Rosalía, Underrated

Dispatch post-LUX tour at MSG

The art, the artist, the critic, the remix

Last Wednesday, I saw Rosalía’s LUX tour at MSG. Please note that what follows will not be an objective journalism, as I’ve been a rabid fan of hers since El Mal Querer. It would be boring to rattle off a list of reasons why I admire her, but to summarize, it all has to do with how messy she’s willing to be in her ideas, and how easily she holds herself in contradiction. I experience her as both a traditionalist and a pioneer; a pop icon and an artist’s artist; a maximalist and a purist; a student and a teacher.

Taking it back to 2018 for a minute. El Mal Querer was her second full-length album, and her thesis (excuse me, “bacc project”) from Catalonia College of Music. She modernized flamenco music by mixing it with hip-hop, establishing herself as a pop experimentalist. It dropped right as Latin pop was having its biggest renaissance since the late 90s.

We were coming off Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito,” which had dominated the US charts for all of 2017 thanks to Justin Bieber jumping on the remix and singing in a decent Spanish accent. In 2018, J. Balvin’s album VIBRAS was so huge that Beyoncé herself got on the remix for “Mi Gente,” the album’s biggest hit. And of course, Bad Bunny released his debut album X100PRE, tipping the radio sound off “Despacito” towards a more urbana + reggaeton sensibility.

Post-breakthrough, Rosalía spent 2018-2020 releasing collaborations for radio. Some, like 2019’s reggaeton “Con Altura” with J. Balvin, became instant classics (“con altura” is a phrase coined by the Dominican influencer Mariachi Budda, which translates to with attitude…chutzpah…azucar, and was written with longtime collaborator El Guincho and hip-hop veteran songwriter Frank Dukes. Others, like “TKN” with Travis Scott, were not soo successful in the states (though it went #1 in Colombia and Spain, and Top 10 in Panama in Costa Rica), but were still critically acclaimed; “TKE” is probably the closest thing to the sound she ended up evolving on her third album, Motomami.

Before we get to Motomami, let’s recall another important cultural note of this era. Aside from the Latin Pop renaissance, let us remember how, in 2018, everyone and their mom was getting CANCELLED! Cultural appropriation accusations were RUINING CAREERS, and many people were PISSED that Rosalía, a white Spaniard from Barcelona, was co-opting music native to the DOMINICAN REPUBLIC and PUERTO RICO and PANAMA and the NON-WHITE NEW WORLD! I mean, fair enough. But to the Spanish-language music industry, of which Spain is a very minor cultural player, she was just going pop…

A reggaeton masterpiece, no way around it

While El Mal Querer was also concept album— musically, but also narratively, as it was based on a 13th century romance manuscript written in Occitan called Romance of Flamenca— the concept of Motomami, as she put it to Zane Lowe in a promo interview, was “self-portrait.”

“It has a personal POV. I feel like I haven’t done that in other albums… [In this one] I was like, ‘I really want to allow my sense of humor to be present in this album’… [My silliness] is such a part of me.” While working on Motomami she was dating Puerto Rican singer-songwriter Rauw Alejandro, was stuck quarantining in LA, away from home in Barcelona, processing the realities and excitements of new-found fame. She had recently toured and spent a lot of time in the Caribbean and Latin America. After two albums of guitar-heavy flamenco-inspired sounds, Rosalía decided she wanted to keep Motomami sparse and minimalist. She’s obviously a direct Björk descendent, this gets said all the time, but I also think she shares many similarities with Kanye… they are both collagists, and Motomami shares many similarities to Yeezus.

To Joe Coscarelli at NYT, Rosalía said of Motomami: “I just want to hear something I haven’t heard before. That’s the intention always… It’s been forever that we, as humans, sample… From ideas comes another idea. When I see that Francis Bacon does a painting based on a Velázquez one, I think that’s sampling… As long as you do it with respect—and with love—I think it always makes sense.”

The album’s concept is also concerned with the transmutation of binaries. She chose the name Motomami as representation of her “two types of contrasting energies,” MOTO being hard, experimental and MAMI being personal, confessional. But the music is harder to trace— there’s elements of dembow, reggaeton, and bachata, certainly. One of my favorite crazy things she does on the album is implement a Soulja Boy sample into a cover of “Delirio de Grandeza,” an old Cuban bolero originally recorded by Justo Betancourt. I also love when she samples Soytiet singing the alphabet and then, inspired by his flow, freestyles words and phrases that start with each letter of the alphabet (E de expensiva, emperatriz, enigma, enterada… H de Hondura… M de motomami, motomami, motomami, only she says it in the rhythm of a viral Harry Potter Puppet Pals Youtube video from 2007… N de ni si te ocurra ni pensarlo.) Gibberish becomes poetry, poetry becomes gibberish, it’s all game!

On Motomami Rosalía’s relationship to her newfound fame is playful, but with an underlying understanding of its heaviness— “Delirio” is, after all, a song lamenting a lover who has decided to choose material wealth over love, and in “La Fama,” she likens it to a toxic lover who will never truly love her, but whom she can’t stop dancing with anyway. But I’d say the most important lyric on Motomami— perhaps the thesis— is on “Bizcochito,” when she says

No basé mi carrera en tener hits / Tengo hits porque yo senté la base
I didn’t base my career on having hits / I have hits because I could feel the bass

MOOD. ZING. YEAAAA!!!

Rosalía as performer: Motomami Tour (2022)

The Motomami world tour might have actually been the most influential pop tour of the decade in terms of production design and I feel like nobody talks about this? It inspired Charli XCX’s BRAT tour, first of all… and Lorde’s VIRGIN tour…

From my phone: MOTOMAMI tour at Radio City, September 2022

The bare, austere stage, the cameraman running around filming her with a handheld while the footage is broadcast on the two big vertical phone-shaped screens that flank the stage… the BRAT tour essentially copied all of this. This type of spare production and in-her-face camerawork made Rosalía’s voice, presence, and dance moves the focal point of the show. It was so fucking INTIMATE, looking back! Radio City baby. I remember coming away from that show being like damn, is she a Beyoncé level performer? She might be…

Fast forwarding to LUX tour!!! Was there last Wednesday at MSG!!!

I already wrote a bit about LUX in December. I’ve been listening to it for over six months, and I am… still not sick of it? The LUX project, she has said, was “an exploration of feminine mystique, transformation, and spirituality.” I love this photo she posted after it was released in November 2025. Just take a gander: Simone Weil next to the Bible next to Music of The World… love how big of a NERD she is…

The album received universal acclaim from critics, even if the classical music of it all (she recorded it with the London Symphony Orchestra, under the Icelandic conductor Daníel Bjarnason) seemed to make people unsure what kind of album this was. NYT, confoundingly, assigned Joshua Barone—their classical music and dance critic— to review it. And his takeaway was that it wasn’t actually a classical music record. Duh… (Gio Santiago at Pitchfork understood it though).

I was so curious as to how she planned to perform this album. Like, I could picture her singing in a gown in front of a full orchestra, but that would flatten all the synths. Also, that’s something Adele would do, not Beyoncé. So why would Rosalía??

I tried to avoid as many videos of the tour as possible, because I’m still not over how much of the Eras Tour I was exposed to before my show— by the time I went, it was the last show of the first leg of the US tour, I’d already seen 85% of the show on TikTok. SO I went in to LUX tour relatively blind, and was pleasantly surprised that she was able to tour an album that many found hard to get into (try harder people!) into a high-concept, but still accessible, pop stadium show.

The show was broken down into movements that retained the shape of the album while still incorporating some of her biggest radio hits— Act I was faithful to the perfect beginning of the album (I sobbed during “Reliquia,” read more about my love for this song in December post) and also, she was fucking EN POINTE for half of it, choreographed by Dimitris Papaioanno (youngest person to ever direct an Olympic Opening Ceremony, fwiw).

Act II went nuts because that was where she put a lot of the Motomami bangers — smart to please the crowd so early. She still started this section with the extended club version of “Berghain,” though, and still ended with “De Madrugá,” and all of a sudden, the two contrasting albums made perfect sense intertwined this way.

This performance isn’t from the tour, it was from the Brit awards— if you somehow haven’t seen it…

Act III was for the ballads— she started off with “El redentor,” the only song she played from her debut Los Angeles (she played nothing from El Mal Querer)— and then she did this really awesome playful interlude where she sang Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” from inside a gilded frame, hovering from a rafter while fans stood on stage with their phones up, admiring her like she were a painting in the Louvre. She performed the Valli song with a deliberately comical ditziness, a wink at the fact that yes, she’s an Artist, but yes, she’s also the Art. And yes, she also has Something to Say About All Of It! I think it’s also interesting to note that “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You” has apparently been covered over 200 times… something to be said here about her love of reproduction, or “sampling” of art…

But my favorite part of the show was probably the Intermezzo, where she walked through the crowd to the B-stage where the orchestra was seated while singing “Dios Es Un Stalker,” a top song on the album for me, and how soon after that, there was a ten minute techno dance break. MSG was shaking. There was also a fog machine that swung over the orchestra during this, to resemble the incense the priest waves over the Eucharist at traditional Latin mass. From mine and Eve’s seats up on the Chase Bridge, the fog machine seemed dangerously close to the musicians’ heads… which only added to the drama! The final act ended with “Focu’Ranni,” and I was brought to tears by the way the screens showed her running around the stage in angel wings in a slow-motion blur each time the hook returned. That hook is crack to me… kind of reminds me of the White Lotus Season 2 theme song.

For the encore, she sang “Magnolias,” the final song of the album, which lyrically answers the question she asks in Track 1, “Sexo, Violencia, y Llantas”— who could come from this earth / and enter the sky / and return to the earth?

Promete que me protegerás
Promise me you’ll protect me
A mí y a mi nombre en mi ausencia
And my name in my absence
Yo que vengo de las estrellas
I who come from the stars
Hoy me convierto en polvo
Today I transform to dust
Pa’ volver con ellas
So I may reunite with them

She is now of the sky, done with visiting the earth, on her way to the stars…
on stage, she just free falls out of sight, and the show ends. For a more in depth play-by-play of the show, this recap in Defector by Sohini Desai was soo much fun to read.

Why does it feel like Rosalia is STILL, somehow, underrated?!?!?!?!?

Is it because I live in the US and she’s never really cared about pandering to an English-speaking audience? I guess her one concession was having all of the song lyrics in English on a marquee above the stage.

Is it because she’s never really cared about being understood period? I feel like nobody is ever 100% sure what she’s doing because her process and her art is so galaxy brained. Critics know it works, but they can’t figure out what exactly she’s doing to make it work. Great art is supposed to feel a lil impenetrable, but so rarely does it feel like it’s functioning on that level these days, in our world of Opinions and Meta-narratives and Easter Eggs. That being said, may she always stay one step ahead of us, may she stay underrated forever! I lament the day she decides to make her My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. I am so curious to see, in a couple years, the influence of LUX on the future pop landscape.

Also random gossip, but while writing this I discovered her girlfriend Loli Bahia (23) is ten years younger than her (33)— and now I’m wondering if this will be the next thing people get mad at her for, or if she’s so alt at this point that nobody cares…✪