In July 2022 I saw Rosalía in concert at the Estadio de la Cartuja in Seville.
Rosalía is not mine and does not belong to me generationally. My generation, X, those born between 1965 and 1980, is that of extreme hard.
But to me, at twenty years old, Extremoduro and that “going out, drinking, the usual stuff, messing around, talking to people” seemed like a shame to me. TO MorrisseyOn the other hand, he caught it. The traditional rock of ladilla, vomitona and epic neighborhood was not my world nor was it ever going to be. That’s why Asphalt, Topo, Log, Barricade y The Soft Ones They have always left me colder than the leg of a poisoned deer.
And if the neighborhood crab was from ETA (Scar, cut off, Something), morality was added to the aesthetic indifference.
Not even to Albert Pla I never saw the fun in it, despite being Catalan and having grown up in a provincial culture that venerates eschatology with Marian fervor.
I started liking Extremoduro when I was forty, when I understood that beyond vomiting there was intelligence. For me, everything enters through my head and almost never through my gut. In that aspect I am the antagonistic pair of Lorena G. Maldonadoto which everything enters through the viscera.
[Ana Zarzalejos dice que intelectualizarlo todo es el camino más directo hacia el infierno, y tiene razón].
I, at twenty years old, and like a good adolescent giddy due to overeducation, tended more towards the Anglo-Saxon. I didn’t listen to Extremoduro, but I did listen to Guns’n’Roses, Mudhoney y Alice in Chainswhich were traditional American rock with crabs, vomiting and heroin overdose.
But if Mudhoney had been from Plasencia and not Seattle, and their song was called Rub me, I’m bad instead of Touch Me I’m SickI probably wouldn’t have spent even half a minute on them.
This comes to mind that I was already an idiot when I was twenty.
I like Rosalía. But cerebrally, since I suppose he likes Ulises of Joyce who likes him Ulises by Joyce. Rosalía does not sing opera well (the air escapes due to coughing), doesn’t sing flamenco well and doesn’t sing hip hop well. Rosalía is a 5 in everything and a 10 in nothing.
But that helps it shine in a market in which Bad Bunny, Dua Lipa o Taylor Swiftto give three stupid examples, are a 1 in everything and a 2 in nothing.
In Rosalía, however, the mix works. More for shock and awe aesthetic than for real technical capacity. But it works.
The historical judgment is something else. There will be two songs left by Rosalía. Because Rosalía, although they try to sell us otherwise, is music of first impulse, like the sweets at the supermarket cash register, which are there to take advantage of their tiny window of opportunity. Two seconds before or two seconds after, those sweets would go unnoticed.
But in line at the supermarket, two seconds is a very long timeas I would say Juanito.
Rosalía’s music, in short, is an “experience.” And, as such, it is intended to be consumed, digested and discarded almost immediately. Its expiration date is tomorrow at the same time as today.
The key word is “experience.” In 2025 everyone sells “experiences.” But nothing seems to penetrate too much. Everything is at skin level. Nobody goes deep into anything and nothing goes deep into anyone.
An example. When Rosalía talks about opera (or, for that matter, God) she is talking only about ingredients, not the final product. Rosalía is not “modern opera” or “the spirituality of the 22nd century.” She’s just a talented artist who mixes old things that others have already invented.
And in this Rosalía is no exception. It’s been at least two decades since anyone invented anything new in commercial music. Because? Because cultural Darwinism is extreme today. Each new album, each new musical generation, exhausts itself. There are no family trees, only stove flowers. Everything is adaptation to the environment. And the means is the algorithm.
Today’s culture is not orgasms, but spasms. Which is different.
Let me be understood well. In art, what is not homage is plagiarism. Nobody invents anything and everything is derivative. But our time is special. Everything, absolutely everything, refers to the past.
‘Blank Space’, de W. David Marx.
Some, like W. David Marx in his book Blank Spaceblame neoliberalism for current cultural mediocrity.
Marx says in Blank Space that art, entertainment and fashion have since 2000 been a combination of recycled, corporate or simply stupid content. According to Marx, there is a “white space” where a popular culture should exist today.
But neoliberalism is an absurd straw man. The conversion of pop culture into an inconsequential product It is the consequence of a previous sociological transformation, not its cause.
Winona Ryder criticized in an interview in 2024 those young actors in the world of cinema who don’t even like cinema. Without mentioning her, he was referring, among others, to his co-star in Stranger Things Millie Bobby Brown. The protagonist of Stranger Things She is, in fact, famous for not liking cinema. When someone recommends a movie to her, she replies, “How long do I have to sit there? Because my brain doesn’t even like to sit down and watch my own movies.”
Culture today is made by people who don’t even like culture.
An example. Today I have listened to Turnstile, Alcala North y Natanael Cano.
But I am aware that I am looking for something in them that commercial music is no longer incapable of giving me. The feeling of living a revolution. That’s what I said Lou Reed: “The best heroin trip is the first one. The next ones are just a pathetic attempt to repeat that first trip. But it never happens.”
That’s what those of us who continue consuming music, movies or books do: we try to repeat the high we experienced when we discovered Bret Easton Ellis, David Lynch or, for that matter, extreme hard.
But now the revolutions are sponsored by Deutsche Bank shouting “the future belongs to civil servants and retirees.” It is the revolution of gerontocracy and shopping centers.
Maybe not even that feeling is new. The cristiancampos from the 90s they could have told me “well, your artists didn’t discover anything either.”
Extremoduro were Log y TrianaSeattle grunge era Led Zeppelin y Black Sabbathand the Strokes were Blondie and the Velvet Underground.
That is, artists from the 60s, 70s and 80s presented in slightly more modern forms.
Perhaps beyond those three founding decades, those of the 60s, 70s and 80s, everything has been derivative.
There are arguments to defend that idea. Turnstile are Bad Brains: Alcalá Norte, Burning y Joy Division; and Natanael Cano, The Tigers of the North.
Invent, what is called invent, they have not invented anything. Some of them are, in fact, deeply reactionary. Turnstile is the melodic hardcore of Washington DC in the 80s. Alcalá Norte, pure and simple Madrid scene. Natanael Cano, rancheras. Rosalía’s own music is very reactionary.
All this comes from the fact that I only see people dancing around the same corpses with slightly more modern shapes and more complicated drugs. In a few years they will smell like a corpse. Their life expectancy is significantly shorter than that of artists from previous decades.
As has happened in many other cultural industries, and that includes youtubers, tiktokers y onlyfanerasthe creative musical middle class has completely disappeared, devastated by the same algorithm that has devastated cinema, literature or journalism.
Or you are the aristocracy, read Taylor Swiftor you are working class of the click. Pure Stakhanovism of attention. Slaves of the lelo impulse. Spasms at the price of an orgasm (I know the metaphor is vulgar, but it is understood, and that is what matters).
So the feeling that something has broken, that pop culture has died and it is only a machine that works by commercial inertiaturning the same ice cream stick over and over again rechupaoseems to be based on something more than “sensations.”
But at Rosalía’s concert I saw something I had never seen before.
Thousands of spectators looking at their phones while Rosalía sang on stage.
Not taking photos of her. Or taking selfies with your friends and checking the result for a few seconds on your phone screen.
There were hundreds, thousands of people chatting with other people or watching videos of Rosalía while the real Rosalía sang on stage. The concert was background music for them.
Muzak. Elevator music.
From time to time, someone would look at the stage, make a comment to their companion, and continue looking at their cell phone.
And I thought “this is new.”
Artistically, the new generations are not going to offer anything that has not been done before. But sociologically they are a new universe.
These new generations live in a bubble of “simultaneous experiences” completely disconnected from tangible reality. I guess, if you give them the choice, many of them will prefer the bubble to reality. Because the bubble is controllable by them with a clic and reality does not.
And I suppose that is a revolution: it is not that today’s music is rubbish and that of decades ago is not; is that no one who is less than thirty years old today believes that anything exists that deserves more than four or five seconds of your attention, let alone your interest.
That is the real gap.