Rosalía: ‘MOTOMAMI’ Review
8.6
GENRE: Pop/Reggaeton
YEAR OF RELEASE: 2022The pop appeal of Rosalía transcends triviality. In the music video for “Saoko,” the first track of her third record MOTOMAMI, the singer rides a motorbike with a group of friends. Together, they twerk at a gas station, dance at the convenience store, make acrobatics while speeding on the highway, all the while wearing high hills and exuding an urban attitude. The song, which samples a classic from Wisin ft. Daddy Yankee, pauses midway for a jazz intermission: piano and snares crash the infusion of deconstructed reggaeton and cyberpunk beats. This much could be enough material for an entire album, but they are just one of the tracks of MOTOMAMI, the organized pretty mess that Rosalía put together as if she were mixing and matching Balenciaga and Versace items of different colors for a Saturday night out. With this juxtaposition of everyday situations and rhythms with less accessible genres, the singer stretches the boundaries of pop without overlooking what’s trending.
Since her sophomore album El Mal Querer, Rosalía has swum in sacred waters, splashing current pop trends and urbano flavors onto traditional genres like flamenco. On MOTOMAMI, she elevates her audacious experiments to the 10th power: with the heavily auto-tuned vocals on the flamenco track “Bulerías,” with the jazz intermission on “Saoko,” with the highly graphic sexual lyrics on the piano ballad “Hentai,” with a viral Tik Tok video incorporated into the samba-inspired “CUUUUuuuuuute.” By putting together these heterogeneous cultural puzzle pieces, Rosalía seems to be simultaneously 10 years ahead and 10 years behind us, traveling through the archives of music and juxtaposing them with bravura.
Rosalía’s sensibility for the unexpected travels beyond geographic barriers too. Take it from the brilliant interpolation of Burial’s 2007’s electronic anthem “Archangel,” a song buried deep inside British musical consciousness and club culture of the late 2000s, on “Candy.” Rosalía’s version mixes the interpolation with a sample of Plan B’s 2013’s track of the same name, a reggaeton classic. Then there’s “La Fama,” the Dominican bachata lead single that features Spanish verses by Canadian singer The Weeknd—the solo version performed live on SNL sounds much better, but the duet is great nonetheless. On MOTOMAMI +, the deluxe version of the album released today, the singer takes these explorations even further by borrowing from popular rhythms from different countries, including a sample of a Brazilian funk song on “La Kilié,” and with the incorporation of Dominican merengue on her summer hit “Despechá.” Her commitment to creating music that entices different generations and nationalities is more than mere culture vulture; her proficiency in different genres makes her an avid self-taught ethnomusicologist.
This experimental approach when creating music has positioned Rosalía among other forward-thinking, genre-disrupting artists like Arca and Björk, but her weird aptness for mainstream likeability makes her a pop star, albeit a non-conventional one. Her charisma comes through choreographies that go viral on Instagram and Tik Tok, highly-memeable interviews like the one she gave to an awkward British guy at a train station, and smiley videos and photos shared online. These down-to-online-earth attributes place her among Gen-Z streaming forces like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo without discrediting her conceptual art, which most likely won’t make it to the radio but will go down in history as a watershed in culture and pop history.
Listen to MOTOMAMI:
