Rosalía is redefining what it means to be Spanish in the 21st century

Rosalía singing at an outdoor concert in Madrid in 2017. Photo credit: Diario de Madrid, via Wikimedia Commons

‘Saoko’, the opening single of Rosalía’s long-awaited album MOTOMAMI, is a frenetic celebration of change and transformation. The song pays homage to ‘Saoco’, the 2004 reggaetón hit by Wisin, featuring Daddy Yankee. But the similarities between these tracks end at the chants of ‘Saoco, papi, saoco’.  

Because instead of ‘Saoko’ being a song that lusts after the objectified feminine form, Rosalía’s song is a revindication of the singer’s ability to freely evolve and combine supposedly contradictory genres and concepts, to create something entirely new. In the single, Rosalía lists her models of metamorphosis, which are everything from ‘Kim K cuando está blonde’ (a blonde Kim K) to ‘Cuando entra el caballo a Troya’ (the Trojan horse).  

These metaphors and the track’s fusion of alternative reggaetón, industrial sounds and a jazz interlude cement Rosalía’s place in music as a culturally disruptive and liminal figure. In this way, the opener of the MOTOMAMI project serves to introduce the Catalan artist’s shift both aesthetically and musically to a more explicitly reggaetón and hip-hop-adjacent form of expression. But instead of presenting it as a commercially driven change, Rosalía uses ‘Saoko’ to communicate to us that, like ‘una mariposa’ (a butterfly), she naturally goes through different phases. It is clear that Rosalía wants her MOTOMAMI era to be consumed with this in mind, and not to be viewed as incompatible with her heavily flamenco-inspired discography in the past or be perceived as proof of her ‘selling out’ to appeal to North and South American audiences.  

The cultural fusion foregrounded in MOTOMAMI shows us the main intention of Rosalía’s project as an artist: to play with established cultural binaries and subvert them. This aim is present throughout her discography, namely in the album that brought her international acclaim and attention, El Mal Querer.  

In El Mal Querer, Rosalía focuses on a fusion between flamenco - a traditional, bullfighting, Catholic Spain - and contemporary trap and R&B. This explicit merging of Spain’s past and future, of tradition and innovation, was instantly irresistible to critics and audiences outside of Spain alike. I belonged to this demographic, first introduced to Rosalía through the song ‘MALAMENTE’ that my Spanish teacher played for us in a Year 11 class; this was because he felt that there were enough Spanish cultural references in the music video for it to be educational for the class, and contemporarily catchy enough for it to hold our attention during a period 5 lesson on a Friday.  

The cultural references present in the ‘MALAMENTE’ music video are muy Spanish, with bullfighting being a recurring visual theme, skateboarders wearing ‘capirotes’ (pointed robes worn during Semana Santa) and choreography that, though similar to that of American pop artists, still contains flamenco moves and flair. In this way, Rosalía used elements of Spanish folklore to construct her own future-looking identity that reflects her Spanish context but is also a demonstration of the great influence international (mainly North American) culture has in modern-day Spain.   

This sentiment was echoed by Rosalía in a Billboard interview published in early 2022, in which she said: ‘I’m very proud to be from Barcelona. But I love that my music is affected by the fact that I travel, the fact that I’m in new places and surrounded by new people constantly.’ According to her, she has not modified her persona in order to cater to the predominantly American market, but rather wears her influences on her sleeve. 

Rosalía’s desire to preserve her base musical identity, linked to Spanish genres, has led her to invite North American artists like Travis Scott, The Weeknd and Billie Eilish to sing in Spanish rather than in English in their collaborations. This is a huge symbolic feat for a non-anglophone artist, given that many international stars (Shakira, for example) begin to sing in English, the reigning language of the music charts, as soon as they gain mainstream popularity. Rosalía boldly rejects this trend, although she is undeniably aided by the reggaetón boom happening globally, boosted by artists like Bad Bunny and J Balvin. This boom has effectively put Spanish-language music ‘on the map’. 

It is not only Spanish, however, that features in Rosalía’s music and public persona, but Catalan. This is another considerable achievement that has given the relatively small region of Catalonia exposure on the world stage; Rosalía released ‘Milionària’, a single entirely in Catalan, in 2019, and often uses Catalan words and expressions in her music. Her spotlighting of her Catalan identity also makes her status as Spain’s current musical darling a subversive one. In Spain’s current political climate, in which the popularity of pro-independence movements in Catalonia have been rising, Catalan culture and hegemonic Castilian culture seem to be in direct opposition with one another. In this way, Rosalía’s music is a symbolically uniting force on Spanish soil; she is universally loved, from Lleida to Madrid, subverting and undermining existing cultural and musical boundaries. And in doing this, Rosalía makes her listeners question the hierarchies present in culture in the first place, valuing Catalan trap and flamenco equally in her music.  

Her love of culture and of the arts in all their forms is also made evident in her work beyond her solo music career. She seems to be artistically involved everywhere and in everything, from a role in Almodóvar’s art-housey Dolor y gloria to her creation of the theme song for the Netflix comedy Paquita Salas; from her appearance on La Pija y la Quinqui (THE entertainment podcast of the moment for young people aged 16-25 in Spain) to her friendships with actors like Hunter Schaffer or public figures like Kylie Jenner.  

From her trajectory, it is evident that the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture does not exist in Rosalía’s artistic universe. Rosalía simply involves herself in what interests and stimulates her, and in domains in which she can bring her own innovative and futuristic flair. Similarly, her art is neither purely Spanish nor Catalan. We are increasingly alienated from explicit ideas of national identity in her work, as she draws inspiration from music genres like American hip hop and reggaetón, or the cinema of directors like Wong Kar-Wai. 

Her freedom to constantly experiment and explore different genres, whose origins often lie in marginalised, and racialised communities (flamenco and reggaetón, for example), while still being uplifted by the mainstream culture, is admittedly in part more indicative of her privilege as white European artist than simply her talent. She has been given free reign to engage with a wide range of media because she has been protected from being pigeonholed artistically. This advantageous treatment is especially evident when comparing Rosalía’s trajectory to that of other contemporary gitano flamenco artists like María José Llergo (an artist of a similar age and range to Rosalía), who has not been granted the same praise or acclaim. 

But Rosalía has nonetheless managed to establish herself as a very different sort of popstar in Spain and beyond. Her playful manipulation and subversion of traditional folklore and current media has allowed her to create an artistic identity that is contemporary, Pan-Hispanic and international while retaining her personal form of cultural singularity. It is this regionalist internationalism that has allowed Rosalía to reconcile Spain’s traditions and dark history with modernity and progress, disrupting the very foundations of hegemonic Castilian culture. In doing this, the Catalan artist has created something entirely new not only for Spanish culture, but culture at large.