Impostor Syndrome
When the metamorphosis is constant, how do we ever know the true form?
rosalía achieved maximum saturation at a shocking speed. In a flash, whispers about a gifted singer-songwriter from Spain reimagining flamenco music blossomed into near-global acclaim as the taste for stark, traditional covers displayed on her 2017 debut album, Los Ángeles, evolved into the spirited genre hybridization and careful pop inroads of its 2018 successor, El Mal Querer. By 2019, Rosalía was guesting on international hits alongside música urbana elites J Balvin, Bad Bunny, and Ozuna, and on English-language records by Travis Scott and James Blake. She has described this evolution in self-mythologizing terms, telling The Fader in 2019 that when she encountered flamenco at age 13, she immediately saw the role it would play in her musical future: “I realized, This is my path.” The quest to fill reggaetón and Latin trap songs with the melodrama and vocal theatrics of flamenco singing has earned the vocalist an embarrassment of praise. El Mal Querer received awards at the Latin Grammys in 2018 and 2019 and was named Best Latin
Rock, Urban, or Alternative Album at the 2020 Grammys; the Billie
Eilish duet “Lo Vas a Olvidar” was crowned Best Latin at the 2021
MTV VMAs. But Rosalía’s critics, and even some of her admirers, see a problem: a white European woman swiping accolades that should be reserved for artists of color from across the Atlantic.
To a cynic, Rosalía may seem like a ringer. Born in Catalonia, the affluent territory in northeastern Spain that has been actively trying to secede from the country for the past few years, she received training from a vocal coach as a teen, landing at Taller de Músics—the Barcelona school with a stated interest in “the dissemination of jazz, flamenco, and modern popular music”—at 16. From there, she enrolled in the Catalonia College of Music, participating in its flamenco program, which accepts only one student a year. It’s not the common experience. Dabbling in reggaetón and adjacent styles tied Rosalía to external worldviews and gave her a feeling of cross-cultural solidarity. When performing in Mexico and Panama, she explained in a 2019 Billboard video series called Growing Up Latino, “I feel Latina.” There are people for whom this music is a matter of life and death, and there are people for whom this music is an
avenue of personal expression. Rosalía is a terrifyingly good study, a singer at ease with any sound she surveys, who bends genre, culture, and music history to her will. As she excels in scenes linked ineffably to specific cultural identities, questions about what is gained and lost when she takes up space in these communities persist. Some flamenco purists perceive the Catalan star’s success in a historically Andalusian form as an insult. Rosalía responded in 2018, stating that flamenco doesn’t belong to their community or anyone else’s. As she circles reggaetón, dembow, and bachata now, her every move seems to annoy someone.
Motomami, Rosalía’s third album, shows off three years of gains and lays out its goals in the first song, “Saoko,” borrowing the chorus from Puerto Rican reggaetónero Wisin’s 2004 hit “Saoco.” She raps about embracing change and finding peace in her inconsistencies: “Me contradigo, yo me transformo/Soy todas las cosas, yo me transformo.” If water is always changing states, chilling to become ice or warming to steam, why are we expected to stick with a fixed persona? Motomami revels in dualities: It’s an album about trying to square the pangs of desire with the freedom of being single, about wanting to look fantastic but knowing that beauty eventually fades, about juggling the love of self and family and men and God, about combining sounds from the past and the present, from the avant-garde and the mainstream. “Saoko” recalls aughts reggaetón but plays with your expectations for that instrumentation, shifting on a dime from rockadjacent distortion to jazz, warning listeners to torch whatever preexisting ideas they had about this album.
This music is restless, a puckish expression of exquisite taste. No style sticks for two songs in a row. After “Saoko,” “Candy” serves flashy synths and Burial samples. “Diablo” interrupts its feathery reggaetón with stately James Blake vocals—this after the title track’s loopy Pharrell production. “La Fama” one-ups the old bachata remixes of the Weeknd’s hits, getting Abel Tesfaye to sing an original, then “Bulerías” recenters flamenco. The latter offers a close look at the spiderweb of influences Rosalía pulls from as it invokes the names of some of her heroes in prayer: “Que Dios bendiga a Pastori y Mercé/A la Lil’ Kim, a Tego, y a M.I.A.” (“Bulerías” also offers rare insight into how the singer copes with backlash as she pledges to meet negativity in kind— “De cada puñalaíta saco mi rabia”—and compares herself to the suffering woman from 1940s and ’50s flamenco star Manolo Caracol’s “La Niña de Fuego.”) Triangulating Rosalía’s interests through references, samples, collaborators, and covers is exhilarating. “Delirio de Grandeza” reimagines Cuban singer Justo Betancourt’s 1968 Fania Records weeper, adding some of the short-lived rap duo Vistoso Bosses’ 2009 Atlanta bass track “Delirious.” “CUUUUuuuuuute” gets Argentine DJ and producer Tayhana to loop up vocals from Vietnamese social-media star Soytiet for a clattering dance track that suddenly collapses into a quiet piano break. It’s here that Motomami starts to feel a bit too coolly curated, though, like an attempt to get the listener lost in its vastness. It’s a jolt when the breathy, carnal exaltations of “Hentai” give way to sped-up raps in “Bizcochito,” where smirking rebuffs invert dembow tradition, suggesting straight men aren’t the players they’re allowed to believe they are: “¿Tú eres el que pimpeas o te pimpean a ti?” “G3 N15” recasts our theme as lust, not love: “Esto no es El Mal Querer, es el mal desear.”
A message of self-sufficiency and empowerment steadies Motomami through roiling creative twists, those owed to its twin interests in complicating our grasp on Rosalía’s abilities as a vocalist and tying international movements in modern Spanish-language music to their 19th- and 20th-century antecedents. El Mal Querer dealt in stories about escaping toxic relationships, a quality inherited from the source material it was based on, the tale of a woman locked in a tower by her jealous husband. Motomami keeps suitors at arm’s length. These songs luxuriate in designer threads and spurned advances; they also warn of tethering self-worth to desirability and material wealth.
In the years spent fine-tuning the sound and scope of this album, Rosalía has spoken candidly about her interest in effecting change in a music business that overlooks women. As eager as Rosalía is to shake things up, though, her career path is familiar: The story of the godsend whose raw skill justifies the space they occupy in communities of color is also the story of Eminem, who has won the Best Rap Album Grammy six times, more than any other living rapper. Whiteness, or proximity to it, often buys artists greater visibility, even in non-white spaces. White artists get commended for trying to “transcend culture,” while performers of color get pilloried for the same behavior. Rosalía has admitted that privilege is in part what affords her the freedom to change drastically with each album and to enjoy acclaim that was never showered on the innovators of the genres she delves into. Motomami offers a chance to fix that.
Only you’d really have to lurk the album credits and be eagle-eyed with the music videos to catch the contributions of Caribbean and Latin American musicians to Motomami. The real revolution would have been bringing everyone to the table to share the spotlight this concerted push for crossover success is bound to generate. It’s not Rosalía’s fault the music industry uses Latin interchangeably with Spanishspeaking while ignoring the deeper distinctions the former carefully delineates.
She is not to blame for narrower opportunities for artists who don’t sing in English or for the long history of talent shielding white artists from criticism. Look, Rosalía can make whatever music she wants. She’s brilliant. Motomami is great. But if her vision for this music of San Juan, Santo Domingo, Medellín, Miami, and the Bronx fails to honor the richness of those origins, if the story is just the richness of her gift, this isn’t the change she prophesied. ■