Björk’s “Black Lake”

If you have 10 minutes … check out Björk’s video for “Black Lake,” an unbearably sad song about living in the aftermath of a relationship that has died. A while back, last year maybe, I read an interview with Björk and she talked about the ending of her long-time relationship, and she could not speak of it without welling up with tears. She had to keep stopping the interview. (I can’t remember where I read it.) It was such a touching and honest interview. And, of course, it is somewhat embarrassing to fall so spectacularly apart, in public – you want to hold it together – she keeps apologizing throughout. Reading, I thought of my own experiences with breakups, how completely devastating they can be, especially if you rely on that other person for comfort/company. It’s exponentially worse if they are engrained into your life, your schedule, the fabric of your day. Because what then? Who are you alone? Do you have any substance? I’ve had only one of those breakups, and once is enough.

Björk is an artist, and so she turned it all into art.

“Black Lake” was part of her MoMA exhibit, apparently, and now it is finally online. I watched it this morning and feel like I breathed only once … twice, maybe? .. during its entirety.

Filmed in and around a black-lava-rock cave in Iceland (with Björk in bare feet), it is an expression of sorrow so intense that it’s at Greek-Tragedy-Levels.

But more than the lyrics of the song, or anything like that, it is her performance here that really strikes me. The posture and the gestures. The opening “pose”, with the slight backwards motion. It’s archetypal, that pose. In other words, that shape, and its slight movement, LOOKS like what grief FEELS like. It is tapping into something universal, something that showed up on cave paintings, something we all know. And all of her gestures throughout have that same strange echoey resonance. The gestures are both controlled (she has chosen each gesture specifically), and totally out of control (once she commits to the gesture, she stops controlling it – and lets the gesture take over.)

For example, at around the 7:30 mark, something starts happening. And once it starts happening, it changes. The gesture goes through an evolution, and so does she. And once she starts committing to the gesture, it changes how she feels, or opens up the depths of the feeling. There starts to be an actual release of something. (This is my thing with “gesture.” You must commit to it on THIS level. A half-hearted gesture is nothing. It doesn’t express anything, and it also doesn’t transform you, the person making the gesture. You might as well not make it at all. As I went on at length in a post a while back: It’s Got to Cost You Something.)

These gestures cost Björk.

This is an extraordinary performance.

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6 Responses to Björk’s “Black Lake”

  1. sheila says:

    A quick Google search brought me the Bjork interview I mentioned in the post. It was with Pitchfork. It’s a great read. I’m not a huge Bjork fan, although “Big Time Sensuality” was as huge to me as it was to pretty much everyone that summer … but I do like her style, her individuality. She is clearly an artist.

    http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/9582-the-invisible-woman-a-conversation-with-bjork/

  2. mutecypher says:

    That was mesmerizing. There is so much anger in the lyrics, but her performance is more about the grief. Stylized, almost ritualized, but personal, inside herself for us to see.

  3. sheila says:

    I know – the lyrics! Her phraseology is so strange that sometimes I can’t understand her – but I know I caught “apocalyptic” in there at one point.

    The video seems to have a (somewhat) hopeful ending. Grass and sunlight, etc. But still!!

    • mutecypher says:

      I know that she can enunciate clearly when she wants – the line “I’m no fucking buddhist, but this is enlightenment” from Alarm Call is one I’ve used more than once in real life. I wonder if she buried the vocals in the mix because of some ambivalence about how angry they were. I don’t think it’s accidental that they are hard to get, hard to hear. Maybe she wanted the listener to work to understand her, given how strongly she felt and how hurt she was.

      The other video from her MoMA exhibit, Stonemilker, is also on line. More inclusive, more melodic and hopeful, but also striking.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQEyezu7G20

  4. CGHill says:

    I stared blankly at the screen for about five minutes after “Black Lake” was over. Clearly she picks herself up and moves on, as one must — but oh, the time she was down! At one point I was ready to apologize to every woman I’d ever met, on the off-chance (sometimes not so off) that I’d brought her there.

    Thank you for showing me this.

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