Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Let's establish some facts first. Are you or are you not a fan of Rosalia? I'll say I'm a cusp.
I am not, but I'd like to be.
I'm definitely a fan. I can't say I'm a stan because I don't have a parasocial relationship with her yet, but I will say I'm a huge fan of her music.
I love the yet. I would say I am an admirer of Rosalia's talent. The music is good. That's undeniable. But the aesthetics make me a little, let's say, uneasy. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. Spanish artist Rosalia's new album, Lux, came out today, November 7th.
And the release, it has been causing a stir amongst fans and critics alike. We're getting into it with writer and critic Bilal Qureshi and writer and critic Michelle Santiago-Cortez. Welcome to the show, Michelle and Bilal.
Thank you for having us.
Thanks for having us, Brittany. So just some background here for those of you who may not be familiar with the princesa. But a consistent critique of Rosalia and the music industry as a whole has been the blurred lines of who is or is not a part of Diasporic Latinidad. Now, while I respect Rosalia's talent, her aesthetics are giving throwback Gwen Stefani, and not in the fun way. Walk with me.
Rosalia is a Spanish pop star, Spanish as in from Spain, the European country, who got her start making flamenco music. She sings predominantly in Spanish. but shot to fame masquerading as a Latin American or Afro-Caribbean person. Even though she's from the country that colonized those regions.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of Rosalía's new album 'Lux'?
Right. We, of course, don't know what's going on in Rosalia's mind and why her aesthetic is evolving. But Michelle, I'm hearing you talk about how you and I'm sure a lot of her audience are understanding her performance of identity within a larger context. Yeah.
We don't exist in a world where like what artists do is like separated from the political and historical context of it all. I think it's kind of a stretch to like accuse it of being like any kind of orchestrated master plan thing of like her capitalizing on Latinidad and then dropping it because it's getting dangerous. But it's like. they're all happening on the same screen.
Like it's the same phone that's showing me the ICE detention videos and her pivot to white girlness. No one can separate these two realities.
I would say that before the kind of collision with the idea of like playing Latinidad for gain, in Spain, she was also critiqued for, you know, being a flamenco artist as someone from Barcelona, because she's from Catalonia, that is the music of Andalusia and the Roma and underprivileged community that has produced that music in the south of Spain.
And there was a question of whether she could and should be the forbearer of this tradition. So there was the debate about her from the very beginning. Like, where do you draw the line between being a vulture of another culture or actually being legitimately inspired by it?
I think her response has always been I'm someone who travels and who's very open to lots of ideas and I'm inspired by different things. I feel like it's been a little more complex than that. But I think her the critiques of her kind of get into a larger question of like who is guilty of appropriation and who's guilty of being inspired.
I don't see the new album as being, to be honest with you, that big of a problem. pivot away completely from her sound because there's still hard-driving sections in the album that kind of, I think there's going to be some songs that are going to be kind of bangers and there's some that are more classical. I mean, it's not like the orchestra is throughout. She's not singing an aria in this album.
It's still a pop record.
Although Berghain, she gets a little operatic with it. She gets a little operatic with it.
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Chapter 3: What are the critiques surrounding Rosalía's connection to Latinidad?
I mean, the one thing about her records, and I think that's why music critics really like them, is that they're extremely complex and they invite and they reward lots of dissection. So I think people will nerd out on all the stuff going on because it's a long album and quite a dense album in some ways.
You know, she kind of blew up at a moment that America was having what sort of was described as a second Latin pop wave, post-Despacito and the kind of rise of like Bad Bunny as well at the same time. And she was sort of marketed into that moment and singing mostly in Spanish because she doesn't sing in English really.
Like you pointed out below, like she was imported into the North American market. as part of this second wave Latin boom. She was marketed as a Latine artist. Audiences received her or were encouraged to receive her as a Latine artist. And for better or worse, she played into that actively.
I think about the interview she did a few years ago. I think it was with Billboard called Growing Up Latino or something like that. And she said that she feels Latina. I have no clue if she'd say that today.
She said that and she was like, when I go to Mexico or Panama, I'm pretty sure the Spanish colonizers have always felt very much at home in Latin America because these are countries that were colonized in the likeness and image of their homeland. Not to be hyperbolic about her, but I really do feel like if she's the artist,
we say she is in terms of her virtuosity and her expansive thinking and her travels. I want her to live in the real world. If she's trying to connect people and she's talking about singing various languages because multiculturalism, I think that's fabulous. But we don't all live in the fantasy land where you can just travel everywhere and be Miss Worldwide.
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Chapter 4: How has Rosalía's aesthetic evolved over time?
If you really want to connect with people, why not acknowledge that you're on different levels of a very real caste system? But yeah, I do feel like the machine of it all is probably more liable. Like her record label is probably who's responsible for pushing her candidacy in the Latin Grammys.
I mean, when you talk the business of it all, or, you know, as both of you have gestured it, like how Rosalia is read by others, specifically, you know, we're talking in American context, a lot of Americans might see Rosalia as Latina.
Like, even if they never saw that Billboard interview where she said she feels Latina, they just might read her that way, even though she is very much a Spanish woman from Europe. And not from Latin America. Aside from her borrowing heavily from Latina and specifically Afro-Caribbean influences, what are some other reasons that American audiences specifically might misread Rosalia as Latina?
I think it's funny, but I always saw her as a European artist. When I saw that she had come from Barcelona and studied classical music in Spain, she's very much an internet it girl, too. It's very high fashion. It's very glam. I loved Michelle when you said Miss Worldwide. That's a big part of kind of her vibe.
It's very much like Euro tripping, like EU resident, flying between Berlin to Spain to whatever. But I do think that, you know, this sounds really basic, but sometimes I feel like in America we do forget that, like, Spanish is a European language as well. And I think she has sort of said that growing up in Spain, what's cool music in Spanish is Latin American music.
What's considered cool in Spain among youth culture, I'm not an expert on Barcelona or Madrid youth culture, but they listen to what people are making in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean as influence. And so I think in America, we have a particular relationship with Spanish as a language, which may also affect how she was marketed and branded and promoted and also what she herself was doing.
So yeah, I do think it speaks to kind of when international artists or people who have more of a global background come to America. you do have to like fit in in a certain way that is legible to us. It's true of African artists. It's true of like South Asian artists. You know, it's like, who do you feature with? Who are you shown with?
And in some ways we're in this big global Spotify moment, but I still think there are like limitations to what people can read and understand. Coming up. It's not an ethnic group to be a Spanish speaker, but it's a way of being connected to people around an identity, around a language.
More when we come back.
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Chapter 5: What themes are explored in Rosalía's 'nun era'?
100%.
who also were kind of presented as sort of raven-haired Latinos, because we've got Mr. Zorro himself.
Zorro, yeah!
And I would say that, you know, in a lot of ways, also Spaniards do have, let's not forget, 800 years of Arab-North African mixing and intercultural mixing that produced Iberia. I mean, flamenco comes with its roots in the Middle East and India, so a lot of what's going on musically is quite connected to sort of a whole other kind of music that Spain is part of.
I just think, you know, to me, I'm not saying this to forgive Rosalia or to dismiss the context that we're talking about, but it's hard for me sometimes to be always thinking about the context when you put on your headphones or listen to one of her albums because it's a completely immersive, incredible music experience.
I feel like I can't hear Rosalie without thinking about her chomping on that gum, though.
But she's not chomping on the gum in her nun era. She's gone to church, Brittany.
When it gets to like the gum chewing, it's just so cringe. It's like watching Taylor Swift do hip hop. So I think broad strokes. I think it takes a lot of work to put like. Rosalia's racial gymnastics next to her music. The racial gymnastics that gets ethically ambiguous happens in the marketing promotion side versus the music itself.
Like you said Bilal, I feel like if you never saw Rosalia interview or any Rosalia press and you just knew the music, I don't think these conflicts would come up at all.
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