<\/p>\n
Sometimes it seems as if everyone wants to be a pop girlie. Last year, Taylor Swift counted herself among the \u201ctortured poets,\u201d but nowadays she is a self-described \u201cshowgirl,\u201d having released a short album full of bite-size songs co-produced by the distinguished hitmakers Max Martin and Shellback. The year\u2019s biggest new musical act is probably Huntr\/x, the fictional girl group from the animated Netflix film \u201cKPop Demon Hunters.\u201d When Demi Lovato, the former Disney teen idol, wanted to go back to her roots, she released \u201cFast,\u201d a perfectly superficial club track; the accompanying album is called, appropriately, \u201cIt\u2019s Not That Deep.\u201d Even MGK, the rapper turned rocker, tried to reinvent himself earlier this year with a video called \u201cClich\u00e9,\u201d in which he danced and lip-synched like a boy-bander desperate for one last hit. It was an amusing pivot, although it inspired such intense mockery that MGK felt moved to record an Instagram reel explaining himself. \u201cIt\u2019s a pop song, man,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
In this way and in many others, Rosal\u00eda is exceptional. She is a trained flamenco singer from Spain who found an international audience in 2018, when she released \u201cEl Mal Querer,\u201d an album full of diaphanous flamenco-pop experiments, which also served as her thesis project at the prestigious Catalonia College of Music. Rosal\u00eda\u2019s sound, full of curlicued vocal melodies and precise hand-clap rhythms, didn\u2019t resemble anything else in the pop universe, but Rosal\u00eda herself was obviously a star, and she followed the album with a series of high-profile collaborations, including reggaet\u00f3n hits with J Balvin (\u201cCon Altura\u201d) and Bad Bunny (\u201cLA NOCHE DE ANOCHE<\/em>\u201d). With her fierce, beat-driven album \u201cMOTOMAMI<\/em>\u201d (2022), she took her place among the Spanish-language artists who have lately transformed popular music. But these days she has something different in mind. When she announced that the first single from her new album was going to be called \u201cBerghain,\u201d some fans expected dance music\u2014Berghain is the name of the world\u2019s most famous techno club, in Berlin. What they got, instead, was essentially a three-minute opera, complete with an orchestral overture and a guest appearance by the avant-garde singer and composer Bj\u00f6rk, who arrives as a deus ex machina, howling, \u201cThis is divine intervention.\u201d The accompanying album, \u201cLux,\u201d turns out to be a sharp swerve away from the logic of the pop economy, in which songs compete to provide the most pleasure to the most people. \u201cLux\u201d sounds less like a streaming playlist and more like a cult film, or perhaps an art installation: there are fifteen songs (eighteen on the vinyl and CD versions), divided into four movements, with lyrics in thirteen different languages, and Rosal\u00eda\u2019s most constant companion is not the beat of reggaet\u00f3n but rather the swooping and swelling of the London Symphony Orchestra. Having conquered the pop world with ease, Rosal\u00eda is now embracing difficulty.<\/p>\n A certain recalcitrance has always been part of what makes Rosal\u00eda so compelling. As a teen-ager, she appeared on \u201cT\u00fa S\u00ed Que Vales,\u201d a talent-competition show on Spanish television; when one judge wasn\u2019t impressed, she said, in Spanish, \u201cI didn\u2019t come here to accept criticism,\u201d and the audience whooped in encouragement. Early in her career, she was sometimes celebrated for fleeing the strictures of flamenco music in order to find freedom on the dance floor, and on the charts. But dance floors and charts have their own rules, and one of the functions of an album as intense and expansive as \u201cLux\u201d is to remind pop listeners of all the limits that they typically take for granted. The album has a notably wide dynamic range, which means that listeners who lean in during the quiet passages may find themselves blasted backward by the thunderous climaxes. In \u201cDe Madrug\u00e1,\u201d she sings a few lines in Ukrainian to evoke the fervor of Olga of Kiev, the tenth-century ruler who massacred the tribe responsible for killing her husband. And for \u201cMio Cristo\u201d she basically wrote herself an Italian aria and then learned to sing it, building to a glorious high B-flat that she hits and holds; we hear a quick snippet of Rosal\u00eda\u2019s studio banter (\u201cThat\u2019s going to be the energy, and then\u2014\u201d) before the orchestra cuts her off with the reverberant final note. Pop stars often talk about working hard, but Rosal\u00eda makes most of her peers seem lazy, and, indeed, any listener not inclined to embark upon a multilingual research project may end up feeling a bit lazy, too. Rosal\u00eda\u2019s representatives asked journalists to listen to this album in the dark, while reading the lyrics on a screen\u2014logically impossible, for most of us, but doubtless Rosal\u00eda herself could find a way.<\/p>\n There is a story to \u201cLux,\u201d or maybe there are a few different stories. The lyrics hint at love, betrayal (one song includes the phrase \u201cun terrorista emocional<\/em>\u201d), revenge, and acceptance. The combined effect can be exhausting, in ways Rosal\u00eda\u2019s previous albums never were: the twists and turns of \u201cLa Yugular,\u201d a theological exploration inspired by Islam, are easier to admire than to enjoy\u2014at least until the finale, a pleasingly earthy clip from an old Patti Smith interview. Sometimes the lightest moments are the most affecting, such as when, in \u201cReliquia,\u201d Rosal\u00eda floats into her upper register, delivering a sumptuous and faintly sacrilegious expression of love and loss. \u201cI\u2019ll be your relic \/ I am your relic,\u201d she sings, in Spanish, and for a moment it all seems simple.<\/p>\n Like virtually all musicians, Rosal\u00eda seems to have mixed feelings about how separate she wants to be, really, from the pop marketplace. \u201cI need to think that what I\u2019m doing is pop, because otherwise I don\u2019t think, then, that I am succeeding,\u201d she told the New York Times<\/em>, in a recent interview. \u201cWhat I want is to do music that, hopefully, a lot of people can enjoy.\u201d But of course that\u2019s not all she wants. The single most surprising contributor to \u201cLux\u201d is Mike Tyson, who during a chaotic 2002 press conference told a journalist, \u201cI\u2019ll fuck you till you love me, faggot.\u201d This phrase, without the incendiary final word, interrupts the otherwise elegant coda of \u201cBerghain,\u201d shouted a few times by the electronic producer Yves Tumor. The interruption is a shock\u2014startling enough, perhaps, to dissuade some listeners from adding the song to their favorite streaming playlists, lest it ruin the mood. Maybe that\u2019s 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 fit pleasantly alongside other songs. A small but significant number of musicians have begun to withhold their music from these outlets, some for economic reasons (the sites don\u2019t pay much), some for political reasons (Daniel Ek, the C.E.O. of Spotify, is also the chairman of a military-technology company), and some for no stated reason at all. The new Rosal\u00eda album is available everywhere, but it echoes this desire to withdraw from a big, messy system, in the hope of encouraging listeners to engage in a more intentional, single-minded way; it\u2019s an album that\u2019s not designed to be ubiquitous, or to slip smoothly into our lives and playlists. \u201cLux\u201d wants to make us stop whatever we\u2019re doing and listen, which inevitably means that it\u2019s less broadly appealing\u2014less listenable, in a sense\u2014than albums that ask less. It\u2019s also much harder to forget.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.newyorker.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sometimes it seems as if everyone wants to be a pop girlie. Last year, Taylor Swift counted herself among the \u201ctortured poets,\u201d but nowadays she is a self-described \u201cshowgirl,\u201d having released a short album full of bite-size songs co-produced by the distinguished hitmakers Max Martin and Shellback. The year\u2019s biggest new musical act is probably […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2141013,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[22008,23083,343871],"class_list":["post-2141012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-magazine","tag-pop-music","tag-splitscreenimagerightfullbleed"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Rosalia-Album-Review-Lux-The-New-Yorker.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2141012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2141012"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2141012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2141014,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2141012\/revisions\/2141014"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2141013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2141012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2141012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2141012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}