In an interview with a fellow student named Jon a few months ago, we discussed the essence of diasporic identity being the ability to take the morally-rich parts of our parent-country’s heritage and the morally-rich lessons we learned from the new environment we were raised in and combine them to create our own identity, one that transcends any doubt we experienced trying to fit into exclusive circles throughout our lives.
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But what seems to be so unique about Rosalía’s flamenco-pop integration is that it embodies her transition into a purely diasporic art-form, beginning from the foundation of authentic Catalan flamenco and shifting according to her surroundings. “Despacito” became one of the most widely-heard songs in 2017, Riz Ahmed and Heems integrated Bollywood-inspired production with East coast rap and grime in their duo Swet Shop Boys, and Skepta found his way into every rapper’s feature list from A$AP Rocky to Playboi Carti to Drake. El Guincho, Rosalía’s co-producer for her newest album, has incorporated Hindi samples and Indian influences in songs like “Cuando Maravilla Fui” and “Bombay.” I even wrote about a project by Moroccan artist Bouchra Khalili in which she juxtaposes speeches by prominent (albeit controversial) North African leaders and revolutionaries next to those by Latin American leaders and revolutionaries to universalize the experiences of Maghrebi immigrants in Europe.įor Rosalía, she’s not the first to try and bring a niche, traditional genre like flamenco into the pop or hip-hop world.
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The Bollywood movie Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara draws connections between flamenco and Hindi music in its hit song “Señorita.” Indian authors like Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy incorporate elements of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude into their tales of India and Pakistan. This connection as well as Rosalía’s objective with flamenco-pop moving forward helped me realize the quickly-changing landscape of music that she is adapting to.įor me, this isn’t the first time I’ve been exposed to South Asian/Arab and Spanish cultures coinciding. Los Angeles and its similarity to Ghazal and Qawwali helped me connect to these feelings of loss in such a larger-than-life manner. Time passes as the narrator’s mother dies, and little brother dies, and the town’s gravedigger buries his daughter, and by the time you can’t handle anymore she concludes her narration with a cover of Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s song “I See A Darkness,” an ending that dually traps the narrator in her own head yet brings her closer to the ones she loves through her familiarity with imminent death. The pattern goes on from song to song, the concise feelings of loss piercing deeper in Rosalía’s vocals and getting heavier in each song’s lyrics. The elongated “Cuando yo” at the beginning takes you inside that raw emotion, those periods that seem like forever just waiting for that person to understand the extent of her love. The same effect captures you in the next song “De Plata,” as Rosalía expresses her mere 14 lines of anguish towards this unrequited love for 4 1/2 minutes.
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Oh San Rafael, to have the water so close and not being unable to drink it” Translation by Anonymous Válgame, San Rafael, tener el agua tan cerca y no poderla beber” Listening to “Si Tú Supieras Compañero,” you inch towards the desire she emanates through her lyrics and lilting vocals (as my friend would classify them), following her through an awaited climax that never arrives, just as she does when she remarks,
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Where I saw the beauty in the variety of her talents through “Brillo” and “Malamente,” I now also saw in Rosalía’s range of whispers and shrill screams compiled together into a central theme. Los Angeles likened itself to that hour-long string of consciousness prevalent in performances by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the feeling like you’re listening to one long song with fragments of various identities that tie in with its overarching theme of love or loss or peace. Her vocal range and constancy of such a raw performance took me back to childhood when my mom played her old Ghazal and Qawwali cassettes in those exact scenarios: when she cleaned, or folded clothes, or drove me to my friends’ houses. So I listened to Los Angeles again two or three times, and its beauty and elegance struck me in weird and nostalgic scenarios: as I cleaned my room, as I folded my clothes, as I drove to hang out with my friends. It couldn’t have been that this singer rose to fame among her peers had they thought she was boring.