Anne Carson: On Rosalía

Anne Carson

Ihave a Rosalía hangover. We climbed a giant day to reach her, all twenty thousand Chicago fans. Strutting and grinning and asterisking her eyes she held their shrieking out around her like a magic cloak and changed them all to rabbits or a vase of tulips inside its folds. The white crinolines. The shrieking. So much to understand. At her every inhalation of breath the entire audience screamed as if she were raking their individual spines with her fingernail, each spine. That voice can do anything. And the persona blooms out to contain it. Imagine seducing twenty thousand people like this every night on a tour of God knows how many cities, I can’t.

Flamenco, they say, was her first fascination; she studied at the Taller de Músics in Barcelona and later at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya, then made surprising pop songs by mixing flamenco darkness with the usual electronic stuff and her own coloratura altitudes. In Chicago she performed two flamenco-pop songs at the end of her last set, accompanied by the fatal stomping and the war of claps. The voice is a wonder. It is a truism that flamenco asks for age in the voice; 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. You could stroke it like an animal prancing and preening through the arena (a sports hall, usually basketball). A few of the fans line up at the lip of the stage and touch her and weep. Most stay at their seats. They stand and shriek. Let me repeat that. For the two-hour duration of the concert every single one of these people (except C. and me) stands up from their seat and shrieks without stopping.

I have never heard a sound like it.

Is the shrieking a response to the meaning of the words? I can’t tell. The lyrics, in many languages, are flashed raw on a screen above the stage. From where I sit I can only see half of the screen. Much of it seems to be processing radical metaphor with Google Translate, but I’m not the best judge. No doubt it’s all better in the original. Yet I hesitate over a stanza like this from ‘Mio Cristo piange diamanti’:

You are the most beautiful hurricaneThat I have ever seenThe finest of dolmensWould rise for you

Later at home I looked up dolmen in the dictionary: ‘A prehistoric monument consisting of two or more upright stones supporting a stone slab, found esp. in Britain and France, thought to be a tomb.’

The image remains uneasy.

Equally uneasy (for me) is the threading together of pop-song procedure with traditional mystic emotion. It is clear Rosalía has a serious affection for the mystic insights and saintly example of someone like Simone Weil, whom her lyrics almost quote from time to time. She mentions God as well as Christ, sacrifice, redemption. Does this religiosity go down to a ground of belief? I can’t tell. I don’t think anyone cares. It is the religious vessel of herself that people want to contemplate, assaulted and all but overcome as it is on seas of feeling. Much of the lyric content is lightly sadomasochistic, all the movement sexualised in large ways. Dancers drape themselves on her and are thrown off, unimportant. Her voice simply knocks them flat.

At the same time, it’s hard to imagine a Rosalía performance without the video. If you were seated in the upper reaches of the basketball arena you would see Rosalía and her dancers as nothing but a tiny diagram of bodies way, way, way down on the stage – it might as well be the fifth century BC and the Theatre of Dionysos in Athens, where the dramatic action took place in view of probably fifteen to sixteen thousand spectators all peering down at a small central orkhestra. But those ancient actors wore masks. They were intended mythically. They had no personal faces. Rosalía’s face is projected six feet high behind her all the time. As the spectators in front of me remain standing, I mostly watch her on video. Her face, her theatre, her palimpsest of bad love. Emotional opulences flood across it, mythic in a technological way. I confess, saturating myself in the video like this feels a little uncommitted. Is there something too easy about video? As a form of attention? I don’t have to work for it. And I wanted to work for it, 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.

And it remains undeniable: throughout the arena people are so very happy. Throughout the arena they scream, scream, scream. It’s nice to see people happy, C. keeps saying. I am always trying to understand what makes people happy.

Do I envy her? Of course I do. She is a 33-year-old embodiment of female glamour and force. She knows how to pout and pose and parody her own seductiveness – this is the new feminism. It fascinates me. 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, then she just throws back her head and laughs like a sail in the wind. She needs to feel new. Everybody in the room now needs it too. Envy is tossed to the floor. All rise to a different order of apprehension. They do not compare, they adore. She is never breathless, we are breathless. She turns you inside out like a glove.

Or, she reaches down into the racket of you, thrusting aside its stupidity, because your deepest desire is fairly stupid isn’t it, with its gaps and contradictions and weak adjectives, until someone drops onto it exactly? Her voice drops like an arrow onto it. Her voice finds the real heat in you. Or the real cold. Or the real real – is that what we call this? What is singing anyway? Why does it cut through us? Possibly a mistake for an audience to greet it simply with more noise, but there is a metaphysical pressure to do so. I felt it too, although I did not scream. Not a good screamer.

Rosalía’s audience: in general I take no comfort from these people. Sometimes when watching a great performance an audience develops a camaraderie, a feeling of here we are all together rowing up and down the waves of this genius. No such mood here. Here each person is singularly in love with Rosalía and busy imagining their life with her, its private salvations. After the show, as we all stand waiting for the train on a starkly lit underground platform, there is (C. noticed this, it’s the kind of thing he notices) no shared exhilaration, no communal wound. The night is flat, folded away. Each person drops into reverie, adjusting their earbuds.

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