La Rosalía, by Meg Bernhard
"Most of my music taste, I admit, comes from my exes. Rosalía is the exception."
This is entry #7 of Know-It-All, a zine about obsession and fandom. In this essay, Meg Bernhard writes about Rosalía, living in Spain, and girl book clubs. Know-It-All zine is best read in print. To order a copy, go here.
My friend Cristina’s apartment was on Gran Vía de los Cortes Catalanes, the longest street in Barcelona. The apartment had worn tile floors in blue and sepia, and a balcony that looked out over treetops. We’d hang out there to drink vermouth and talk about the books we were reading together. Those books were all written by women — one of our friends had declared she wouldn’t read a single book by a man that year, so we tried to follow suit — and, though we didn’t intentionally create a themed reading list, most had a backdrop of unvarnished violence against women, like Samanta Schweblin’s Distancia de Rescate, a novel about a woman confined to a hospital bed in thrall to some mysterious ecological fear, and Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. This was early 2019, and the background music to our conversations was Rosalía’s second album, El mal querer. The album had blown up in Spain; its lead single, “Malamente”: (CAP. I AUGURIO) was an intoxicating blend of flamenco, pop, and reggaeton with an eerie subtext of regret and foreboding. The song hints at a woman’s fear of an abusive partner. “La Rosalía,” Cristina would say reverentially, rolling the R hard. I’m not sure we even knew her last name.
It felt like Rosalía was ubiquitous in Barcelona those days. Her breathy voice, at times mournful and at times celebratory, floated through the plazas where young Catalans would gather on church steps and drink beer, and across the futsal courts where the other foreign journalists and I would scrimmage once a week. Mostly, though, I associated Rosalía with my bookish friends. Elegant and stylish Cristina, half Greek and half Spanish, who hosted our gatherings. Kayla and Val, Americans studying linguistics. There was Malena, a brainy Argentine, and Sam, dry-humored and half-French. Meaghan, also half French, was a journalist who covered women’s rights.
We liked Rosalía partly because she was close to our age. Today, she’s 32. She grew up in a small, industrial suburb of Barcelona called Sant Esteve Sesrovires. When she was thirteen, she heard Camarón de la Isla, the revered Spanish-Romani flamenco singer, for the first time, and she was hooked. “I’d never before heard a voice as visceral and animal,” she told Vogue España. After hearing his music, she immersed herself in flamenco. She sang at home, and at fairs. But she damaged her vocal cords by singing too powerfully without proper technique, and after surgery, she began an intensive technical study of flamenco, at Barcelona’s Taller de Músics, to discipline her voice.
Spain has a diversity of cultures and languages — Catalan, Castellano, Gallego, and Euskera, as well as dialects like asturiano and the mixed language caló, spoken by the Roma. Rosalía was clearly fascinated by the country’s linguistic diversity. She peppered El mal querer with caló, using Romani-inspired choruses and palmas (clapping) to push her songs forward. In 2019, for the single Milionària, she sang in her native Catalan for the first time. Even then, Catalan language purists criticized her for using “Spanishisms” such as “cumpleanys,” similar to cumpleaños, for birthday, instead of the Catalan aniversari. But it wasn’t linguistic purity she was getting after; Motomami, her 2022 album, would blend Japanese and English into Spanish. She was capturing something about the way people speak in a globalized world. In Barcelona, I was constantly living in two languages — sometimes three, on the occasions I caught a phrase of Catalan — and I savored her linguistic play.
She was playful, too, on serious matters — like feminism. El mal querer is an imaginative experimental album whose arc is loosely based on a thirteenth-century Occitan drama that follows the story of a woman, Flamenca. Her possessive husband locks her in a tower out of fear that she’ll meet someone else, and even though the album is often dark, Rosalía infuses the music with levity: giggles, gasps of awe. Each song in the album has two titles, the second titles based on novel chapters — with names like wedding, dispute, lament, liturgy, and ecstasy. The album plots the intimidation and violence embedded within Flamenca’s relationship, and eventually, her self-liberation (“I do not consent to any man dictating my sentence,” Rosalía sings in the album’s final track, “To no man”).
Her concept album captured the moment. An anti-feminist far-right political party was on the rise in Spain, and stories of gender-based violence dominated the news cycles. The most prominent case in the media was La Manada, or The Wolfpack, the Whatsapp chat name for a group of men who raped an 18-year-old woman at the 2016 Running of the Bulls festival in Pamplona. The men shared videos of the assault in their group chat. In rural Spain, I’d hear people at bars — women included — blaming the 18-year-old for wearing too short a skirt, for being out alone, for drinking alcohol. “Ojito,” women told me, scolding, when I walked the Camino de Santiago alone, in 2018. Watch out.
Cristina’s airy apartment was a refuge from this kind of machista thinking. We talked about politics, and books, and gossip. We cooked. Then, Malena moved to Scotland, and I moved to Belgium, and soon Covid kept any of us from seeing each other. While doing some reporting about domestic violence during Spain’s strict Covid quarantine, I ended up on a government email list that sent out updates each time a woman was killed by gender-based violence. For years, I continued to receive the updates. The number of dead women ticked upward.
When I moved back to the U.S., the men I dated made me Spotify playlists of punk, indie rock, classic country, R&B. Most of my music taste, I admit, comes from my exes. Rosalía is the exception. One night a few months ago, I told a man I was seeing to put on DESPECHÁ, from Motomami. “Baby, don’t call me, because I’m busy forgetting about all of your problems,” Rosalía sings, in a fast-paced, hyper pop style. “I decided that tonight, I’m going out with all my motomamis, with all my ladies.” That man and I parted ways, but recently, he texted, “BUMPING Rosalía.” I smiled and started typing something, but I forgot to respond.
Meg Bernhard is a journalist and essayist from southern California.