WEEKEND REQUIRED READING: THIS IS BJORK

The One has a new single out with Thom Radiohead. That's news you can use, but the big deal is that Bjork is on a mission to help rebuild Iceland's economy by turning away from the heavy industry of aluminum smelting and instead investing in the hearts and minds of her country: proceeds from the sales of "Náttúra" will go to help seed companies—start-ups in the tech sector.

She's a model for the ways in which artists so inclined can affect real change where they are.

"What we are saying is, we've got three aluminum factories, let's work with that, we cannot change that. Why not have the Icelandic people who are educated in high-tech and work already in those factories in the higher paid jobs, why not let them build little companies who are totally Icelandic with the knowledge they have? Then they get the money and it stays in the country. Then we can support the biotech companies and the food companies and all these clusters. I think that if you want to be an environmentalist in Iceland, these are the things you've got to be putting your energy into.

"A lot of investors [are] coming, and I'm hoping they will want to invest in the high-tech cluster. There are money people here that did not lose a lot of money. For example, here is one investment company in Iceland only run by women. They are doing fine. [laughs] They aren't risk junkies. They just made slow moves. The people who are crashing, they took a huge loan and then another huge loan, and so on. And it's all just air. But these women didn't build on air."

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Amazing interview with Bjork as she goes in on the Náttúra idea, the politics behind it and how the song came about here and here.

Náttúra info here.

Bjork's Times of London editorial on Iceland's economic "smeltdown" here.