Switched on Pop - Unlocking the Rhythms of Rosalía

Episode Date: November 5, 2019

Back in the fall of 2017, our producer Megan Lubin went for a stroll near her house, popped in earbuds, and heard a song that’s stuck with her ever since: “Si Tú Supieras Compañero” (“If you only knew, my friend”), by the Spanish pop star Rosalía. Since then, Rosalía’s star has continued, especially after the 2018 release of “El Mal Querer,” Rosalía’s genre-blending album of R&B and flamenco.  On this episode, we dig into Rosalía’s sound to try and figure out what stopped Megan in her tracks back then, and what keeps us coming back. With the help of New York Times Magazine writer Marcela Valdes, we break down key elements of the flamenco tradition, like the hard-to-define magic of duende, and count out some of the diabolical rhythms that keep us dancing.  Songs Discussed Rosalía - Si Tú Supieras Compañero Rosalía - BAGDAD (Cap.7: Liturgia)  Rosalía - PIENSO EN TU MIRÁ (Cap.3: Celos) Episode Spotify Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4zRce31m3RhCjVwmSSMz2Q Read “Rosalía’s Incredible Journey from Flamenco to Megastardom” by Marcela Valdes: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/08/magazine/rosalia-flamenco.html Watch Rosalía performing “Me quedo contigo”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32d1bq-kG5c More coverage of Rosalía from The FADER magazine: https://www.thefader.com/artist/rosalia **A previous version of this episode claimed that Alicia Key's "Fallin'", Aretha Franklin's "I Never Loved a Man", "Marvin Gaye's "Here, My Dear" and Kelly Clarkson's "Breakaway" were all written in 3/4 time. That was in error, and we've edited the episode to reflect that. CORRECTION After airing this episode, listeners informed us that many Romani people consider the term “gypsy” to be antiquated, discriminatory and derogatory. We apologize for airing this this word in the episode, and will avoid its usage in all forgoing work. See the NOW foundation’s explanation for further detail: The “G” Word Isn’t for You: How “Gypsy” Erases Romani Women Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Euporia of Calvin Klein, the new collection elixir, three new elixires perfum intense, solar, magnetic, ball. Pulsa in the banner, do the quiz, and discover your fragrance euphoria.

Welcome to Switch on Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan and with my co-host Charlie Harding off in Parentville. It means we get to bring on another all-star co-host and today I'm very pleased to welcome

none other than Megan Lubin, our very own producer. Megan, thank you so much for joining us. Hi, Nate. Megan, you're here because you have a burning musical question. Artist that you cannot get out of your brain. Who is that and why can't you stop listening to them? I do. It's an artist that a lot of listeners might know about already.

She's certainly somebody that we've been talking about on the show behind the scenes a lot. I've been waiting to tackle. Her name is Rosalia. And the reason I want to talk to you about Rosalia is because of a really specific experience that I had listening to a song of hers. Yeah. Take us there. Yeah. Paint the scene. Great, great. Yeah. What time of day is it? You know, it's golden hour. I'm in my hometown of Hood River, Oregon. Oh, I can see it now. Yeah. It's gorgeous. There's mountains there. Yeah. I'm on a walk with my dogs. I've got a clear mental picture. Please continue. And on that walk, I discovered this artist, Rosalia. I see she's got an album out.

I put on the album. The album starts with a song. It sounds like this. Wow, I've heard Rosalia, but I've never heard this particular track before, and it's, I'm speechless. Right? You hear a young boy reciting something in Spanish, and he's sitting far enough away from the mic that you kind of feel like you're secretly overhearing something. It's all very intimate. You don't know who the boy is, but he's like, he's sort of teeing up Rosalia. And then you hear Rosalia's voice come in.

And it's soft, but it has this power. Her voice, it's like slightly whispered. Like you can hear the rasp, but it's very pure. And she's got these gorgeous runs. Like it's very soft, but so emotive. And I don't know if you noted there's a point in the song where she's singing very softly and then everything escalates. she starts singing with a force that was not in the first part of the song.

Her vocal range shoots up as well. The first part she's singing in a lower register. And then as it goes on, she's singing, I won't even try and emulate it, but she's seeing a much higher register. Totally. Kind of like it picks up and the emotion that she's been keeping in reserve kind of bursts out. And then before you know it, she's actually, she's back down again. I have to ask, Nate, before we go any further, do you speak any Spanish?

I don't speak any Spanish. Okay. I can speak a little French and I can a bit of English but I don't really speak any Spanish. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I totally, I hear you. I'm picking up what you're putting down. Yeah, so I speak none of those languages.

Maybe a handful of words of Spanish, which means that while she's singing, I don't really understand what's being said, but in the end, I'm in this profoundly different emotional state and listening to that song on that walk, like I was left with a question. What is a song like this doing? What does music do to cue emotion in you when you can't understand the words being spoken? And I want to acknowledge that the lyrics really represent this huge arc involving different characters that Rosalie is trying on. And that alone could be the subject of a whole other episode. So that's not what we're going to talk about today. What we are going to talk about is the way that she conveys emotion in her music and the way that she constantly

keeps us guessing by switching up rhythms and incorporating some of the traditional elements of flamenco into her pop. Okay, great. And what's the other part? So there's another thing about this song, which is that it kind of seems to float through, like, without a grounding in time. Yeah. This isn't a song where you're really clearly, like, counting out the downbeats. It's floating. Like, I tried to count it out and I couldn't. Yeah. So first thing you want to do is kind of establish the underlying beat, which is confusingly not where the handclaps are occurring. So you want to feel the place where you want to tap your foot or nod your head.

But then the question is, once you've established the underlying beat, how do you group those beats into repeating sets of the same amount? And that becomes very challenging here. Because if you try and count the conventional 4-4 pop meter, I don't even know where to start it, Megan. Watching you try to do this is... It's very disorienting. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two.

It doesn't, it's... It doesn't work. It's, like, it's really, like, trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Yeah. I mean, I didn't even get that far when I'm on my dog walk, because I'm walking my dogs. I've got other things on my mind. But I was, like, totally taken by the complete lack of predictability, the feel of this song that I'm not grounded in a four or four beat. This is not traditional pop. I mean, it's

certainly not traditional pop. This song comes off a flamenco album. It's this feeling like you're being taken on a journey, right? Like it's much more poetry than pop music. But the crazy thing is that Rosalia, as a lot of listeners might know already, is like is kind of one of the most interesting things happening in pop right now, like in popular music. She's this Spanish flamenco-trained pop singer who last year put out an album that fuses traditional flamenco elements, the Palmas, those like Spanish rhythmic phrases that you were hearing in the song. And she fuses those elements with really modern R&B and hip-hop production elements. We're going to hear that in a minute. But she's all over the Billboard dance chart. She's got these songs with like huge Latin artist,

Jay Balvin, Ozuna, her songs Malamente, Con Altura. And for you, too, you for me. These songs are huge. They're racking up millions and millions, if not billions of views on YouTube. She performed at the VMAs this year.

Like, she's becoming a household name. So with all that in mind, I did some research. Yes. I did a lot of research. And it turns out that the song, If You Supieres Companiero, that we heard earlier,

that you were just trying to count. out the beat to. The reasons that it left such an indelible impression on me are so much more complex and interesting than I understood them to be at the time. And they are still really present in the more flamenco and pop-fused music that she's making now. So let's start with a little bit of who Rosalia is. Rosalia grew up in an industrial part of Spain. So it's about 45 minutes outside of Barcelona. And she grew up on a lot of different music, as talented musicians often do. They have a lot of musical influences. Everything from Bruce Springsteen. To Queen.

Got mud on your face. Your big disgrace. Kicking your can all over the place. To Bob Marley. York, who we've talked about on this show. Kanye. Destiny's Child, all of which you can hear in her music now. But early on, it was actually the sound of flamenco that was really, really inescapable, where she lived in Spain. In an interview she talks about the first time that she heard arguably one of the most, if not the most famous flamenco singer of all time, whose name is Cameroon de la Isla.

She says when she heard this, I think she was 13, she says her head exploded. But let's hear Cameroon de la Isla. That's extraordinary. I mean, the guitar work alone would probably leave my mind exploded like Rosalia. And then when you add on these vocals that are, I don't know, what's the right word, impassioned, almost possessed? It's like, it's pretty staggering. Emotive. Yeah.

By the time we finish this episode, you're going to have a lot of words to describe what you're hearing. I love words. That's really exciting. So as the story goes, she hears Camerone. throws herself into learning the art of singing flamenco. She takes flamenco dance classes. She starts listening obsessively to his records. She starts learning piano. She starts composing music. But the type of singing she's trying to do, and that Camerone is doing, it's incredibly challenging. And at this point, she doesn't have any formal training. So she's actually, when she's trying to sing flamenco,

she's actually hurting herself. You know, all this time, she's tried to pick it up by ear and ended up mimicking it. And she actually damages her vocal cords in the process. So typically flamenco is picked up when you're a kid. Like there are families who come up singing flamenco. You hear it from the time you're really little. So it's not a conscious learning process. Rosalia is learning at the age of 13. So it's all just sort of like trying to imitate the people she's hearing. So she has surgery to repair her vocal cords and recommits to the learning process. But this time she seeks out professional instruction. So this begins her years of training with this extremely sought after vocal instructor.

His name is Jose Miguel Vizicaea, and he's mostly known as Cheeky. So Rosalia stays with Cheeky through high school and through her years at a music college called Esmook. It's an acronym. And with him, she learns the true art of singing flamenco. So in 2017, Rosalia finally drops an album. It's called Los Angeles.

And the opening track is that song we heard at the start of the episode. In 2018, Rosalia drops a really different record. It still sounds. like flamenco, but it's filled with electronic dance beats and these really modern effects that you hear all over the billboard, like autotune, like the underwater effect that Charlie dissected a few episodes back. It's got these really sultry R&B hooks and samples. And actually, one of the best illustrations of this change is this song off that album, which is called El Malquerer,

or EMQ for short. And it's the song Baghdad. Right, so what is she doing? She's pairing Spanish lyrics with a bit of the melody off of... Cry me a River. Justin Timberlake's. Cry me a river, exactly. Wow, what an insight in. I feel like we're going back to her 13-year-old mind.

It's like Flamenco and Justin Timberlake found together in this wonderfully unique package. Totally. It's with this album, EMQ, that we finally get a song called Pianso and Tumira. I'm struck listening to this how many of her vocal melodies like don't go in ways that I expect from listening to a lot of top 40 pop. What I'm loving about this conversation already is seeing how Rosalia like takes so many of the sonic elements of mainstream pop music. We've got like a beat. We've got these electronic touches like you mentioned. and we've got swagger and intensity that you expect from a pop star,

but then there are these elements that are so surprising. And one of those is the melodies. They're not like, I don't know, we have to dig into this further. But the sound of her voice and the melody she's singing, they just don't do the things I expect from a lot of mainstream pop music. Totally. And the thing that sticks out to me, you don't hear it as much in this song necessarily as you do with the song

we started the episode with. But like her voice, it's really soft, but it drips with feeling. A while back we talked about Kim Petras, right, and how she sings really earnestly, and it's like, it's a totally different performance, but another one that is like conveying emotion on a scale that just grabs you.

With every song of hers we've listened to so far, you get the sense that as soon as it's over, she has to, like, go sleep for five hours just because of like the amount of energy and emotions she is expended. Totally. Which is really rewarding listening experience because you, by contrast, can just sit in your, you know, sofa and get to listen to her do that.

I and I do. Yeah. And that's exactly what you just named is what we're going to get into. So I actually spoke with somebody who knows a bit more about this than we do. Her name is Marcella Valdez, and she's a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine. Marcella recently wrote a behemoth profile of Ursula for the magazine. She's also a flamenco fan herself. And in the piece, she talks about this flamenco styling called Duende, and I think it holds the key to understanding what we're hearing in both of these songs. When people write about flamenco,

they almost always read about Duende in this almost fetishized way, because it is, in some ways, a kind of mystical concept or mystical experience when you talk about it with people who perform flamenco. And so part of my challenge when I was, writing about it and trying to express what it is and talking to Chiqui and to Rosalia about what it is,

is to find a way to express its spiritual dimension without fetishizing it. And I think that it really comes down to this concept of emotional authenticity that's like, as Rosalia explained to me, the way that an actor inhabits a role. Like if you, the actor disappears inside the emotion of the role. What the actor is feeling is real anger or real sorrow. It's not faked. And that ability to get to that place where you're feeling this emotion in an authentic way comes through in the actor's performance. And it also comes through in somebody's voice.

What we're talking about is acting. Yeah, yeah. the performance of authenticity. Exactly. Which is the central, in a lot of ways, also like the central, compelling, almost paradox of so much pop music. What do you mean by that? In the sense, the performance of authenticity is what we get in, you know,

every Taylor Swift song that we might not put her in, next to Rosalia as having like similar sounds or styles. Maybe there is something that connects those to, which is like you get up there and you perform these, deep emotions in a way that feels like you are experiencing them for the first time. So this concept of Duende, right, this very convincing performance, sort of like trying on a set of emotions and really like acting. Literally we're talking about acting. It's of course not Rosalia's invention at all, like the greatest flamenco artists like Cameroon and an artist that

Rosalia was particularly influenced by a woman called La Niña de los Pines, who Marcella also mentions in her piece. They are famous. for their interpretation of Duende, for their ability to convince you when they're singing of the emotional experience contained within the song. And Rosalia, she may not have invented it, but like she is a master at this. You heard it. Like she's in, she has incredible control of her vocal range. And I don't mean that just in the notes that she can sing. I mean that in the way that she manipulates her voice and the way that she employs melisma, which you've talked about a bunch before. Melisma being the practice of singing multiple musical pitches over a single syllable.

And I do. I mean, I love this word dwindae without wanting to take it out of its specifically flamenco context. I actually think it's a really powerful way to describe that emotion you get in many musical experiences, an emotion which is at the outer limits of our technical vocabulary. because when it comes to saying not just about like what pitches or what rhythm someone is singing, but actually like how they're singing, that's when our technical vocabulary starts to fail. That's where a term like Duende can step in to fill the void, which is really awesome. Yes. When I was talking to Marcella, like and in reading the piece, like I remember having this moment of tripping upon a word that I needed so badly and didn't know I needed.

When I'm talking about music, I often find I run into the limit. of my vocabulary. You know, we talk a lot about music that sounds warm. Like, what does warm sound like, right? We're sort of subbing in words that don't actually do a sufficient job to describe what we're talking about. And Duende's just one of those terms that, like, I'm so grateful I know about now because it gives a name to exactly what you were just saying.

And it's wild to me to think about all of this because we talk, you and Charlie, talk so much about what pop artists and producing. are doing underneath the performance to bring you into the music and to make songs like this feel like a wild joyride that you want to listen to again and again. And here's this flamenco-trained pop singer who's doing that with this very sort of classic genre-specific technique that is like happening under our ears. Right, right. Marcella said two things about Rosalia's singing that really stuck with me. She talked about the act of singing so that it sounds like she's pulling her heart out through her mouth.

Wow. Right? So good. So good. Snaps to Marcella for that. Like I wish. That simile right there. That is,

and when I read that, that's like, that's exactly where my head was on that dog walk, right? Like, I felt like I was witnessing an emotional performance that I hadn't heard before. And the other way she talks about Rosalia's voice is dancing between strength and vulnerability, which I think is spot on and gets at the very heart of what is

so convincing about this that the trajectory of her voice mimics life. So many pop songs are just this snapshot in time of the moment you're feeling post-breakup, pre-breakup, moments of empowerment, moments of sadness and tension and drama. And listening to a Rosalia song is like following along watching someone like rise and fall and rise and fall. It is a total dance. And the actual quality of her voice is a dance between strength and vulnerability. Like she's got this really strong core tone that's whispered almost. And both of those lines from Marcella, I think are such a perfect encapsulation of Duende and give you like even further language to describe this thing you're hearing. There's, there's a really specific moment in that first song,

Situ Su Pira's that I think like is this dance between strength and vulnerability and I want to zero in on it. You can almost hear the recording engineer, like grabbing the microphone and being like, whoa, whoa, got to pull that back because otherwise Rosalia is just going to like blow out your speakers. Right. Yeah. I'm curious, Nate, does any of this bring to mind another genre of music, particularly this concept of Duende and the emotional performance? A genre of music that explores the notion of Duende and has this dance between strength and vulnerability. Play acting, convincing emotional performances. maybe taking on characters.

Like a Broadway musical? Getting there. Getting warmer. Maybe clap and think a little more. Opera. Opera. All roads lead to opera, I should have known. All roads lead to opera.

When you're talking about vulnerability and strength, there's like such a clear divide in opera between the recitative section, which is very quiet and kind of spoken. And then the aria which is like loud and intense and virtuosic. And this came up in my conversation with Marcella. She talks to Rosalia's instructor, Chiki, and this was her takeaway. Flamenco and opera. In some ways, they are quite similar in the kind of vocal technical training that's

required to perform each of them separately in the way that they value emotion in the voice. But what he said is that in Flamenco, we want the earthier sound of the voice, the less processed and prettified version of the voice. Very obvious comparison to be made there. Then they keep talking, and she finds out that Chiki really actually draws an important line between Flamenco and opera in this way. And obviously, he's biased. but he said opera is like applesauce and flamenco is like the apple, fresh picked from the tree with all the dust on it and the crisp natural taste.

And that in flamenco, you value every human sound in the vocal production. And you can hear that in Rosalia's music. There's sometimes she's just going, oh, you know, or she's going, oh. And you hear there's no attempt to erase those kind of little human grunts and size. In fact, they're considered part of a valuable vocal vocabulary that you can use in your music. Wow, I'm never going to forget that as long as I live. Opera is the applesauce. Flamenco is the apple.

Bravo. So you can hear all of that, I think pretty clearly in Rosalia's rendition of a flamenco classic called Makeda Contigo, which she performed recently. I bring all that up to just to show you, it's not just that Rosalia's innovating within flamenco and within pop, but there are connections to be made to other very traditional genres that, you know, Rosalia's really like bringing into the pop charts in a way that we haven't seen before. So Rosalia's performance of Duende and incorporating it into these very modern sounding songs, that's just one piece of how she's bringing flamenco

to pop. When we get back from the break, we're going to take a slightly more rhythmic approach to all of this. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions. Okay. Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated

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But you made me a promise earlier in the episode that we were also going to talk about rhythm and try and break down why we get this rhythmically disorienting effect when we listen to Rosalia. So maybe you can help ground me here. Like, is this also something that comes from the flamenco tradition? Well, short answer, yes. Longer answer. Yes, and... Good, I like longer answers.

So at the top of the episode, we talked about the lack of predictability in her music, that feeling that something's shifting from under us. Yeah, totally. And a lot of that has to do with how Rosalia is manipulating the pace and the rhythms in her songs. And actually, I'm going to pull somebody else into this conversation. We recently had a listener write in about this. His name is Steve, and Steve wrote us about... the downbeat in Pianso and Tumira. He says, the downbeat in Pianso and Tumira feels like it shifts from

under me. Could you please explain this phenomenon? I'd love to hear from you guys about it. Well, Steve, we're going to try. No promises. No promises. First off, let's set some base definitions here so we know what we're working with. And I want to start with time signature. Nate, can you give me like a music theory for dummies version of what time signature is? Exactly. Time signature is a term we use interchangeably with meter. And I think actually meter is maybe the term I want to use. I like it because it has part of its meaning in its very name, meter, like measuring. Like meter is how you measure pulse. So in order to talk about meter, we first need to talk about beat or pulse, which is the idea that 99.999.9% of music that you'd hear like on the Billboard. charts will have some kind of underlying pulse or beat, some repeated ratio of rhythm that is

usually kind of unchanging and in certain tracks is really made totally audible. Like for instance, a lot of four on the floor house tracks, oonts, oonts, oomts, that oonts is literally the beat, the underlying pulse. It makes sense that for like dance music especially, that this pulse would be really important because that kind of tells you how to move your body. Right, right, right. You don't, not all music has pulse, especially a lot of religious music doesn't necessarily have pulse. And that makes sense, too. It's more about...

Less for dancing. Yeah, more about focusing on the meaning of the words. And in fact, maybe dancing would not be always. But there are the acceptance to that gospel being a big one. Sure. So pulse, beat, like that's the underlying thing. That's like the kind of the rhythmic grid of any song. Now, if we go one level up, there emerges a question.

which is like how do you organize that underlying pulse into like some kind of repeated set of beats phrase maybe exactly that's meter that's time signature it tells you how are you going to group these underlying beats into repeating sets and the way that we tend to do this in modern popular music is in sets of four which is where we get four four or common time signature called because it's just so popular so is it is it all on four? feel then when you count out a time signature, like how much of this are you listening to, like literally the way it feels when you count it out versus some sort of mathematical equation or is it somewhere in between? That's such a good question. I think different meters

like shape our perception of musical time in different ways. And I think 4-4 meter has become so prevalent because it's like in the sweet spot, it gives you four beats with which you can like introduce a lot of rhythmic nuance and complexity. But, but, But it's not any longer than that. If you went up to five, six, or more, it would start to, like, lose its coherence because your mind wouldn't be able to wrap around, like, hearing that many beats in a row before you get a repetition. Right.

So, like, you can, you know, think about meter as, like, shaping how you experience musical temporality. And two beats is, like, that goes by really fast. That's what you use in, like, a march, like, of John Philip Sousa stars and stripes for, Forever type march. My boy. Philip Sousa. Three, four. That's what you use in a lot of like waltz time signatures.

It's a little, a little longer than two beats at a time and has this sort of like circular whirling motion. 4-4. That's a nice, you know, evenly divisible measure. It's got that length we were talking about that allows you to play around, but also has that four-beat, like evenly divisible regularity that makes it like really ideal for a lot of different kind of dance styles. Yeah.

4 is the Goldilocks porridge that is just right. Yeah, I like that analogy. And you mentioned this basically all of pop that we're hearing. Maybe say in the last like 70 years of popular music or perhaps even since the inception of popular music, you know, recorded popular music is in 4-4, is in common time. There are definitely some notable exceptions to that rule. If you'll recall Kelly Clarkson's breakaway, that's in 3-4. one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. That's triple time, that's Waltz Meter for sure. You'll give it to me.

Okay, great, right? Breakaway's not the only one. Marvin Gay's here, my dear. Alicia Key's fallen. Aretha Franklin's I never loved a man. Just a handful of the songs written in three, four. These songs stand out because our brain is so accustomed to hearing things in 4-4 that when we hear something different, it's like, wait a tick what's going on here it's only when you start to break out of traditional american pop

music that you start working with some really funky stuff did you by chance catch the time signature of pianso and thumera to be totally transparent i think that i do recognize it but it's only because that listener steve that you mentioned earlier wrote us an email about this and so then i was like looking into it and it was kind of blowing my mind i think without his help thank you you, Steve. I wouldn't have been able to identify the meter of this because like you said, it's very disorienting and kind of leaves you unmoored rhythmically. Right. So what Steve points out from Marcel's article is that Pianso and Tumira starts in 12-8 time. And you were just saying it's tough to track in part because the phrase of 12 beats, 12 beats in a phrase is a really

long time to count and still be in the same phrase relative to what we're used to hear. Okay, so the song starts in 12-8. What does that mean? Let's actually just break it down in English. Yeah, so 12-8 is the time signature and it refers to a meter in which you have four beats and each of them are divided into sets of three. So four times three equals 12. This is requiring me to do slightly more math than I anticipated. And what's kind of cool about this is that you can see it's not that different from four-four time. But there's a big difference because in four-four time you divide each of the four main beats into two subdivisions, whereas in 12-8 you divide each of the four beats into three.

That really expands the length of each measure, of each repeated group of beats. And that's part of what gives us the feeling when we listen to Rosalia of like, whoa, like, where am I here? Right, trying to place ourselves in the song. Yeah, totally. It's like trying to find your way through a forest or something. You're like, wait, I'm used to like city streets and now all of a sudden I'm in this like wilderness. Long dog walk in the woods. Yeah.

So I want to really break this down to show you all of the levels on which Rosalie is operating because they are crazy to me. Okay, so first, like we just mentioned, she's written this song, Pienzo and Tumira starts in 12-8. Let's hear it and count it out. 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, right? Yeah, Megan. Yes.

Way to break it down. I'm really impressed because you don't have a music theory background. I do not, unfortunately. But you just nailed that 12-8 time signature. And for those listening at home, I think the key here is to focus in on that moment where you have this electronic kind of like, how do we describe the sound? It's like, yeah, it's a little electronic hit. That's going to be where you're going to want to start counting each time.

So you hear the, bown, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, two, three, three, two, three, two, three, three, two, three, four, two, two, three, two, three, two, three, you were making it even harder because you were counting seven, eight, nine, ten, ten, eleven, right, right, I was going all the way. So for starters, we're working in 12-8. The phrase is really long. It's 12 counts. So when we're used to hearing a pop song and just count into four and starting over again, we have like two more of those fours to go and then we're at the end of the phrase. Yeah. And it gives it that sort of like journey feel, again, that we were talking about earlier.

We don't really know where this is going. We think we're going to be done. And then it's not done really lends itself to that sense of unpredictability that we were talking about. Exactly. The second thing happening here is it's an amalgamated rhythm. It's giving you a feeling. of playing in one time signature with another one almost playing out underneath it. So it's sort of like the simultaneous overlapping of time signatures with a beat accent that is shifting in real time.

So in the piece, Marcella says that many of these songs have shifting beat accents that are known as amalgamated rhythms, which can sound like fused meters, a three, four, for example, meshed with a two-four. I love this because this is terminology that is, new to me. Amalgamated rhythm. This feels like very specific to the world of flamenco. I issue this next statement with the caveat that I may be misinterpreting this and I need to go hit the books. But I think part of what makes it even kind of further disorienting is that while you can establish that 12-8 rhythm that we just counted off, there's a moment in that meter where you expect like a firm downbeat to kind of tell you like,

Yeah, you're feeling this correctly, but you don't get it. But it doesn't come. You just get silence. And I think that's really, for our ears at least, that's like a really weird moment. Yeah. I think that's what Steve was identifying. That's definitely, like my, I didn't know that's what I was hearing when I first listened to the song. Let's listen to that first section again.

And I'll count it out. And you'll hear on what would be the seventh beat where you would expect to have like a little bass drum maybe reinforcing. like holding your hand and saying like yeah you're you got this you're feeling out all these triplets you can do it there's nothing and there's a moment that's for for a musician like myself that's really it feels like you're falling off a cliff right right where did that go all right let's give a try one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve there's nothing on that seven Yeah, like I can hear you emphasizing the seven to really bring it out, but it's not being reflected in the music.

Yeah, it's a very canny rhythmic move because, again, it, like, kind of just takes you out of your safety zone, rhythmically speaking. And I love, like, that language that Marcella uses, that Steve uses of that beat shifting out from under you. It's like you expect it to be there and then all of a sudden it's not. It's like trying to step on a stone that's fallen below the water. Like, so unnerving, so cool. And so, and it needs to be said, like, so hard to do as a musician because. you have to internalize that rhythm so that you don't get thrown off and like go with the bass drum, which is really a decoy bass drum and like trying to throw you off.

Right. You have to keep your internal rhythm so sharp that you don't get fooled by that decoy base. If music theory were a game, we're sort of like we're leveling up here. Yeah, this is Seal Team Six. Yeah, Seel Team Six. Yeah, right, right. That shifting pulse, that shifting beat, like to me, it's swinging, right? like it undulates like waves undulate like waves that like move in and come out and move in almost

on top of each other and that's what lends itself to that unpredictability that we've been talking about that feeling of like I don't know where my footing is and I love it so on top of all of that here's what Pianzio and Tumira is doing it starts in 12-8 and then we move into a different time signature altogether back to 12-8 back to the different time signature back to 12-8 and I'll show you what I mean. One, two, three, four, five, six. And then we're back to 12-8 again, right? Damn, Megan Lubin, coming with the metric science.

I love it. So what she's doing there is she is switching back and forth between 12-8 and 10-8, which is unheard of in popular music. I mean, I hope it goes without saying it's unheard of. And, you know, 12-8 to begin with is unexpected. Yeah, this is like if doing that amalgamated 12-8 rhythm with the dropout halfway through on the seventh beat was like Sealed Team 6 level. Sure. Musical assassinations.

And this is like Jason Bourne level. Oh, yeah. Rosalia, Jason Bourne. Same person for sure. It gives you, what does that 12-8 to 10-8 do? It gives you like a power dynamic all of a sudden. There's a push and a pull. A push and a pull.

You sort of got the 12-8 film. in and then 10-8 and you get to like you don't even have time to take to catch your breath before the 12-8 time signature comes in again and that to me I mean all of this the themes that we're talking about in so much of this is like swagger control that lack of predictability that leaves us feeling like she's driving the car and we're just along for the ride and this to me is just like one more example of how she does that Megan this is so cool you were pushing all of my musical buttons here. We've talked about the sound of Rosalia's voice, how it comes from this flamenco tradition of Duende. We've dug deep into the weeds of her metric manipulations

and how those like pleasantly disorient us as consumers of Western pop music. This is very comprehensive, but is there anything else we need to know about Rosalia? Yeah. So Rosalia's surge in popularity has not been without backlash. Marcella writes in her piece that in Spain, there's really legitimate criticism from Spanish Romani gypsies who have criticized her for using words of callo, or calo, which is Romani dialect, and for kind of like trying on these pronunciations that are not her own, that are not of her own sort of like upbringing and background. For appropriating these stylings that are not hers. There are actually even Catalan nationalists who are are arguing that she is using her musical platform to win support for their independence movement.

So it gets, like, actually quite political in Spain in a way that I think pop music rarely does in the United States. And then in the U.S., there's an accusation of Latin ex-appropriation that Marcella writes about by critics that Rosalia, a European, should not be up for Latin music awards. Marcella had a really pointed take on all of this. I don't think that criticisms are warranted at all. Let's take the last. Latinx criticism. The song that she got best Latin for at the VMAs is a reggaeton song. Right.

It has a reggaeton beat. The beat of reggaeton is from the Caribbean. The Caribbean is part of Latin America. So you're saying that a song with a Latin American tradition can't win best Latin? Or are you saying that somebody who's Spanish can't perform a song with a beat that comes Latin America. And I think that that argument is tremendously short-sighted. With the gypsy appropriation question, I have a bit more sympathy because the truth is that during the dictatorship of Franco in Spain, he tried to wipe out gypsies and specifically he adopted flamenco as an anthem for his

nationalistic policies while at the same time trying to erase the gypsy's role in creating flamenco. So I can understand that there are some historic sore points there that have real validity. I don't think that Rosalia is trying to steal flamenco music from gypsies. And I don't think that she was trying to appropriate gypsy culture when she used some Andalusian pronunciations, I don't think it's a fair accusation, really. I'm glad we dug into the more controversial aspects of Rosalia's career. And now that we've both discussed those and her music in depth, I guess I want to bring the two together, does this change the way you listen to Rosalia?

Inevitably, yes. Like, I think it's our duty as listeners. to have ears wide open. And when we listen to music by our favorite artists and receive new information about that music, especially when it comes to accusations of appropriation, we should always be willing to hear that. In general, when I like weighed into critique of artists,

it kind of just makes me want to know more about that artist. And in this case, this whole, all of the conversations surrounding Rosalia and potential appropriation and the way that she is, you know, like all of her. training and the fact that she hasn't necessary, you know, she wasn't born into this space, she chose this space. It just makes me want to know more about flamenco. It doesn't make me not want to listen to Rosalia. Megan, this has been so much fun. I mean, first of all, you've indulged my passion for metric manipulation. I mean, that I can't thank you enough for that. But then

beyond that you've like turned me on to this musical tradition that I have always been sort of dimly aware of but never really explored that much. And it's like, Rosalie as an artist, I've been listening to a lot. And now I think I have a deeper understanding of, like, why I'm enjoying it so much. And I hope our listeners feel the same way. Can we maybe start making a playlist of, like, some flamenco tracks or something? I'm so glad you asked. We're going to put together a playlist. And we're actually going to ask some friends of the show, including Marcella, who are more familiar with this music than than we are to contribute to that playlist. And if folks have suggestions for who should be on it, send them our way.

Switched on Pop is produced by me, Nate Sloan, Charlie Harding, and this episode was produced by our very own Megan Lubin. I want to give a super special shout out to a few people. First, Steve, for writing in about this with exceptional timing, right as we were in production for this episode. I want to give huge thanks to Marcella Valdez. of the New York Times Magazine for her time and for her incredible wealth of knowledge

about Rosalia, Flamenco, opera. I so enjoyed our conversation. And I want to give a little special shout out to the Fader Music Magazine who's been on the Rosalia beat since she first started bubbling up in 2017 and gave us a really incredible bank of information to work from for this.

Right on. We'll put a link to Marcella's article in the show notes. Our executive producers are Liz Nelson and Neshot Kerwa. Bridget Armstrong is our amazing producer, and Brandon McFarland is our extraordinary editor and engineer. You can find more episodes anywhere you get podcasts, including Spotify and the Apple Podcast app.

We are proud members of Vox Media, and we'll be back in another week with a fresh new episode. Until then, thanks for listening.