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BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — And Rosalía said, “Let there be Lux.”
Rosalía, the global Spanish pop star loved by millions for fusing flamenco with Latin hip-hop and reggaeton, has amazed her fans with a radical shift.
The singer and songwriter’s new album, “Lux” (“Light” in Latin), is unabashedly spiritual. Fifteen songs, sung in 13 different languages, including fragments in Latin, Arabic and Hebrew, are laden with a yearning for the divine.
And it is receiving praise from on high.
Xabier Gómez García, bishop of Sant Feliu de Llobregat which includes Rosalía’s hometown of Sant Esteve Sesrovires near Barcelona, was one of the first church leaders to laud her work in an open letter to his flock. Rosalía’s grandmother regularly attends mass in Sant Esteve Sesrovires, according to the diocese.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Gómez said that while some of her songs were “provocative,” Rosalía “speaks with absolute freedom and without hang-ups about what she feels God to be, and the desire, the thirst (to know God).”
“When I listened to ‘Lux’ and Rosalía speaking about her the context of her album and the creative process, I found myself faced with a process and a work that transcended the musical. Here was a spiritual search through the testimonies of women of immense spiritual maturity,” he said.
From her opening lyrics sung over piano and mournful cello, “Who could live between the two/ First love the world and later love God,” Rosalía announces that this album is a rupture from its Grammy-winning predecessors. “El mal querer (¨The Bad Loving” in Spanish) and “ Motomami ” had established Rosalía as one of the leading artists in the Spanish music world with her experimental urban beats.
Despite — or thanks to — its diversity of styles and song forms, ranging from classical strings, snippets of electronica with a cameo by Björk, a boys’ choir from a thousand-year-old monastery, an aria-like song in Italian, a Portuguese fado and, of course, modern flamenco and hip-hop beats, “Lux” is off to a powerful start among listeners. It has four songs in Spotify’s Top 50 global chart for this week, more than any artist, including Taylor Swift.
Madonna has declared herself a fan of “Lux,” and composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has lavishly called it the “album of the decade.”
Turning inwards
Rosalía, 33, has said that after her success in more popular music forms, she let her long-held longing for the spiritual guide her in making “Lux.”
“In the end, in an age that seems not to be the age of faith or certainty or truth, there is more need than ever for a faith, or a certainty, or a truth,” she told reporters in Mexico City last month.
She said that she was guided by the concept that “an artist doubts less of his vocation when he works in the service of God than when he works in the service of him or herself.”
Rosalía apparently has not had a revelatory “come-to-Jesus” moment common among evangelical believers in America. Like many Spaniards, she grew up in a once staunchly Catholic Spain that has quickly secularized in recent decades, especially among the younger generations, leaving churches mostly to elderly parishioners.
Even her early music flirted with medieval religious poetry, including one video clip from 2017 when she set a poem by 16th-century Spanish poet Saint John of the Cross to music.
While embracing Catholic symbols and expressing a fascination with female saints, Rosalía seems to eschew strictly organized practice and draws inspiration from other religions, as well. “Lux” responds to that diversity of interest, at one point quoting a Sufi poetess.
“I have read much more than I did years ago, reading many hagiographies of feminine saints from around the world,” she said. “They accompanied me throughout this process.”
Her style has also morphed. Gone are the hip-hop fashion and long fake nails Rosalía sported only a few years ago when she took the Latin Grammys by storm. Contrast that now with her look on the “Lux” album cover, where she is dressed in a solid white nun’s veil with her arms apparently trapped inside a white top, her gaze averted.
Vatican’s culture cardinal joins the fan club
Despite the potentially controversial move of comparing God to an obsessed lover in the song “Dios es un stalker” (“God Is a Stalker” in Spanish), Rosalía has won over the equivalent of the Vatican’s culture minister.
Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, prefect of the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education, told Spanish news agency EFE this month that Rosalía has detected a wider dissatisfaction with the secular world.
“When a creator like Rosalía speaks of spirituality,” he said, “it means that she captures a profound need in contemporary culture to approach spirituality, to cultivate an inner life.”
Among the songs about faith, Rosalía found the time to deliver tunes like “La Perla” (“The Pearl” in Spanish) that dishes out scorn for a former lover.
That deft mix of both high and pop culture is part of the allure of “Lux,” said Josep Oton, professor of religious history for the ISCREB theology school in Barcelona.
“She has succeeded in making popular music with very deep cultural roots,” Oton told the AP. “Anyone can listen to it, and people with different backgrounds can take away different things. It is pop music, but it is profound.”
Interpreting ‘Lux’
“Lux” can be intimidating for listeners, both due to its elaborate orchestration and smattering of esoteric lyrics that Rosalía was inspired to write after reading medieval mystical poets and their accounts of undergoing a transformative union with God through deep prayer and meditation.
In the exhilarating “Reliquia” (“Relic” in Spanish), Rosalía compares herself to female saints, listing the parts of her body and life she has left in cities around the world as relics for others’ keeping. Her “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti,” (“My Christ Weeps Diamonds” in Italian), brims with the extravagant Baroque image of the jewels dripping from the eyes of the Messiah.
In “Divinize,” Rosalía sings of the “divina buidor” (“divine emptiness” in Catalan), a central concept of medieval mysticism which focused on how the soul must experience abandonment to open a space where God can enter.
Victoria Cirlot, professor of humanities at Barcelona’s Pompeu Fabra University and expert in medieval feminine mystical tradition, liked “Lux” for its ability to introduce complex religious concepts to the general public, while noting it is “a minimalist” sample of the mystical tradition.
Cirlot said the moving “La Yugular” (“The Jugular” in Spanish) is rich in mystical thought because the throat, the home of the voice and the breath, is associated in many religious traditions as the body’s door to the divine.
But, for Cirlot, it’s the entire package that makes “Lux” so impactful.
“Rosalía is not just a great singer; she is a great actress, and her body language is full of these mystical gestures like contorting her face in an expression of ecstasy, of staring into nothing,” Cirlot said. “And then we have her amazing voice, which creates a sense of flight.”
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AP writer Berenice Bautista contributed from Mexico City.
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