Ch-Pe✨

Anne Carson, one of the most important writers in the English-language literary tradition, published a review of ROSALÍA and her artistry after attending a LUX TOUR performance. “I have a ROSALÍA hangover. We climbed a giant day to reach her, all twenty thousand Chicago fans. Strutting and grinning, she held their shrieking out around her like a magic cloak. At her every inhalation of breath the entire audience screamed. That voice can do anything. And the persona blooms out to contain it. The voice is a wonder. Her voice, still somehow teenage-bright, might go from wonderful to miraculous in a few years. It rises above the mad pounding of the sound system like a silver arrow shot into space, and they scream, and it rises, and they scream, and it rises. Total adoration pours towards her from the seats. I have never heard a sound like it. It is clear ROSALÍA has a serious affection for the mystic insights and saintly example of someone like Simone Weil. She mentions God as well as Christ, sacrifice, redemption. It is the religious vessel of herself that people want to contemplate, assaulted and all but overcome as it is on seas of feeling. Her voice simply knocks them flat. ROSALÍA’s face is projected six feet high behind her all the time. Her face, her theatre, her palimpsest of bad love. Emotional opulences flood across it, mythic in a technological way. I wanted to work for her, to match her heroism. We require heroism of our entertainers. We want them sacrificing themselves to a certain ultimate degree of input. No one can sing this loud, and yet she does. No one can dance this hard and long, but she goes on. No one can survive being this intensely cherished, but it is we who are wrung out like sponges watching her, hearts pounding, slightly afraid of what’s next. Do I envy her? Of course I do. She is a 33-year-old embodiment of female glamour and force. Unlike Björk, who disappears from femaleness by going into other species, ROSALÍA goes deeper into female itself, drilling down into it, past the mutilations of flamenco to some place of power where she feels new. They do not compare, they adore. She is never breathless, we are breathless. She turns you inside out like a glove. Her voice finds the real heat in you. Or the real cold. Or the real real. What is singing anyway? Why does it cut through us? Here each person is singularly in love with ROSALÍA and busy imagining their life with her, its private salvations. Each person drops into reverie, adjusting their earbuds.”