Sometimes it seems like everyone wants to be a pop girl. Last year, Taylor Swift counted herself among the “tormented poets,” but today she's a self-proclaimed “dancer,” releasing a short album full of bite-sized songs co-produced by standout hitmakers Max Martin and Shellback. The biggest new music act of the year will likely be Huntr/x, the fictional girl group from the Netflix animated film “KPop Demon Hunters.” When former Disney teen idol Demi Lovato wanted to return to her roots, she released “Fast,” a completely superficial club track; the accompanying album is appropriately titled It's Not That Deep. Even MGK, the rapper-turned-rocker, tried to reinvent himself earlier this year by releasing a video called “Cliché,” in which he danced and lip-synced like a boy bander desperate for the latest hit. It was a funny twist, although it drew so much ridicule that MGK felt the urge to record an Instagram video explaining himself. “It’s a pop song, man,” he said.
In this and many other respects, Rosalia is exceptional. She is a professional flamenco singer from Spain who found an international audience in 2018 when she released “El Mal Querer,” an album full of transparent flamenco-pop experiments that also served as her graduation project at the prestigious College of Music of Catalonia. Rosalía's sound, full of quirky vocal melodies and precise handclap rhythms, was unlike anything else in the pop universe, but Rosalía herself was clearly a star, and following the album's release she released a series of high-profile collaborations, including reggaeton hits with J Balvin (“Con Altura”) and Bad Bunny (“Bad Bunny”).LAST NIGHT“. With her furious, beat-oriented album “MOTOMAMI(2022), she has taken her place among the Spanish-language artists who have changed popular music in recent times. But these days she has something else on her mind. When she announced that the first single from her new album would be called “Berghain”, some fans were expecting dance music – Berghain is the name of the world's most famous techno club in Berlin. What they got instead was essentially a three-minute opera with an orchestral overture and a guest appearance by avant-garde singer-composer Björk, who appears as a deus ex machina, howling, “It's divine intervention.” The accompanying album, Lux, proves to be a sharp departure from the logic of pop economics, in which songs compete to please the most people. “Lux” sounds less like a streaming playlist and more like a cult film or perhaps an art installation: there are fifteen songs (eighteen on vinyl and CD) divided into four parts, with lyrics in thirteen different languages, and Rosalía's most constant companion is not the rhythm of reggaeton, but rather the fast-paced, swelling sound of the London Symphony Orchestra. Having easily conquered the pop world, Rosalia now faces difficulties.
A certain tenacity has always been part of what made Rosalia so attractive. As a teenager, she appeared on Tú Sí Que Vales, a talent competition show on Spanish television; when one judge was not impressed, she said in Spanish, “I didn't come here to take criticism,” and the audience cheered her on. Early in her career, she was sometimes celebrated for escaping the restrictions of flamenco music to find freedom on the dance floor and in the charts. But dancefloors and charts have their own rules, and one of the functions of an album as intense and expansive as Lux is to remind pop listeners of all the limitations they usually take for granted. The album has a particularly wide dynamic range, meaning that listeners leaning in during quiet passages may find themselves thrown back by thunderous climaxes. In “De Madruga” she sings a few lines in Ukrainian to awaken the ardor of Olga of Kyiv, the tenth-century ruler who destroyed the tribe responsible for her husband's murder. And for “Mio Cristo,” she essentially wrote the Italian aria herself and then learned to sing it, building it up to a gorgeous high B-flat that she takes and holds; we hear a brief snippet of Rosalía's studio banter (“It'll be the energy, and then…”) before the orchestra cuts her off with a resounding final note. Pop stars often talk about having to work hard, but Rosalía makes most of her peers seem lazy, and indeed, any listener not inclined to take on a multilingual research project might end up feeling a little lazy, too. Rosalía's representatives asked journalists to listen to this album in the dark while reading the lyrics on the screen, which is logically impossible for most of us, but undoubtedly Rosalía herself could find a way.
Lux has its own story, or maybe several different stories. The lyrics hint at love and betrayal (one song contains the phrase “emotional terrorist“), revenge and acceptance. The cumulative effect can be tedious in a way never seen on Rosalía's previous albums: the twists and turns of “La Yugular”, a theological exploration inspired by Islam, are easier to admire than to enjoy – at least until the ending, a pleasantly down-to-earth excerpt from an old Patti Smith interview. Sometimes the lightest moments have the greatest impact, as when on “Reliquia” Rosalía floats into her upper register, enunciating a lush and slightly a blasphemous expression of love and loss “I'll be your relic/I'm your relic,” she sings in Spanish, and for a moment it all seems simple.
Like virtually all musicians, Rosalía seems to have mixed feelings about how separate she actually wants to be from the pop market. “I have to think that what I do is pop music, because otherwise I don’t think I’m successful,” she told New York. Timein a recent interview. “I want to make music that I hope a lot of people will enjoy.” But of course, that's not all she wants. The most surprising member of The Suite is Mike Tyson, who told a reporter during a chaotic 2002 press conference, “I'll fuck you until you love me, fagot.” This phrase, without a fiery final word, interrupts the elegant coda song “Berghain”, which is shouted several times by electronic producer Yves Tumor. The interruption came as a shock—perhaps so startling that it dissuaded some listeners from adding the song to their favorite streaming playlists, lest it ruin the mood. Perhaps this is the idea. Music streaming services encourage us to mix and match, so perhaps they also encourage us to spend more time listening to songs that pair nicely with other songs. A small but significant number of musicians have begun to withhold their music from these publications, some for economic reasons (the sites don't pay much), some for political reasons (Daniel Ek, the CEO of Spotify, is also the chairman of the board of a military technology company), and some for reasons that are unclear. Rosalía's new album is available everywhere, but it reflects a desire to move away from a big, messy system in hopes of encouraging listeners to engage more purposefully and with purpose; this is an album that is not intended to be ubiquitous or seamlessly infiltrate our lives and playlists. “Lux” wants to make us stop whatever we're doing and listen, and that inevitably means it's less compelling—less listenable, in some ways—than albums that demand less. It's also much harder to forget. ♦
