Spanish singer suddenly sings in German Megastar Rosalía shows why pop knows no borders

Spanish musician Rosalía has never shied away from breaking genres. Now she is venturing into classical music with her new album "Lux" - and remains one thing above all: independent.

Orchestra, strings, choir, an operatic voice. Spanish, English, German.

When the Spanish singer Rosalía releases "Berghain", the first single from her album "Lux", she surprises us. It is a song with sacred power - energy that charges, discharges, builds up again.

"His fear is my fear. His anger is my anger. His love is my love. His blood is my blood," sings a choir in German. Then Rosalía kicks in - and you don't know whether she wants to go to the Berghain club in Berlin or to mass.

As soon as it is released, the song is the talk of the town - because it sounds different from anything Rosalía has ever done before. And because Rosalía is suddenly singing in German.

But that's the way it is with successful women: At some point, the public assumes that there must be a man behind it. In Rosalía's case, this man is Emilio Sakraya, a German actor with whom she is said to be in a relationship and who - according to speculation - may have inspired her to write the German part of the song.

But anyone who attributes Rosalía's music to her boyfriend has simply not understood her. And if you want to understand it, you have to go back to the beginning.

Her head exploded when she heard flamenco

Rosalía Vila Tobella was born in 1993 in the small town of Sant Esteve Sesrovires near Barcelona. At the end of the 1980s, the car manufacturer Seat builds a plant there. Workers from all over the country move to northern Spain, including many from Andalusia, who bring flamenco with them.

At the age of 13, Rosalía hears the genre for the first time when someone plays the famous flamenco singer Camarón de la Isla in the park. "My head exploded," Rosalía later recalls of this moment.

Two years later, she sings a flamenco ballad on a Spanish television talent show. "That's not the song you should have sung today," said the jury. She has a lot of potential, but can't bring it out yet. Rosalía gets through anyway, only losing in the final - but gaining something else: the will not just to become famous, but above all to become a good musician.

Then her voice fails. The years of singing flamenco without any training have damaged her vocal chords. She needs an operation and has to take a break for a year. But even here she doesn't give up and enrols in a classical flamenco course at the conservatory in Catalonia.

Rosalía wants to create something original

To earn money in the meantime, she sings in restaurants and bars, at weddings and parties and records music for commercials. Then, in 2017, she ventured to release her first album. The songs on "Los Ángeles" are based on traditional flamenco melodies, with just the guitar and her voice. But Rosalía wants more, she wants to create something original.

So in her second album in 2018, which is also her graduation project, she mixes flamenco with R&B, hip-hop and electronic music. It is a risk. When she was working on it, she was in debt and didn't yet have a label. Little did she know that this album would bring her an international breakthrough.

Collaborations with the biggest artists in the world followed: Billie Eilish, The Weeknd, Bad Bunny. And the awards followed: She wins two Latin Grammys with "El mal querer". She has since gone on to win nine more Latin Grammys and two Grammys.

The more music Rosalía makes, the more styles she tries out. Her third album "Motomami" features less flamenco and more reggaeton, bachata, jazz, pop and electro. Everything flows together in her music.

Performances and tours then take her all over the world - including Switzerland. In 2023, she will play at Paléo and the Gurtenfestival. When you watch these performances, there is so much happening on stage that you never know exactly where to look first.

"A show that is far more than just a concert", wrote SRF afterwards. And the "Neue Zürcher Zeitung" writes: "No-one would have expected a concert of this caliber on the Gurten. It was a show that sent everyone else back to school." Her most-streamed song to date, "Despechá", has the entire audience singing along.

Recently, Rosalía has no longer limited herself to music - she also appears in front of the camera as an actress. For example, in the new season of the HBO series Euphoria, in which she plays a supporting role.

Music full of cultural and intertextual references

Rosalía's success is huge - but it is not without contradiction. It is precisely this blending of styles for which she is celebrated, but also criticized.

As a northern Spaniard, it is not her place to do flamenco, they say. And even when she turns to reggaeton, a traditional Latin American genre, there is a debate about whether this is cultural appropriation.

Rosalía herself argues that flamenco is based on a mixture of cultures and is made up of many different influences. "Music doesn't have an owner," she says. She also doesn't think about whether music is "correct or incorrect", but whether it is exciting.

Rosalías' work is full of cultural and intertextual references, to name just a few: "El mal querer" is a concept album about toxic love, inspired by a medieval novel. On the cover of "Motomami", she adopts the pose of Botticelli's Venus.

And on her thigh she wears a garter belt - a replica of the tattoo that the Austrian performance artist Valie Export had pierced on stage in 1970 and which is considered a symbol of the oppression of women by the patriarchy.

With "Lux", Rosalía ventures into classical music. Because Rosalía doesn't want to (or can't) do the same thing again. "I'm constantly changing, why shouldn't my music change with me?" she says in an interview. "Sticking to what I did before makes no sense. Change is the best way to honor my existence as a musician."

For her, it's not about herself, but about creating space for the stories that are happening around her - and that have happened before her. She thrives on contrasts, on friction, on opposites that are expressed in her music. And she creates a vessel in which she brings together what is seemingly irreconcilable.

"Habemus album"

And she takes her time to do this. "I don't feel like I'm too late when I follow my own rhythm," she says. "I want to make an album according to my own ideas." And so Lux comes when it has to - three years after "Motomami."

"Habemus album", Rosalía writes on the announcement, as if she were the Pope of pop culture. On the cover, she presents herself in a white cap and robe as a kind of nun. Her fans have long been calling her "Diosalía".

Rosalía thus immediately sets the theme of the album: it is about spirituality, feminine mysticism, transformation and transcendence, according to the official press release.

In interviews, Rosalía says that she read a lot for "Lux" - biographies of saints and nuns, theoretical texts on female writing and creation. She almost casually mentions names such as Hildegard von Bingen, Ursula K. Le Guin, Teresa of Ávila and Simone Weil.

You don't have to know them - but doesn't it say something about Rosalía that she can?

Chaos in Madrid at album announcement

Rosalía officially announces "Lux" in a livestream on TikTok and Instagram. Smoking, she drives through Madrid in her car and calls on her viewers to come to Plaza de Callao. But because so many people follow the call, there is a traffic jam.

In the end, Rosalía leaves the car and continues on foot - followed by hundreds of fans. In the end, she has to flee to a hotel. Meanwhile, a countdown is running on the Plaza de Callao, revealing the cover of "Lux" at zero.

Pure chaos. And because she didn't have permission for the action, she is now likely to face a fine. What remains are almost iconic images of Rosalía running through the streets of Madrid, all in white and laughing.

And it's part of a strategy to get the public in the mood weeks before the release. Two weeks before the release of "Berghain", she shares the sheet music of the song - whereupon fans on social media try to play the melody before they have even heard it.

Now it's here, the album: fifteen songs digitally, eighteen on the physical edition. Rosalía sings not only in German, English and Spanish, but also in Sicilian, French, Ukrainian, Arabic and Latin - thirteen languages in total.

With "Lux", Rosalía is once again pushing boundaries and building bridges at the same time. She wants to create something new again and reinvents herself once more. And once again she is taking a risk by combining musical styles that seem incompatible at first glance. It is her own version of pop - and that is precisely why it is pop.

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