BARCELONA, Spain — And Rosalia said: “Let there be Lux.”
Rosalia, world star of Spanish pop music. loved by millions for combining flamenco with Latin hip-hop and reggaeton, she amazed her fans with a radical shift.
Singer and songwriter new album “Lux” (“Light” in Latin) is unabashedly spiritual. Fifteen songs sung in 13 different languages, including passages in Latin, Arabic and Hebrew, are imbued with a longing for the divine.
And it gets praise from above.
Javier Gómez García, bishop of Sant Feliu de Llobregat, which includes Rosalia's hometown of Sant Esteve Sesrovires near Barcelona, was one of the first church leaders to praise her work in an open letter to his flock. According to the diocese, Rosalia's grandmother regularly attends Mass in Sant'Esteve Sesrovires.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Gomez said that while some of her songs were “provocative,” Rosalía “speaks with absolute freedom and without hesitation about who she believes God is and the desire and thirst (to know God).”
“As I listened to 'Lux' and Rosalía talk about the context of her album and creative process, I found myself exposed to a process and work that went beyond the musical. It was a spiritual quest through the testimonies of women of great spiritual maturity,” he said.
In her opening lyrics, sung over piano and mournful cello, “Who could live between two / First love the world, then love God,” Rosalía announces that this album represents a break from his Predecessors who received Grammy. “El mal querer (“Bad Love” in Spanish) and ” Motomami ” has made Rosalía one of the leading artists in the world of Spanish music thanks to her experimental urban beats.
Despite (or because of) the variety of styles and song forms, ranging from classical strings, electronic passages with a cameo by Björk, a boys' choir from a thousand-year-old monastery, arias in Italian, Portuguese fado and, of course, modern flamenco and hip-hop rhythms, “Lux” gained a strong start among listeners. It has four songs Global Spotify Top 50 Chart this week more than any artist, including Taylor Swift.
Madonna stated that she is a fan of “Lux” and composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. generously called it “album of the decade”
Rosalia, 33, said that after success in more popular forms of music, she let her long-standing yearning for spiritual guidance guide her in creating “Lux.”
“After all, in an era that does not seem to be an era of faith, certainty or truth, the need for faith, certainty or truth is greater than ever,” she told reporters in Mexico City last month.
She said she was guided by the concept that “an artist is less in doubt about his calling when he works in the service of God than when he works in the service of himself.”
Rosalia did not appear to have the revelatory “come to Jesus” moment common among evangelicals in America. Like many Spaniards, she grew up in a once staunchly Catholic Spain that has rapidly secularized in recent decades, especially among younger generations, leaving churches largely to older parishioners.
Even her early music flirted with medieval religious poetry, including one 2017 video in which she set to music a poem by the 16th-century Spanish poet Saint John of the Cross.
By adopting Catholic symbols and expressing admiration for female saints, Rosalia appears to eschew strictly organized practice and draws inspiration from other religions as well. “Lux” responds to this diversity of interests by, at one point, quoting a Sufi poet.
“I have read a lot more than I did years ago, reading many lives of female saints from all over the world,” she said. “They have been with me throughout this entire process.”
Her style has also changed. Gone are the hip-hop fashions and long false nails that Rosalía wore just a few years ago when she took the Latin Grammys by storm. Compare this to her appearance on the cover of the Lux album, where she is dressed in a solid white monk's veil, her hands apparently trapped inside her white top and her gaze averted.
Despite the potentially controversial move of comparing God to an obsessive lover in the song “Dios es un stalker” (“God is a stalker” in Spanish), Rosalía has won over the equivalent of the Vatican's culture minister.
Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, prefect of the Vatican's Dicastery for Culture and Education, told Spanish news agency EFE this month that Rosalia revealed a wider dissatisfaction with the secular world.
“When a creator like Rosalia talks about spirituality,” he said, “it means that she captures the deep need of modern culture to approach spirituality, to develop an inner life.”
Among songs about faith, Rosalía found time to sing tunes such as “La Perla” (“Pearl” in Spanish), which expresses contempt for a former lover.
This clever combination of high and pop culture is part of Lux's appeal, said Josep Oton, professor of the history of religion at ISCREB theological school in Barcelona.
“She has succeeded in creating popular music with very deep cultural roots,” Othon told the AP. “Anyone can listen to it, and people from different backgrounds can take away different things. It's pop music, but it's deep.”
“Lux” can be unnerving due to both the elaborate orchestration and the sparse amount of esoteric lyrics, which Rosalia was inspired to write after reading medieval mystical poets and their stories of transformative union with God through deep prayer and meditation.
In the moving “Relic” (“Relic” in Spanish), Rosalia compares herself to holy women, listing the parts of her body and life that she left behind in cities around the world, like relics for storage by others. Her “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti” (“My Christ is crying with diamonds” in Italian) is filled with an extravagant baroque image of jewels dripping from the eyes of the Messiah.
In the song “Divinize”, Rosalia celebrates “divina buidor” (“divine emptiness” in Catalan), a central concept of medieval mysticism that focuses on how the soul must experience abandonment in order to open up a space where God can enter.
Victoria Chirlot, a professor of humanities at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and an expert on the medieval female mystical tradition, liked Lux for its ability to introduce complex religious concepts to the general public, while noting that it was a “minimalist” example of the mystical tradition.
Sirlo said the moving composition “La Yugular” (“The Jugular” in Spanish) is rich in mystical thoughts, as the throat, the home of the voice and breath, is associated in many religious traditions with the body's door to the divine.
But for Sirlo, it's the whole package that makes Lux so impressive.
“Rosalia is not just a great singer; she is a great actress and her body language is full of mystical gestures, such as contorting her face into an expression of ecstasy, looking into nowhere,” Sirlo said. “And we also have her amazing voice, which creates a feeling of flight.”
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AP writer Berenice Bautista contributed from Mexico City.
