Her take on the Gypsy art form has powered the Catalan maverick’s rise, and as for cries of cultural appropriation: ‘Music is beyond races,’ she says
Rosalía always knew she would be famous. “I’m a spiritual person so I had a vision of this moment in my life,” she says the day before her cover of Spanish Vogue drops, and a week on from being namechecked by Madonna in an interview (more on that later). In the space of just two years she has evolved from singing flamenco standards on her death-obsessed debut album Los Ángeles, to controversially modernising that genre’s folkloric traditions via the high-gloss sheen of R&B on her breakthrough collection El Mal Querer, swiftly becoming pop’s most exciting new superstar in the process. Last year, in a New York Times profile, the 25-year-old was hailed as “the Rihanna of flamenco”.
Along the way, she has picked up fans ranging from James Blake to Alicia Keys (to whom she’s been giving Spanish lessons) and director Pedro Almodóvar, who cast her in his latest film Pain and Glory. That’s thanks in part to the album’s crossover hit Malamente, full of complex handclap rhythms and sleek electronic pulses, which landed her five Latin Grammy nominations and a performance at the MTV Europe music awards. Its head-spinning, Hype-Williams-does-Top-Gear video, featuring Rosalía executing flawless choreography in the back of a lorry, and later being lifted skywards on the prongs of a forklift, currently stands at 85m YouTube views. Its mix of industrial, modern and traditional (matadors lure motorbikes rather than bulls; cape-wearing penitents glide around on skateboards) is a perfect encapsulation of Rosalía’s merging of Spain’s past and present. It’s been a busy 12 months, capped this weekend with a performance at Glastonbury that will see her reach a whole new audience, a la Christine and the Queens in 2016, and tighten her grip as global pop’s latest innovator.
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