Berghain
Berghain: ROSALÍA’s Doorway to Heaven
ROSALÍA’s new single Berghain is the madness of Vivaldi. Toes bleeding inside of pointe shoes. Romeo killing himself thinking Juliet dead; Juliet killing herself because he is. It’s Lana Del Rey singing ‘…you're my religion…when I'm down on my knees, you're how I pray…hallelujah I need your love’. Orpheus turning towards Eurydice. The Phantom composing spectacular music from the shadows of the opera house. It’s the God of the Old Testament. It’s a crown of thorns. Berghain is beautiful brutality.
The LUX listening party in the Oval Room of the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya
Preamble
On 7 November, ROSALÍA released her fourth studio album, LUX—Latin for ‘light’. On the album cover, ROSALÍA wears a white veil, a common headpiece in the habit of a novice nun in the Catholic Church. Her arms are enclosed in a similar white material, wrapped around her body in a tender embrace. Eerily, this also resembles a straitjacket, a garment historically used to restrain patients in psychiatric hospitals. It creates an intriguing and compelling conflict between the expected and the unexpected when it comes to devotion and obsession, madness and salvation. It promises the audience that LUX is going to challenge and confront us.
LUX consists of four movements that explore themes of religion, spirituality, femininity, love, and light. In the first press interview for LUX with Popcast, ROSALÍA describes it as a vertical album, less concerned with horizontal, worldly pursuits, and more with mystical realms. ROSALÍA wants to get closer to God, and in LUX we’re likely to see this unorthodox journey unfold.
Berghain is the first single released from LUX. It’s named after the renowned Berlin techno club, an acronym formed from the two bordering neighbourhoods: Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain. The club is notoriously secretive, with everything happening inside remaining a mystery that can only be explained by those who have experienced it. While no explicit meaning has been provided for the title, I think ROSALÍA is utilising the rich and infamous context of Berghain to make a rebellious and juxtaposing statement about religion. Berghain’s guarded entrance mimics the exclusive gates of Heaven—an eternal paradise you can only experience through faith. To be saved, God must have ‘…called you out of darkness into His marvelous [LUX].’ (1 Peter 2:9).
ROSALÍA is a Spanish artist whose culture is traditionally Roman Catholic. This colossal religious institution provides rules for attaining faith, but ultimately, spirituality is a mystical concept, unexplainable to those who have not experienced it. The club, Berghain, is a sanctuary of techno music that provides a form of spiritual liberation and transcendence for its occupants. Likewise, Berghain, to me, appears to be ROSALÍA’s commentary on her unconventional pursuit of the divine.
Opening Strings
The music video for Berghain opens with ROSALÍA coming home. She walks past a half-eaten apple, referencing the original sin, or perhaps the poisonous apple from Snow White. It sets a sombre tone for our protagonist who may be in emotional, spiritual, or psychological darkness, like the room. When she opens the curtains—letting the light in—the London Symphony Orchestra roars to life. The strings possess a sort of mania. It’s extraordinary, but far from what could be perceived as lovely or peaceful, illustrating how enlightenment can be painful. Ignorance is bliss, as the saying goes. Knowledge can be burdensome, isolating, and frankly terrifying. As you learn more, it’s destabilising to grasp how little you actually know. Often too, intellectual pursuits make clear ugly realities.
If Christianity is your truth, then it is wonderful to worship a God who has saved you to be in eternal relationship with Him. Equally, it’s awful to suppose that non-believers are cursed to eternal hell. Considering the psychology of cognitions more broadly, thoughts can be intrusive and incessant. This is where we meet our protagonist in Berghain. ROSALÍA’s thinking is ceaseless, persisting throughout mundane tasks in the home. From the chorus performed by the Escolania de Montserrat choir, we glean the content of her ruminations:
Chorus
Seine Angst ist meine Angst (His fear is my fear)
Seine Wut ist meine Wut (His rage is my rage)
Seine Liebe ist meine Liebe (His love is my love)
Sein Blut ist mein Blut (His blood is my blood)
Primed with religious imagery—the statue of the Virgin Mary and the Alexander McQueen, SS03 rosary heels—this chorus immediately speaks to the sentiment of abandoning yourself and submitting to God. Perhaps ROSALÍA is lamenting the conservative prescriptions of this.
For women, holiness has historically been pursued through purity, as could be symbolised by her scrubbing white clothes in Verse 1. Ironing the garment and making up the bed could also speak to the Church’s value of order, discipline, and traditional roles. In society we tend to pursue this with the same energy as the strings: heightened, neurotic, fearful.
Despite our adherence to these rules, they can be ineffective. ROSALÍA is troubled. Her rosary heels have stepped on gum, she’s feeling stuck, and she inspects a dented jewelled locket representative of her broken or closed heart. The imagery could speak to her yearning for God and her simultaneous desire to rebel against the singular path set out to find Him. Of course, the heart could also be symbolic of romance, for which the lyrics are equally apt. Infatuation and obsession with another exalts them to the status of idol. Their perceived magnificence, their wants, their needs—it consumes you entirely, like a god. It is unclear whether ROSALÍA believes salvation will come from religion or romance, or whether her pursuit of these was what condemned her in the first place.
Verse 1
Die Flamme dringt in mein Gehirn ein (The flame penetrates my brain)
Wie ein Blei-Teddybär (Like a lead teddy bear)
Ich bewahre viele Dinge in meinem Herzen auf (I keep many things in my heart)
Deshalb ist mein Herz so schwer (That’s why my heart is so heavy)
Verse 1 is stirring German opera which presents the audience with contradictions. Flames, which are fluid, are said to penetrate; teddy bears, which are soft, are said to be made of lead. ROSALÍA describes objects which are ordinarily warm and comforting and reconstructs them into something hard and dangerous. Her heart, which has such capacity for love, is also filled with things that burden her consciousness. Again, it is like religion and romance, both of which have the power to heal or to torture.
The chorus repeats, sustaining this narrative tension. ROSALÍA leaves home, locking the doors behind her, but these ruminations follow her onto the street.
Verse 2
Yo sé muy bien lo que soy (I know very well what I am)
Ternura pa'l café (Tenderness for coffee)
Solo soy un terrón de azúcar (I’m just a sugar cube)
Sé que me funde el calor (I know that the heat melts me)
Sé desaparecer (I know how to disappear)
Cuando tú vienes es cuando me voy (When you come, that’s when I leave)
ROSALÍA reverts to her mother tongue for Verse 2, singing vulnerably in Spanish of how she is lost and destabilised in her devotion—to God or the Other. Desperate for salvation, ROSALÍA turns to a cardiologist and a jeweller to mend her heart.
In the Popcast interview, ROSALÍA cites the French philosopher Simone Weil, who purported that to love is not to close the distance between you and the object of your desire, as is often our goal. In romance, we want to possess, to fuse, to consume. In religion, we can be driven to madness searching for truth and understanding. This pursuit is as futile as a cube of sugar remaining solid in the heat of coffee. It erodes you. Dismayed by the fruitlessness of these external remedies, ROSALÍA returns home as the chorus crescendos.
Chorus
Seine Angst ist meine Angst (His fear is my fear)
Seine Wut ist meine Wut (His rage is my rage)
This is divine intervention
Seine Liebe ist meine Liebe (His love is my love)
Sein Blut ist mein Blut (His blood is my blood)
The usual lyrics are punctuated by Björk, who sings ‘This is divine intervention,’ just as ROSALÍA finds her locked door standing ajar. It is a hopeful as well as a religious sentiment, insisting that regardless of how you may be hurt, healing is always possible. Revelation 3:8 says, ‘See, I have placed before you an open door that no one can shut.’
Bridge
The only way to save us is through divine intervention
The only way I will be saved is through divine intervention
As ROSALÍA enters, she and the room are transformed, both emulating the aesthetic of the 1997 Disney film Snow White. The German fairytale and German lyrics seem to acknowledge a key figure of inspiration for Berghain: the German abbess Hildegard von Bingen (Sibyl of the Rhine). Born in 1098, Hildegard was a nun, visionary mystic, poet, and legendary composer. Her hymns and liturgies are still performed today—a bridge for people to God.
This is significant because the Snow White scene this music video references is when the titular character is lost and scared in the forest. Animals swarm to her, and she asks a little bird (portrayed by Björk in the music video) what they do when things go wrong; the bird’s answer is to sing a song. Music is what draws Snow White out of the darkness and into the light. Björk sings that the only thing that can save us is divine intervention, perhaps for ROSALÍA and Hildegard von Bingen those two things are one and the same.
Outro
I’ll fuck you ‘til you love me (x3)
‘Til you love me (x5)
Love me
‘Til you
‘Til you love me
I’ll fuck you ‘til you love me (x2)
Love me (x4)
In Snow White, the animals join in singing A Smile and a Song, while the animals in Berghain seem to take on human form to play instruments in the outro. Performed by Yves Tumor, the outro is violent, despairing, and desperate. ‘I’ll fuck you till you love me’ almost takes on the rhythmic quality of repetitive, disconnected, penetrative sex. It feels like intimacy that is pornographic, artificial, and disembodied.
The acts we perform in religion and romance don’t make us saved, and they don’t make us loved. Eventually the outro drops the threatening posture of the lyrics ‘I’ll fuck you till…’ What repeats is the desperate plea: ‘Love me’. This devastatingly relatable and human sentiment is paired with distressing visuals of black liquid seeping from a deer’s eyes. Our fraught pursuits in religion and romance can obscure our vision, perpetuate harm, and bleed us to death.
As the music takes on a hopeless quality, we see images of the animals overlaid with musicians playing their instruments. The heart locket is mended, the sugar cube absorbs the coffee, and ROSALÍA transforms into a bird that flies away. Almost like a dove, this moment could symbolise when the Holy Spirit was gifted to Christians during Pentecost—a moment in which people were able to speak in tongues, facilitating understanding and connection. I am so inspired by this trilingual single, which features on an album using thirteen different languages because spirituality transcends language. The bird from Snow White turns to music as salvation, another art form that transcends language and other human demographics. Love and obsession too can be understood by anyone, anywhere, if they have experienced it. Again, a little like Berghain, which attracts techno lovers from all over the world.
As a bird, ROSALÍA is free. It’s the conclusion of the song, but there were feathers on her eyes throughout the music video. Freedom was always a part of her. It was promised. Sonically Berghain remains maximalist and tense, like how religion and romance can always be wielded to cause pain. But in the end, ROSALÍA is set free through Berghain, an avant-garde pop single which is musical expression in its most authentic and liberated form. It speaks to the magical and transcendent nature of spirituality and love when it is raw, genuine, complex, and real.
Final Thoughts
In her interview with Popcast, ROSALÍA references Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which explores the differences between masculine and feminine writing. Masculine writing tends to be more linear and structured; the feminine is said to be a vessel. Feminine writing opens a container, it holds space for exploration and reflection, which is exactly what Berghain does.
If I could summarise my lasting impression of the single, it would be through Simone Weil’s conception of love: love is consenting to distance between you and the Other. We cannot comprehend God and the innumerable ways people can connect with the divine, just as we cannot possess another person the way we want to, in love. Releasing control and the desire for perfection can be painful, eliciting a sort of grief. But Berghain speaks to the ultimate freedom that comes with this surrender. Berghain is feminine mystique. It is exceptional. Alluring. Frightening. Beautiful. Brutal. I can’t get enough—and neither should you.