I was walking around, like a vulgar fan, listening and evaluating Lux, which took three years to reach our ears, when, with barely any time for enjoyment, the controversy broke out, provincial, but controversial nonetheless.
The fact is that connoisseurs will value its importance; the album offers, among its various collaborations, a notable presence in several of the album’s songs. It seems that, immersed in a wave of religious mysticism, he wanted to count on them. “We accept this project because Rosalía, as she herself has already explained, speaks about the experience of God. The permanent discernment of God is something very Benedictine and she also does it through music,” they have assured from the choir. Seen from the outside, one would say that the argument is even reasonable: resort to a group of sacred music singers, to collaborate on an album with a clear mystical spirit.
Well bad. Come on, not everyone liked this collaboration. Almost the same day the album came out, from Rac1 o Catalonia Radio, a few many influencers pro-independence philonationalists cried out: How can Rosalía be allowed to count c so that she can collaborate on her album… in Spanish! And how, the Escolanía, spiritual symbol of Catalonia, agrees to collaborate with the “Castilian singer” artist! Because, friends, that has been the problem, that the Escolanía has accepted to sing in Spanish, and that is “cultural betrayal.”
Needless to say, they had not found it relevant that, on other occasions, the Escolanía had sung in Latin, English or German, the problem was that they did it in Spanish.
I was amused by the twist in the script, it hadn’t even occurred to me that nonsense could go so far, for several reasons. The first, because it seemed to me a nonsense similar to when the parents of today, I imagine, ran a campaign against the rock group Sopa de Cabra, which also dared to sing in Spanish, calling them traitors and inviting them to go to… Spain. The leader of the group, Gerard Quintana, already in the nineties, had to come out demanding “the same rights as a Spanish or foreign artist, for whom no one tells in which language they must express their art” and lamenting: “As long as this is not clear, we must continue thinking that something is not going well in our land, and that we still need a little maturity. Maturity that, almost thirty years later, it seems that we have not acquired.”
And it also made me laugh because, it never hurts to know the history, none of these hyperventilated people are concerned that on the mountain of Montserrat there is a funeral complex dedicated to the Tercio de Requetés de Nuestra Señora de Montserrat, the military group that supported the rebels and was created after the failure of the coup d’état of ’36 in Catalonia. Just as they did not make a fuss a year ago regarding the first conviction for pedophilia against a monk from Montserrat.
It sounds strange, but one has the feeling that, as long as one speaks Catalan, one can be a pedophile and even a requeté, without this entailing a condemnation from the spheres of that Catalan independence movement which, luckily, is already a political corpse.
