Rosalía always plays at home

Ten in the morning, Sant Jordi entrances. Embarrassment. In about 12 hours Rosalía acts. There are 133 people waiting, 30 for the concert on Sunday. Among the latter, the first in the queue, Víctor, 18 years old, from Montcada i Reixach, number 1, and Candela, 18 years old, from Mataró, number 2. They met while queuing on the tour of The Bad Want and today they organize the mommy. They’ve been here since Thursday. Like the rest of those waiting, they know by heart what they are going to see thanks mainly to Twitter and TikTok. What are they looking for?: the central argument of a musical show in times of the silent advance of holograms, to share physical space with the star.

Something else, Víctor points out, “watching a live show through some very currades screens”. Isn’t it better then to be a little further away and not at the foot of the stage? Jordi, 20 years old, Barcelona, ​​doesn’t think so “I want to be close to my Rosalía and see her with my own eyes, I don’t mind missing the whole show”. Elsa, 20 years old, Barcelona, ​​concludes: “the era mommywith its promotion, its images, the work on the networks and its aesthetics is fascinating, although I like it better as an album The Bad Want”. A general agreement among all: nobody imagines what Rosalía will sound like in 10 years.

Rosalía’s concert in Barcelona arrives, seventh on the tour, first of two at Sant Jordi, and it is exactly what is expected, the translation into music and images of what populates the networks, a basic alphabet of images and concise messages and frangible. A paradigm shift. The youtuber Ibai Llanos greeted the box like a star and some thirty songs even sounded fragmented in a fast show, stitched with out-of-frame images, some of them beautiful. Costumes and choreography, music and voice to slaughter.

Those educated among video games see faster, look differently, and this show is designed for those people, granddaughters of Super Mario Bros. Besides, Rosalía is on stage, real and natural —she removed her makeup on stage—, and fills everything, like Beyoncé on tour in 2016 projecting only her image on a huge screen that offered it to the stadiums in a thousand planes. The star makes herself seen, and in Rosalía’s case she looks at the camera, hence her presence on stage, a medium to look into her eyes. If you have not done camping days you can receive that look as personalized as someone who is at the foot of the stage after days outdoors.

In the dawn of stadium music, the screens only diminished the enormous distances of these venues, bringing the public closer to the tiny protagonists. Today the screens show the gaze constructed by a production that adds information to what the eye sees on what is already a set-stage. C. Tangana has hit the conceptual nail by suggesting that the best image of his current tour is not seen on stage, but in the film that he builds to be seen on the screens. And if her leading role is shared on a complex stage with the plethora of musicians who show her respect, Rosalía chooses to appear alone, a powerful, iconic, resolute woman, sure that her charisma alone endures the show in a minimalist scene. The public, located in an environment that spatially and visually dominates, chooses where to look.

And Rosalía performed at home. Of course she spoke in Catalan, although in reality Rosalía always plays at home, because she is “the” Rosalía, that little girl, the one from Sant Esteve de Sesrovires, the daughter of José Manuel and Pilar, the one from the neighborhood, come on. That familiarity makes Rosalía from all sides, although as her grandmother says in “G3 N15 ″, she has gotten into a complicated world. With capital in Miami. But she is a confidant, an object of desire, a friend or a person recognized as an equal.

Or as an idol for their daughters, as accepted by Ana, 54, and Agustín, 58, Barcelona parents of two girls aged 25 and 16, present there from five in the morning who were fed at 11. Ana said “at certain ages this behavior is normal, and I think that Rosalía is a very thorough artist that in mommy has opted for a joy not present in The Bad Wantmore tragic. It innovates without betraying its roots”, she summed up. And Rosalía invents words, gestures, suggests memes, she creates hits live without having published the song —this Saturday she presented despise Y Isolation—and it shows itself not as a future, but as a present already nested today.

You will like it or dislike it, its tracing of contemporary Latin and crossover sounds will bore you or excite you, its changes will disorient or guide you, but Rosalía is a stubbornly challenging reality. And the central thing: it became clear that despite the technology, cameras, lights, costumes, songs and choreography, the most important thing in a concert is still being there making memories, strengthening affinities with the star, which is better to be total. This is what the person who was there with a Rosalía did, who perhaps in a year will be impregnated with raised in Lagos, recording jazz standards produced by Daniel Lopatin or who knows what. And this suggests drawing conclusions not today, but in a few years, when the perspective throws more interpretation keys on a trajectory that is intuited to be changing. Like the times. And yes, he razed it. It was a delusion.

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