performances — you will never see a moment when she is not in complete control of her voice, her band, and her audience. There is perhaps nobody in this era so professional. The mantra above doesn’t work if what you CAN do is anything. Dealing with someone who approaches each public act with both talent and conscientiousness is not something my life experience prepared me for.

For this reason, while I have reviewed Björk’s performances both in Iceland and the US in this paper, I haven’t leaned in beyond that because I felt she simply overpowers us.

More and more often, over the last 10 years, I have come to the conclusion that a celebration of the DIY aesthetic was misguided. I was reading Greil Marcus’s book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century as the current US president burst forth onto the international stage. It became clear that while he and his cabinet had no training or interest in training, they had a whole lot of interest in doing things — obviously, they are still up to it. Namely, spectacle and negationism. It was not a surprise that Johnny Rotten cottoned to Trump. They are kissing cousins, creating without talent and boasting of a disinterest in training.

As Hallgrímur Helgason notes in his op-ed in this issue, the aesthetic from which we arose in the 2000s has transmogrified, and may now be represented here in Iceland with the Brosphere. Rank amateurism is either a cause or a cloak, or both, for regressive propaganda. In the face of this, as noted in our September 12, 2025 cover story, we have a push for professionalism and competence in the form of our current prime minister.

While we will continue to have amateurish moments in this paper, we’re ready to celebrate those who reach for a lot more.