#Gabriel singing some version of I remember how those boys could dance

[multimousenette]

I was ABOUT to make a post about you shine from Carrie being an adrienette song especially w the lyric “no photograph could possibly show/the you I know” and then only a few lines later is “I’ll be your mirror and you can be mine” and obvs kagami means mirror and I am once again back at the which adrigaminette combo best fits Carrie/Sue/Tommy.

[thejonzone]

Jon Writes a Year-End List

My favorite songs of 2020, alphabetically by artist

Bedouine (Margo Guryan cover)- The Hum

The original Guryan version is good but Bedouine’s take is cleaner, all the better to emphasize Guryan’s blissful songwriting. I could listen to the chords in the chorus forever.

Bob Dylan- I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give My Heart to You

It’s nice to hear Bob sing a yearning and clear-eyed love song. And the way he stretches out his words gives the whole thing a confidence that’s easy to get lost in. 

Boldy James- Giant Slide

Boldy had a great year, and it’s The Price of Tea in China with Alchemist producing that stood out to me. 

Empty Country- Becca

I don’t go to music festivals anymore, but listening to this album makes me dream of hearing it live, while being dehydrated, sweaty, feet hurting, holding in a p*op, a late afternoon sunburn loading. I want the whole thing!!

fawning, Rui Gabriel ft. Jack Riley- God

Toss it on the cloudy day walking playlist!

Frances Quinlan- Went to LA 

Great cathartic yell in this one. Quinlan builds up a palpable tension here. It rocks.

Judy ft. Jack Dolan, jommis- Say What U Mean

You’ve got to imagine these fellas knew they had put a few catchy melodies down while trying to out-croon each other.

Kurt Vile ft. John Prine (John Prine cover)- How Lucky

A Prine acolyte with a feature from the man himself. RIP.

Lala Lala, Grapetooth- Valentine

Kind of like a slow-dance song at nightmare prom. I love the percussion and Frankel’s villainously-low voice.

Lil Durk- Street Affection

The range of emotions Durk can access and scroll through is impressive.  

Miranda Winters- Little Baby Dead Bird

Scuzzy guitar and violin create a hypnotic effect in this evocative dirge. Miranda Winters is such a good singer. Check out her main band, Melkbelly-- they put out a great album this year!

Nap Eyes- Mark Zuckerberg

Two guitars: one is pointy, the other is chugging. That is the correct way to do two guitars.

Noname- Song 33

This song is 70 seconds. 70! Noname casually negates J. Cole and the song isn’t even about him. She’s so great. 

Ratboys- I Go Out at Night

Julia Steiner is on her The Hours shit in this melancholic fantasy of leaving and not returning. 

Rio da Yung OG, Lil Yachty- 1v1

I like how Yachty comes in on his verse! It’s been fun to see him back in action with his new Michigan friends. Rio is the star here, though. And Enrgy too. 

Soccer Mommy- yellow is the color of her eyes 

Sophia Allison’s delivery of “The tiny lie I told to myself is making me hollow” might be my line of the year. 

Swamp Dogg- Memories

The whole of Sorry You Couldn’t Make It is great, but for Swamp Dogg, who has covered John Prine, to work with the man before he died is a special accomplishment, and we’re better off that it’s recorded. 

Tall Juan- Irene

One of my favorite 2020 releases. And I’ll be a bit vulnerable here folks….when I am walking outside and this song comes on, I push my butt out a little bit and walk like I have rhythm and purpose. 

Tierra Whack- Dora

I’m so excited to see what Tierra Whack does, from her beat selection to how she jumps between flow and cadence. She understands herself so well. 

Non-2020-specific Music I Enjoyed, in Superlative Form

Group Vocal Performance Most Likely to Pierce Your Heartless Facade

Yesu Ka Mkwebaze

Best Song to Listen to if You are an 1850’s-era whaler in Your Feels

Mary Ann

Favorite Duet (Not Blood-Related)

Emmylou Harris and Herb Pedersen (but mostly Emmylou) create such an intricate and gorgeous melody on “If I Could Only Win Your Love”. Pedal steel heads and mandolin freaks, eat up.

Favorite Duet (Blood-related)

The Louvin Brothers- When I Stop Dreaming

Any longtime friends of the show know I’m a big fan of the singing duo The Louvin Brothers. They’ve got that golden country tone but it’s the blood harmony that turns these guys into something else entirely.

And here’s the kicker, folks. Emmylou covered When I Stop Dreaming! How coincidental for all of us reading this End of Year list…. The Louvins are my preferred version, but Emmylou, that you could help me make this connection is enough, dayenu!

Most Surprising Use of a Song in a Network TV Show

"Yama Yama" by the Yamasuki Singers, Fargo Season 2

When I was a dishwasher at St. James Cheese Co., late 2016ish, this CD was in our back of house music rotation. It is a magical album-- a Japanese children's choir with French pop production (think a bunch of bells and shit). I never learned the name of the album while working there and it fell out of my mind until years later when, after remembering how much I loved it, realized I had no idea how to find it. The pain of typing different spellings of “japanese children’s choir” into google for days on end.....I literally yelled when Fargo used this in its Season 2 big boy shootout. *chef’s kiss*

Best Album by a Spiritually Hungry Musical Genius, Lapping Her Contemporaries in Arrangement, Theme, and Songwriting, Gone Before Her Time

Judee Sill’s self-titled debut. 

Best Use of a Second Keyboard in A Keyboard Solo

Fountains of Wayne’s Red Dragon Tattoo

Do I mean to say synthesizer? Not sure. RIP Adam Schlesinger and long live FoW. What a loss.

Best Vibes/ Song I’d Most Want to Show Ezra Koenig so That We’d Bond & Become Friends

Zibote

Best Lyrics Written by a Jew in 1920’s NYC Being Sung by Willie Nelson

Lonely rivers flow to the sea, to the sea / to the open arms of the sea

Favorite TV Shows

Ramy

-Second season shook its focus on the titular character and oh am I thankful. Not that Ramy himself isn’t great, he is, but the entire cast here deserves attention. The Uncle Naseem episode. The Uncle Naseem episode. Ahem. The Uncle Naseem episode.

Joe Pera Talks with You

Lovecraft Country

-Small gripes and complicated plotlines aside, this anthology connecting gothic horror, racism, and American history is phenomenal. 

Small Axe

-The second installment in this series, Lovers Rock, which takes place at a party, is the vicarious shot in the arm you deserve, you little extroverted thing you. 

I May Destroy You

Betty

The Last Dance

-The first Bulls game I ever went to was the first game *without* Michael Jordan, at the beginning of the ‘98-’99 season. Bad timing.

The Chi

Schitt’s Creek

-This show was never about the plot. Am I allowed to say that? I’ve never cared less for a plot and more for a cast. Catherine O’Hara is in her own league above us all.

Jon Writes a Year-End List

In 2019, my roommate June and I took a road trip through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I was out of a relationship, happily or unhappily I wasn’t sure yet, but along the way I downloaded Tinder hoping to meet a local who’d be excited to make out with me. There wasn’t much bite on my line, but by the time we reached Marquette, largely due to my good looks and charisma I’d orchestrated some type of group date with June, me, a girl from Tinder, and her friend. 

We met at a dingy karaoke bar and drank for cheap. Nobody wanted to hear me sing, but I got on stage anyway and gave “Willin” by Little Feat a go. Some guy at the bar in a maroon work shirt looked at me, scoffed, and left to smoke outside. The four of us weren’t hitting it off, even with alcohol. I and the friend made a plan to sing “Mommas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow up to Be Cowboys'', but she quickly abandoned the duet after we had begun, citing a lack of vibes.   

But we kept singing and drinking and hours later I was leaning against the bar, waiting to order, standing next to maroon-shirt guy who had so easily shrugged off my existence earlier. What caught my eye as I stood next to him was a Star of David tattoo on his forearm. And sure enough, the name tag stitched onto his shirt identified him as “Isaac”. Well I’ll goddamn be-- this guy was frickin Jewish! I was shocked-- I assumed he was goy in the same way I assumed everyone I ran into up there would be. 

For just one unconscious assumption (I’m the only Jewish person in this Marquette karaoke bar) to be wrong felt great. My assumptions are really awful. I assumed maroon-shirt hated my guts. I assumed these two girls we were drinking with thought I was a loser too. I assume people don’t like me or respect me or have any interest in getting to know me. I tell awful stories about myself to myself, and my assumptions about the world are limiting and boring! With patience, “guy at bar who kinda scowled at me” had all of a sudden turned into “my new friend Isaac” who, after a few minutes of conversation, I “asked to bum a cigarette from.”

One of my favorite shows of 2020 was Joe Pera Talks With You. I still remember watching Joe Pera’s stand-up for the first time, and then rewatching and rewatching, savoring his cadence. He dressed and spoke like a grandpa, replete with pitch-perfect, kinda-gross mouth sounds, stutters, and low-but-driving energy. It’s a good bit, and Joe has morphed it into probably the funniest, sweetest, and least-pandering show of 2020. What I love about this show is its foundational belief that anyone can surprise you, you just need to give yourself time to notice.

I didn’t end up making out with anyone but I did wake up the next morning with the worst hangover of my life. Wake up, barf, whimper. As June drove us out of Marquette, I could barely keep my eyes open. I did notice, however, a massive, wooden structure jutting out into Lake Superior.

It is this same Lake Superior structure that Joe Pera Talks With You fixates on for its first shot of Season 2. Yes, this is an Adult Swim show that takes place in none other than Marquette, Michigan! Which is weird. Think about other movies, shows, or books that take place in the U.P. You can’t! Even zooming out to include the larger Upper-Great Lakes region leaves us with an almost-empty net: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot and titular Gatsby’s origin story on Lake Superior. These are stories of hard living and life and death on the dangerous Great Lakes. But neither of those are specific to the Upper Peninsula.   

Regions are an easy if reductive lens with which to attempt to view and understand people. In 2020, broad and sweeping generalizations about large swaths of people continued to gain power. There was the movie adaptation of JD Vance’s ahistorical Hillbilly Elegy. Woolly-eyed liberals trotted out fake maps of a preferred America that holds only the “good” blue states, not at all engaging in the history of racism and voter suppression that got us here. Besides the fact that Georgia went blue. And Democratic strongholds like California, New York, and Chicago betray any notion of a “better” America. The sins of this nation are not cordoned off into one section or time zone, no region is monolithic, and most importantly, no person can be explained away with a quick sentence.

There is no regional monolith more widely misunderstood than the Midwestern gestalt. Fargo (the show) does a great job of serializing this one type of Midwestern character-- they say “oh sure, happy to help” and they’re murderers. So for Joe Pera to settle his show in the U.P. is a fun choice. Most Americans are probably hard-pressed to conjure an accurate mental picture of who the U.P. is, so Pera creates his own flavor of a seemingly-recognizable small Midwestern town.

In the first episode, Joe walks us through the bean arch he’s growing. Why grow snap beans? “Beans are straightforward.” Straightforwardness, or the appearance of, is central to Pera’s charm. Pera’s shtick is walking the audience through a basic task that can serve as a metaphor for a larger existential question. This conceit isn’t new to Pera, but it has been en vogue recently, with shows like Andy Daly’s Review and the new HBO show How To with John Wilson. These shows present a simple stated goal that obfuscates a larger, more complex grapple. 

Joe Pera Talks With You is incredible and endearing because of the genuine tone Pera gives his tight-knit Marquette. We’re getting deranged lunatics like Conner O’Malley and Dan Licata to write jokes for 70-year old Michigan grandmas at a salon. The show trades in the perceived Midwestern folksiness for a punchline, yet doesn’t lose itself in irony or resentment. 

Every character in the Joe Pera universe has the opportunity to be profound. Pera gives every character the patience they deserve; even O’Malley’s berserk Joe Rogan listening-caricature Mike Melsky gets incredible moments of vulnerability. It’s a rare comedy: self-aware but not self-obsessed, sweet but not gross, and uniquely funny.  

Nowhere else on TV are you going to see such consistently great acting. Some of the best working comedians are in this season. Conner O’Malley has found a way to tap into his unsettling grotesque that is a pleasure to watch, playing characters at the ends of their ropes, shrieking. Jo Firestone is hilarious and essential as Joe’s doom-prepper girlfriend Sarah. We get guest stars like  genius Carmen Christopher. Even one-line role players like Joe’s teacher-coworker, who says Joe and Sarah go together “like desk and chair,” knock it out of the park. 

The questions at the heart of Talks With You feel more pronounced in a year of death and isolation. How do we connect with people? How can we really be there for our loved ones? How can we feel comfortable in our own skin? The show came out pre-pandemic but Pera’s touch and pacing is universal.

It’s difficult not to compare Talks With You to How to with John Wilson. The two shows have a lot in common. Both protagonists are soft-spoken, and speak at an arrhythmic clip. John Wilson’s voice is affected just like Pera’s; both vocal deliveries are meant to engender trust by signaling to us that they’re lacking some social confidence. But I don’t buy Wilson’s shtick as much as Pera’s.

John Wilson’s show is not straightforward in the same way Pera’s is, and the show suffers under the added weight of pretense. Wilson’s tangents lead us to places that barely fit under the established thematic umbrella and feel forced. On memory, Wilson’s adventure with the Mandela Effect turns from fascinating to boring as the truthers devolve into sketch characters, viewing simple spelling errors with magnifying glasses. “How to Cover Your Furniture” spends an upsettingly long amount of time with an anti-circumcision advocate as Wilson works through the question of how much we are allowed to change parts of other people. Meant to appear as if they effortlessly fell into place, these characters feel shoe-horned in.

Both characters and shows are performative authenticity, and Joe Pera and John Wilson’s whole deal is their status as observer. This year, many of us have become observers. I know I have: unemployed, unable to see people, watching death counts climb, sending money to various bail funds and rent relief to people and organizations near and far. There is a responsibility to being an observer. It is not some callous task. Being an effective observer means allowing your subject the space they need to be as they are and not foisting your own nonsense onto them.

In Joe Pera’s America, it’s understood that everyone is weird. By virtue of being human, we are all weird, off, we do confusing things, and say dumb stuff that doesn’t make sense. Even you’re a weird freak. John Wilson’s subjects seem like circus animals, squeezed in front of the camera for their fucked-up little flip. I can’t shake the feeling that John Wilson is making fun of the people he’s observing. Pera’s observations are rooted in the fairness that comes from seeing humanity in people-- every person has an equal chance of surprising you with how weird they are if you just make them comfortable and let them talk. We owe that to each other.

To be fair, these shows are also very different. Wilson’s found-footage, documentary style is ingenious, hilarious, and completely not the vibe that Pera and Co. are going for at all. And region here is everything. Wacky stuff happening in NYC? Eh, isn’t that par for the course over there? Wait, a show set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula? Ok...now that I’ve never seen. 

Obviously I was wrong about Isaac in Marquette, just as any broad assumption about a region and its people will be. I actually learned that Jews have a significant relationship to the U.P. And I found similarities between my own Jewish history, covering a similarly nebulous area of the Rust Belt/Midwest, and my U.P. cousins. Yes, home was closer than I thought, even across the length of Lake Michigan. Yes, people don’t just hate my guts. Yes, we can overcome lazy assumptions and we can even connect with people. We can make a better world. It just requires patience and listening.

Now, on to my thoughts regarding Fiona Apple’s landmark album Fetch the Bolt Cutters...

[aliahaider-blog]

The time flamenco pop sounded like my Pakistani mom’s cleaning music

Boring, I thought. The first time I listened all the way through Rosalía's debut album, Los Angeles, all I could think about was that, boring. 12 tracks and an hour later it felt like I had listened to the same song over and over again, the same guitar strum repeating itself with some off-beat vocals scratching on top of it. This had been right after discovering Rosalía on J Balvin's new record, Vibras, in which she delivers an interlude ("Brillo") that completely overshadows Balvin and the rest of his guest features on the album. The hype built up later as I discovered her latest single at the time, "Malamente," and loved the choreography, the production by one of my favorite Spanish artists El Guincho, that sexy repetition of "malamente" aided by the claps in between. So with all the dance-y hype built up in me, I decided to listen to her debut album, reaching that first impression I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post: boring.

It had to be impossible, though. It couldn't have been that this singer rose to fame among her peers had they thought she was boring. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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,

Ay te voy pintando y pintando

Al laíco del brasero

Y a la vez me voy quemando

Por lo mucho que te quiero

Válgame San Rafael tener el agua tan cerca y no poderla beber

Oh! I am painting your portrait, painting you,

by the faint light of the brazier;

and at the same time I am burning away slowly,

consumed by my love for you.

May Saint Raphael help me, oh!

The water I need is so near, yet I cannot drink of it.

-Translation by Anonymous

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. 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 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. 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.

Los Angeles and its similarity to Ghazal and Qawwali helped me connect to these feelings of loss in such a larger-than-life manner. 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. For me, this isn't the first time I've been exposed to South Asian/Arab and Spanish cultures coinciding. 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. 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. For Rosalía, she's not the first to try and bring a niche, traditional genre like flamenco into the pop or hip-hop world. "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. 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. 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. Through that experience we learn to identify with people who experience the same feelings as us, like displacement and the necessity to adapt to unfamiliar surroundings, rather than exclusively people who look like us or share the same traditions as us. That's not to say I didn't mostly hang out with South Asians anyways. Sometimes people who experience the same feelings as us are also the ones that look like us. It's not mutually exclusive. And perhaps this inclusiveness, or absence of exclusiveness, is what allows Rosalía the ability to delve into these new areas of her music while staying true to her roots. This flamenco-pop wave she basks in is not a new era but a transitional one. In an interview with Tom Tom Mag, she discusses her perspective of creating popular flamenco, stating, "It is not my intention to alter, in any way, the status quo of this genre. It is more like….I sing flamenco from my perspective. For me to make music, and specifically flamenco, it is absolutely necessary for me to play in my own way." In this sense, she maintains that diasporic identity through the creation of her own perspective of flamenco, one that she hopes younger generations who were not exposed to its pure form since birth can identify with. And through this perspective, she capitalizes on the expanse of the genre without denouncing its purists. In a video set in Barcelona, a camera follows Rosalía through her favorite square. She reminisces on randomly meeting friends every time she goes there, and then the video quickly switches to her explaining the process of creating her new album, El Mal Querer. Through it all, I get to see how she manifests her explanation of this transcendental identity my friend and I talked about, but through her music. She remarks, "It's quite different from Los Angeles, but the essence remains. You can sense the flamenco inspiration," she says as she mimics the snaps and claps common in flamenco, "but at the same time, it's a whole new thing." This brief explanation rings throughout my head as I contextualize this leap in her career. Perhaps all the artists who pivoted to other genres of music and creativity never truly departed from their past crafts but just adapted to the environments they found themselves in. And perhaps as diaspora dominates more and more aspects of our lives, the preparedness to embrace unfamiliar circumstances opens the doors to many new forms of expression.

As I sat here writing this after hearing that quote in the video, I remembered where I had read something similar before. It was an interview with Riz Ahmed written by Carvell Wallace of the New York Times. In it, he explains his experience listening to Riz Ahmed's verse in the Swet Shop Boys song "Half Moghul, Half Mowgli." He ends that verse with four different voices talking to him, one of them calling him a "Paki" terrorist, one of them praising him for representing South Asian kids, one of them saluting him for his raps, and lastly an old Muslim man condemning him for his explicit content. Wallace explains his experience hearing that verse and coming to truly understand it, writing, "But the reason it unraveled something so deeply inside of me was that it also represented four different ways you can look at yourself. All completely opposite one another, and completely isolated, and yet completely validated by the world you live in. And when there are so many versions of self, maybe the only way to maintain safety is to develop a view that can see, literally, everything." Reading that passage a few months back brought me full circle in coming to terms with this "transcendental identity" Jon and I coughed up in our discussion, and now finding myself in the wake of this album that popularizes the artist's own perspective of flamenco, pop, love, loss and everything in between, I understand Wallace's notion of viewing "everything." I understand it through being a Pakistani-American who identifies with a piece of art from halfway across the world, one based in a language I can barely speak and a form of music I have virtually never heard before.

Through this piece and Rosalía's own expression of her diasporic identity, we get to see her perspective of flamenco come to life, whether it be in the fierce pop choreography in "Malamente," in the flamenco-inspired crescendo of the guitar and background of emphatic snaps and claps in "Que No Salga La Luna," or in the Bedouin-style auto-tune riffs in "De Aquí No Sales."

Throughout her performance in everything--video, song, and stage--we see the two worlds of Rosalía combine to create a third. We see her perspective of pure flamenco come together with the pop and R&B she came to know growing up; we see extravagant displays of color and flare in costume, fabric and setting yet also her casual streams of consciousness through fluid dance, concise lyrics and steady cinematography; we hear the theme of love and loss carried over from Los Angeles--even hearing that lyric from "De Plata" in which she asks her love to tie her hands together with their braids carried into "Di Mi Nombre"--yet we find our narrator with a brand-new air of confidence in her; and we see her Catalan roots become universalized as listeners around the world share her experience.

In the song covers (yes, she has a different cover for each song) we see these elements come together even more, such as in the “Bagdad” cover as Rosalía lays on her side pointing towards the sun with stigmata in her feet, a fitting expression of the Catholic undertones for her liturgy rendition of Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me A River.” The cover for “Que No Salga La Luna” displays two versions of Rosalía shaking hands during the flamenco medley, the left dressed in chic white clothes as if a pop icon, the right dressed in an embroidered flamenco suit. Keys of different colors float in between them as if to open a door not accessible previously.

In the beautifully-crafted lyrics we hear the story of the narrator play out through the darker stages of her love. In “Que No Salga La Luna,” we hear a male singer repeat “Que no salga la luna que no tiene pa' qué / No tiene pa' qué, no tiene pa' qué,” saying the moon has no reason to rise because the narrator has filled herself with light, yet deeper into the song those repetitions soon bring out the loss of oneself in this obsessive relationship. Whereas the line once serves as a reason for hope, it soon becomes a reason for doubt in the confines of this love full of diamonds and undying loyalty to each other. In “Bagdad,” the narrator prays to God repeatedly to see her way out of the trapped relationship, yet despite the descent of an angel she again falls in love with her evils. The story of this love bound to end in flames continues through “Di Mi Nombre” as she basks in the sexual moment between her and her love. The last three tracks show the narrator confront her desire to find that exit and maintain the hope of finding herself again too. The final track, “A Ningún Hombre,” brings us to her realization of self-worth, remarking that no man can dictate her life, asserting that she will tattoo his initials to remember what he did and how she came out of it. These songs, layered as chapters, tell the coming of age story that is born out of this obsessive love in a way so unique to the genres they touch. “Di Mi Nombre” epitomizes the sex-fueled undertones of pop and R&B, getting its name from the famous Destiny’s Child song “Say My Name.” The experimental production of “De Aqui No Sales” meshes flamenco claps, auto-tune riffs, and car engine sounds in a way that perfectly matches the scattered and fluctuating feelings of pain and infatuation this relationship causes. It seems that with every line comes its corresponding piece of instrumentation to fully embody the narrator’s circumstance.

Throughout this listening experience we perceive "everything" the way Carvell Wallace explains. We can be both the purists and the adapters, both the flamenco and the pop, both the familiar and the unfamiliar. Somehow, while having to balance all of these ambiguities, Rosalía does not fail to leave out any aspect of her new identity that she’s embracing, that of a powerful, self-realizing woman, a pioneer of the emerging genre of flamenco pop, and a product of cultural eclecticism and diaspora. 

Listen to El Mal Querer below: