A book came out this week called Convent Wisdom: How 16th-century Nuns Could Save Your 21st-century Life. Written by two young academics who front one the world’s biggest Spanish language podcasts, it considers the issues of early adulthood (intense female friendship, social isolation) through the medium of cloistered sisters from days gone by. Religion may have declined, but other parts of being human – like feeling lonely, crazy and obsessed – have intensified with the rise of technology, leaving us stewing in cells of our own. Modern asceticism and passionate communion seem strangely appealing. The first millennial saint, Carlo Acutis, was canonised in September: they called him God’s Influencer.
Saints have always been there at the fringes of pop – the 12th century Benedictine Abbess Hildegard von Bingen is a favourite of Jarvis Cocker and Damon Albarn (she wrote her own tunes). She is one of many female saints that figure in Lux, the gargantuan new album by the Catalan singer Rosalía, which is the kind of listen that requires a real mental engagement, and the fourth record in a career that makes constant stylistic leaps. Rosalia did a thesis in flamenco interpretation but her voice is as high as Ariana Grande’s: think of a chandelier turning in the wind. She favours the kind of big beats and tuned timpani Bjork used in her early records (Bjork co-wrote the lead single “Berghain” and sings on it). And she explores the full spectrum of what an orchestra can do, along with a Carl Orff-style chorus – there are slashes of strings straight out of a horror film, sudden swells, and the kind of pizzicato stuff you usually hear from the avant-garde sextet yMusic. Did I say this is a pop record? On “Novia Robot” Rosialia says (according to my lyrics sheet) that she’s “hot for god” – as though in tribute to Madonna and her sexy black saint.
I’m going to make the very obvious point here that because Lux is sung in 13 languages, you spend the most part not knowing what Rosalía is saying. This immediately breaks the contract of pop, which communicates through words as much as music. The focus, then, is placed on the latter, with her voice featuring more like an instrument. The sound of the Spanish language leads, rather than featuring in a plundered chorus here and there as is so often the case in Latino-inflected chart songs, a shorthand for slinky, sexy summers. “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti” is full flamenco singing, and “La Yugular” is at once a stadium-style anthem and something far more intimate, with a pleading vocal performance that really sounds like a conversation with the self: an account of internal conflict, or questions of faith.
Religion is not a pose for her – it wasn’t for Madonna either. Rosalía has walked the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. I feel less convinced by her point that she recorded the album in solitude and isolation: ie Los Angeles. She is fabulously well connected, and is well out of the Latin category at the Grammys now. She’s starred in HBO’s Euphoria and has modelled for Calvin Klein.
A few years ago, something started to happen in pop criticism that never fails to annoy me. Any truly ambitious project from an artist was suddenly met with a swoon. It was probably around the time that Beyoncé came out with Lemonade, the “visual album”. The press want to be bamboozled by popstars these days: it is normal for projects like Lux to be met with breathless surprise, for critics to list every cultural reference they can tease from the lyrics and to wonder at the fact that the artist produced it all themselves.
The argument is always the same – that X or Y has arrived to overturn the problem of processed pop, to allay our anxieties about the loss of true creativity to manufactured music (or, now, to AI). We remark on people’s willingness to listen to orchestras, or to sit through 16 songs, as though it’s a real achievement of any given record. But Bjork’s sonic innovations in the 1990s were considered on their own terms. The concept albums of the Seventies weren’t thought of as signs of superior musical intelligence and references to religion were not proof of greater cultural depth. They were just there as part of music, part of life: just some of the many things that musicians would do. Lux – and Rosalía – certainly deserve the fuss, but the fuss we make of projects like this in general shows what we are afraid of losing, or perhaps have already lost.
[Further reading: West End Girl and the price of oversharing]
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