The young global Spanish star Rosalia has just released a revolutionary album - the real event of the season, which visionarily crosses classical, pop and flamenco
This is the year of Rosalia (full name: Rosalia Vila Tobella, b. 1992). She is one of the most successful singer-songwriters singer na in spanish language of all time, if the usual indicators are to be believed: she has just turned thirty and has already won two Grammys and eleven Latin Grammy awards, along with an unprecedented number of first places on the charts in her native country. Rarely have the industry and critics been so unanimous in their assessment that this is a generational talent that determines where contemporary pop music will move - today and in the future.
And although it comes from an unexpected direction - flamenco and its new reading - Rosalia has been pushing the boundaries within this genre since her first appearance: on her debut Los Angeles (2017), she crossed flamenco and hip-hop. He brought her fame The Bad Want (2018), which neo Flemish movement launched in mainstreamBrilliant album. mommy (2022), introduced her radical electro-pop with Latin inspirations, which deservedly made her a new global phenomenon. But all that did not prepare us at all for this miracle that appeared the other day under the name Luxury.
Luxury is definitely an album that will surprise you. He is anti-predictable. His heroic fusion of classical, flamenco and pop music is a new formula that illuminates this era in a very specific way, boldly finding a universal message and an unsuspected artistic depth, precisely in our confused time, in which the disintegration of all disintegrations seems to take place. And we, confused like this, suddenly have before us a crystal clear view of the world around us and an insight into our place in it. This is what great art always brings us.
Here there are no boundaries and nothing is set in stone - everything flows, everything changes, just like our world. Is this the music we've always dreamed of experiencing? In it, pop and classics are organically mixed as if it had always been taken for granted. When you listen to all that and start to wonder: how is this possible? How did it come about? How come we haven't heard that before?
SELF-KNOWLEDGEMENT OF A YOUNG WOMAN
Rosalia comes from a working-class family, born in a small Catalan town where her family arrived from other parts of Spain in search of work. And although she has a master's degree in flamenco singing, she also sang at weddings and clubs, and never lost touch with his folk roots. That is why even her most experimental songs are always carried by a voice of unusual warmth and sensitivity. From the extremely poetic verses sung here, we learn a lot about her life and emotional experiences around the globe. Rosalia, in this way, offers us the fullness of living in its natural splendor, which millions would like to experience. It's no different than what Taylor Swift does, but we like it more real and honest. The main theme of the album Luxury is the self-knowledge of a young woman. The path to self-knowledge for Rosalia goes through romantic relationships and a relationship with God. The poems are divided into four movements, with words in fourteen languages - Spanish and Catalan, as well as Arabic, Hebrew, English, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Latin, Japanese, Chinese Mandarin, Ukrainian and Sicilian. The texts in each of those languages have to do with the lives of different saints, and each speaks of some new knowledge about oneself.
The sensual spirituality of the album is completely unique, because it does not rely on previously known examples from soul or gospel. Instead, it builds a whole new model of sensibility for the new age - whether we are exposed to the dynamically motoring single "Berghain", the love tracks "Reliquia" and "Porcelana", the spiritual "Dios Es un Stalker" and "La Yugular", the playful "La Rumba del Perdón", or the ballads "Memória" and "Magnolias"... Luxury is a planetary product. It was made for three years and recorded in ten studios, with the help of the London Symphony Orchestra under the baton of the Icelandic conductor Daníel Bjarnason, and with the American producers Noah Goldstein and Pharrell Williams, and Rosalia herself as executive producer. Apart from her, French artists Charlotte Gainsbourg, Justice and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo (Daft Punk) appear as composers, and alternative diva Björk is a guest on her recordings. underground rap figure Yves Tumor, fado singer Carminho, flamenco star Estrella Morente and the American-Mexican group "Yahritza y su Esencia".
POP IS THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY GENRE
This music doesn't have a name yet. In it, within the same composition, classics, pop, hip-hop and flamenco alternate from beat to beat, with incredible soulful singing that holds everything together and dictates the message. A dizzyingly exciting, dramatic, unexpected - yet communicative - record carries the listener with all its might straight into the unknown. And we are transported, with the desire to stay there, in the unknown, forever.
As a serious, direct successor to "Bohemian Rhapsody" by the group "Queen", on the record Luxury we find a noted electro-opera aesthetic, foreign to any previous listening experience. It gives us the best possible insight into what all music creation can still achieve, if it uses the most modern studio tools... and we can already see young producers beaming at the freedom they experienced exposed to this turbulent sound fabric, which all the time plays with us and our expectations.
Pop music is the best reflection of our age. Luxury celebrates exactly that prevailing trans-genre vibe that dominates everywhere. Everything that directly creates some emotional content for us - euphoria or melancholy - is good in it, unencumbered by former cultural patterns. Everything can be listened to and watched at the same time. The fragile and uncertain spirit of our transitional era is faithfully conveyed in music on Rosalia's new album, which glorifies the ultimate freedom to explore the world again and receive it as a direct experience, as it suits the individual, without external dictates of any kind.
A masterpiece of postmodern music, which definitely confirms our old thesis that pop is actually the most revolutionary genre of this time.
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