Mystic without a soul

It has been the best debut in history for a Spanish-speaking artist, with over forty-two million streams on Spotify worldwide. Mainstream critics praised her, audiences soared with every interview she gave, and even the Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, congratulated her for being "the third most listened-to artist" globally for a few days. But what makes the success of Rosalía's new album so remarkable is... Lux (Sony Music Entertainment), is it also paradoxically, and in a more qualitative, artistic, profound sense, a failure?

Almost everyone already knew about the album before they had even heard it: a Lux, Rosalía sings (more or less) in thirteen different languages, returns to music with traditional instruments, and opens a new chapter as an artist in which, she says, mysticism and the search for God are central. Few artists generate such anticipation when releasing a new album, and the analyses that fans and music experts have made of her previous work are legendary, ranging from overinterpretation to more or less well-founded exegesis. With each new release, it's as if Rosalía offers her listeners not only an artistic piece to be enjoyed on a sensory and emotional level—which is no small feat—but also a kind of coded game that needs to be deciphered.

However, there comes a point when the listener can tire of interpreting an artist's albums that don't always deliver on what they promised. It's really 'Lux' Is this a mystical album seeking the meaning of God from the contemporary perspective of the third millennium, or simply another aesthetic that, like Madonna but without any transgression, without any questioning, Rosalía has discovered and now wants to exploit? With this penchant for secrecy and supposed complexity, the marketing team of the artist from San Esteban Sesrovires has achieved the opposite effect of the intimate, revelatory promise the album contains: emotionally disengaging the listener and making them feel like the final piece of a meticulously crafted marketing machine, in which God is, what God is, merely decoration. It is, ultimately, soulless mysticism.

Meanwhile, anyone interested in exploring these paths need only read some recently published titles in Catalan, such as the exquisite Essential Poems, by John of the Cross (translated by Pere Lluís Font), in Fragmenta, with 'Spiritual Canticle', 'Dark Night' and 'Living Flame of Love'; the Book of friend and beloved, Llull's, in Sebastià Alzamora's version, recovered by Barcino; or the delightful essay volume Mallorcan mysticsBy Rosa Planas, published by Lleonard Muntaner, Editor. Classics and long-overlooked and undervalued female authors don't have a promotional team like Rosalía's, but they do come from a deeper, more genuine place: the search for love, for truth, for the supreme. They can even resonate with an incorrigible agnostic like the one writing this article.