Björk - "Oceania." Today was a momentous day for Björk and for anyone who admires her. In front of an estimated 4.5 billion viewers, she performed the first single from her upcoming album Medúlla. "Oceania" [oh-shuh-NEE-uh] was the result of her commission to open the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, and while the final product is a gorgeous celebration of voices and primordial equality, the initial attempts at this tune weren't so good:

From Independent.co.uk

"Basically, the Olympics people asked me to do a kind of 'Ebony and Ivory' or 'We Are the World' type song," she says. "Those are smashing tunes and all that, but I thought, 'Maybe there's another angle to this.' When I tried to write an Olympic lyric, though, it was full of sports socks and ribbons. I ended up pissing myself laughing." Plan B was clearly required. Björk decided to call on Sjón Sigurdsson, the Icelandic poet who had collaborated with her on songs such as "Bachelorette" from Homogenic. When she impressed upon him that they'd need something suitably epic for Athens, Sigurdsson took the matter seriously, even going so far as to take a short course in Greek mythology at Reykjavik University. The end result was "Oceania", a kind of aquatic sojourn and the last song recorded for Medúlla. "The Olympic version will be a little different," Björk says. "But it will fit the occasion, I think, because the song is all about how the ocean doesn't see boundaries between countries and thinks everyone is the same. Sjón came up with this beautiful last line that touches on how we were all little jellyfish or whatever before we made it on to land."

At the Olympics Björk was swaddled, like the rest of the Opening Ceremonies participants, in a costume by Sophia Kokosalaki—an "ocean" dress that commentators said was the largest dress in the world, covering 9270 meters square.