Rosalía: From flamenco to superstardom

Before she started topping YouTube and Spotify ranks, Rosalía spent more than a decade training in flamenco, one of the world’s oldest, most heartfelt and most complex musical art forms

One Wednesday in July, 40,000 people gathered on a synthetic-grass field on the outskirts of Madrid to watch Rosalía headline the Mad Cool festival’s “welcome party”. For the next three days, 103 acts — including Bon Iver, Iggy Pop and Prophets of Rage — would appear at the festival grounds, which were ornamented by a towering white Ferris wheel. Wednesday, however, was for Rosalía, Spain’s greatest pop export since Julio Iglesias. For her, Mad Cool was a quick stop in the middle of a nine-month tour through Latin America, Europe and North America. But as she took the stage in white platform sneakers and an aqua top with an enormous ruffle running over her arms and chest, she gushed in Spanish, “I am so, so, so thrilled to be here!”

Giant digital screens hung on either side of the stage, projecting her face to the crowd. Less visible was the garter-belt tattoo peeking out below her tiny, high-waisted shorts: a replica of the one that the Austrian feminist performance artist Valie Export gave herself onstage in 1970. Counterpointing sexiness with a kind of SoulCycle strength, Rosalía’s troupe of female dancers wore white bike shorts and hoop earrings. They finished “Como Ali” — an unreleased tribute to Muhammad Ali — with a series of long, rapid-fire air punches, then held their hands overhead in fists.

On one side of the stage stood two male percussionists — experts in performing palmas, traditional flamenco hand claps. Palmas formed the backbone of Rosalía’s next number, “Pienso en Tu Mirá” (“Thinking of Your Gaze”), a deceptively sweet-sounding tune about jealousy that mixes voices, palmas and electronic samples. The song, a Pitchfork critic wrote, “stands out from virtually everything else on the global pop landscape”. It appears on Rosalía’s 2018 CD, El Mal Querer (Bad Love), aka EMQ, which earned raves all over Europe and the US as one of the best albums of last year. The album’s first track, “Malamente” (“Badly”), streamed 15 million times in its first week in May 2018 and went platinum on the United States Latin charts earlier this year. “Malamente” also earned Rosalía two Latin Grammys and five total nominations, making her the most-nominated female artist in 2018. Last month, with the rest of EMQ finally eligible, she repeated the feat, picking up five more Latin Grammy nominations, including Album of the Year.

EMQ transformed Rosalía’s life, turning her into a sought-after collaborator who has recorded songs with James Blake, A Chal, Ozuna and Pharrell Williams. In March, she posted “Con Altura” (“High Class”), a reggaeton collaboration with J. Balvin, on YouTube. It now has more than 951 million views, crushing Billie Ellish’s “Bad Guy” (567 million views), Ariana Grande’s “thank u, next” (432 million) and Taylor Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down” (145 million).

Success like this inevitably provokes backlash. In Spain, rumours suggest that Rosalía is a fake created by industry professionals to satisfy market trends. Spanish Romani Gypsies have attacked her for using words of caló (Romani dialect) in her lyrics and for adopting Andalusian pronunciations and street styles in her videos. Catalan nationalists have complained that she should be using her platform to win support for their independence movement. In the US, she has been accused of “Latinx appropriation” by critics on Twitter who argue that as a European country, Spain should be excluded from winning Best Latin awards. But if you love music, Rosalía’s groundbreaking compositions and otherworldly voice are themselves the best answers to these sociocultural darts. Before she started topping YouTube and Spotify ranks, Rosalía spent more than a decade training in flamenco, one of the world’s oldest, most heartfelt and most complex musical art forms.

As Rosalía poured out the flamenco classic “Catalina”, people wiped away tears. Her voice is both raw and liquid, vaulting smoothly from aching tenderness to angry longing. When she performs pure flamenco, Rosalía often sounds as if she’s pulling her heart out through her mouth. Duende — the ability to transmit deep, authentic emotion — is a moment of nearly mystical self-effacement in flamenco, akin to an actor’s disappearance inside a role. Its emotional vulnerability cannot be faked. Whenever she performs, Rosalía told me, she always tries to find that moment when “you’re not there as an artist, not there as a person with your first and last name,” she said. “You’re nothing more than a channel” for the song’s “soul” to pass through to an audience. “You’re there more than ever, and super awake, but at the same time you’re gone.” She smiled with embarrassment, as if she were sharing a secret.

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