Björk

Certainly a prominent figure in modern popular music even if her musical exploration isn't quite my thing. But the quartet of albums from "Debut" to "Vespertine" would impress anyone and is enough to place her in the pantheon. It's one of the few cases where I personally recognize the need to separate personal tastes (which would be three stars) from the undeniable value of the artist (five stars). So let's say an average of four, which I think "captures" her well. Also because after the dreadful 2004, she has produced a lot of mediocre material, full of vain experimentation and bland, soporific ballads cubed. It's still comical to see her profile on the Scaruffi website: a lot of 7s and 6.5s for the albums (which on average means at least one extra point for another critic), while in the descriptive text, she gets shredded from beginning to end with the usual killer style... a glaring example proving that some of the profiles were written by someone else. A cosmic clown.