Saint Rosalia
The Artist and the Weight of Her Own Light
It’s hardly surprising that the most fascinating thing about Rosalia’s new album has turned out to be its political marketing. The intuition that gives life to the record — and tries to hold its emotion together — is too deep for the price Rosalia seems ready to pay for her ambitions. The Bruce Springsteen biopic now in cinemas clearly shows the difficulties artists face when fame severs them from their surroundings. The Boss resolved it with an intimate transitional album released without promotion or press: Nebraska. Michael Jackson, after Thriller, doubled down with Bad — but his skin began to whiten suspiciously.
Rosalia’s case is a difficult one, because her problems are not merely emotional: she’s a Catalan in a Spain still wounded by the independence movement, and she’s operating in a world seemingly destined for inner conflict. The idea of exploring her personal crisis through the crisis of the West was a piercing one. I, at least, can relate to that—I’ve spent my life chasing the same theme in my books, though keeping the world limited to Catalonia. Her decision to narrate her small dramas through a series of saints, using Baroque imagery, strikes me as brilliant. As brilliant as what Springsteen did when he locked himself in a room to confront his fears — and the dark side of the American dream — through a gallery of outcasts, drifters, and loners.
The problem, it seems to me, is that Rosalia didn’t dare carry her intuition to the end, because she felt that her roots were an obstacle. Instead of making the record in Montserrat — right next to her home — or in Granada’s Alhambra — if she wanted to play with multiculturalism and flamenco — she made it in Madrid. The disappointment some of her fans have felt, I think, stems from that. In seeking a base that would guarantee international resonance, Rosalia abandoned the epic of purity and fragility she had set out to explore halfway. Without her interviews explaining the concept, and the visual world built around it, the album would be even harder to understand or value.
A radio critic said that Rosalia has made a record of ‘coplas’ — an Andalusian form refined in Bourbon Madrid — filtered through Björk in thirteen languages, as if she were a 21st-century Rocío Jurado. I cannot claim to be an expert on Spanish music, but the songs lack the melodic hook and precise detachment of Motomami. The lyrics are weak, and the song in Catalan, Divinize, sounds as if it were written with Google Translate: it lacks the clever simplicity of ‘Milionària’ or the emotional depth of ‘G3N15’. The whole album hangs halfway between confession and performance. Its sense of transcendence recalls that affected dramatism which, in Franco’s day, Catalans dismissed as an ‘espanyolada’ [an unsophisticated display of Spanishness]. The most genuine things to emerge from the record are its Baroque imagery — and the self-serving praise of The Guardian, The Times and La Vanguardia.”
I’m not sure Rosalia realised the ghosts she was summoning when she placed Baroque aesthetics at the album’s centre. The Counter-Reformation is convenient for selling Spanishness abroad, especially now that the West is going through a moral crisis. But inwardly, it represents the Castilian attempt to cover the fractured soul of the empire with the gold of the Americas. It’s no coincidence that Charles V went to Montserrat whenever he faced trouble, or that he spent more time in Barcelona than in any other city on the Peninsula. The Hispanic empire, built on the patterns of the Catalan one and later seized by Castile, is now trying to reinvent itself as a nation to save face. That’s why Rosalia’s album has provoked such unanimous, faintly oily enthusiasm among the guardians of order.
Rosalia doesn’t need to know all this, but she does need to treat her intuitions more sincerely if she wants to avoid being drawn into a political conflict she will never escape. Without meaning to — or without the inner strength to rise above opportunists — she has allowed herself to be carried along by a Spain that always reinvents itself out of its own decay. Rosalia, who wanted to enlighten us by speaking of her fragility, has ended up adding to the confusion of a world constantly putting on make-up to avoid looking in the mirror. Instead of testing herself against the raw elements, as Springsteen did in Nebraska, she has chosen to sing from the temple of appearance and merchandising — without becoming Michael Jackson, who never let himself be used politically.
We live surrounded by recycled images and myths, seeking redemption in the very light that blinds us. Lux, tellingly, is a mirror of our times: a mass without much faith, a void without enough silence, a fluttering beauty sinking under the weight of the gold so many clever people hope to get for free.