We have more than enough evidence that the war on indigeneity is not a metaphor when we are talking about land and people. When it’s words and music and listeners swapping places, the idea of theft starts to blur. Settler colonialism in pop is tough to litigate—or, if you’d prefer to use the original terms of culture, it is hard to judge the distance between the fan (sometimes us) and appropriation, love, imitation, or critique. We love our bullshit and we also want it to be real, or real enough. The world system any artist builds needs to be internally consistent before it represents anyone or anything. How could we know who represents who? We are all strangers on the radio.

One of the artists who profits from, and struggles with, this process is Rosalía Vila Tobello, a 34-year-old singer from Sant Esteve Sesrovires, a town outside Barcelona in the north of Spain. Known as Rosalía, the artist is touring her way around the world now, in support of LUX (2025), her fourth album. Her debut release, Los Angeles (2017), is about to turn ten. Between these two albums, there is an ocean of styles and borrowings. The land and its people slip forward and back under all of this.

Los Angeles is lively, tactile stuff, built around Rosalía’s voice and acoustic guitar played by producer Raül Refree, with string parts and noises folded into the mix without making the audible space any less intimate. The main artistic reference point is flamenco, a music developed in Andalusia—south of Barcelona but still in Spain—primarily by its Gitano communities. This was not the only inspiration, though. One of the cited production models for Los Angeles was the series of American Recordings albums Rick Rubin made with Johnny Cash. (Rosalía even ends Los Angeles with a Will Oldham cover, a song Cash also recorded with Rubin, and the only track in the English language here.) The string arrangements on the first song, “Si Tú Supieras Compañero,” create a dissonant cloud that has more to do with Webern than flamenco, an announcement, from the start, that Rosalía was not sticking to the rules of her source material.

But Rosalía seemed committed to her inspirations and was observing more rules than an outsider might have known. As is common within the flamenco tradition, existing verses (“letras”) are pulled into a single performance. “De Plata,” a song that has stayed in her set lists for years, channels lyrics associated with flamenco singers Manolo Caracol and Manolo Frenegal. (Rosalía exerts a songwriting copyright on “De Plata,” though, which recalls Bob Dylan mulching the folk song “No More Auction Block” for “Blowin’ in the Wind” and then additionally copywriting the arrangement of the traditional itself.) The first letra has the singer asking her hands to be bound with her lover’s black hair after her death. Rosalía’s fusion here brings the ache of the originals into high drama and she has the voice to pull it off. Rosalía’s voice has texture and body in several different registers and a combination of power and tonal purity that usually comes only with the most elite gospel and opera singers. Hearing her sing “La Plata,” I very much believe she is about to die and that she wants her hands tied with only one kind of hair and when she does these looping runs I believe also that she will never die. 

Each artist creates their own land and within that, their own history, all of which will be mediated by the filter of a listener’s desire and the histories they may or may not be drawing from. For her Los Angeles version of flamenco, I knew only that I was not hearing an original Romani rendition but not how close or far the result was landing. I was sold because, spiritually, it connected. But as a white Anglophone American, I am a tourist for this part of the show. I spoke with the cultural critic Michelle Santiago Cortés, who has written about the relationship between Latinidad and Rosalía, a white European who reads as Latinx to many Americans. “When she sings flamenco,” Cortés told me, “she puts on a super-thick southern Spain accent. It would be the equivalent of a British girl from Chelsea trying to sound Scottish. I don’t think people catch that it’s Iggy Azalea levels of blaccent. Not that there’s an equivalence in the racial element, but the gap is that big.”

After Los Angeles came out, the Romani community was not unanimously pleased. In a 2018 piece for Jenesa Is Pop, writer and activist Noelia Cortés (no relation) laid out the terms bluntly: “Andalucía es gitana y mora, no es blanca.” (“Andalusia is gypsy and Moorish, it is not white.”) She quotes flamenco scholar Alfredo Grimaldos, who wrote that “in Andalusia, the philosophical despair of Islam, the religious despair of the Jew, and the social despair of the Gitano all converge.” And Cortés posed the question at the heart of any situation in which a music is borrowed and then recirculated to the people who created it: “Why, in order to be seen, do we have to accept a depoliticized substitute for flamenco—which is the ultimate expression of our resistance?” 

The pop artist gambles that the borrowing somehow creates a new land with its own viable history, as the process involves erasing an existing and vital tradition that stretches back for generations. In cynical terms, it seems like a risky way to come up with material. For example: Rap is, broadly speaking, indigenous to New York, but it formed during the age of radio and TV and records, and then spread so quickly that someone in LA was, at worst, confronted with maybe ten years of tradition. Everyone knew the sources for this new music, as all of it was on the radio in the Sixties and Seventies. Not so with the history of flamenco, a music of nomads that entered the popular conversation slowly. Throw in the prismatic nature of decoding what Spanish language music means, globally, and you have a very tricky starting position (or possibly confusing enough that none of it would be a barrier to launching). As Santiago Cortés wrote in 2021, “[t]he only thing that binds Latinidad into any one word is the trail of blood the Spanish Empire (but also the French and Portuguese!) left behind.”

Which may partly explain the turn Rosalía took for her second album, El Mal Querer (2018). With producer El Guincho (Pablo Díaz-Reixa), she made an album that succeeds by abandoning polite study and folds the palmas of flamenco into an electronic lattice. My politics have me siding with the Andalusians, but this album has yet to fail me. The team was immaculate—the Barcelona-based film directors CANADA did the surreal, loose videos for the album, the Los Angeles-based choreographer Charm La’Donna (essentially the Bob Fosse of hip-hop) created the crucial dances, and a gifted set of women known colloquially as Las Rosas danced with her in the videos and on tour. Rosalía’s show at Webster Hall in April of 2019 secured her spot (for me). Watching this Paris show from June, I remember the spontaneity and joy. Flamenco is as much dance as music, and the distribution of palmas throughout all the limbs and beats (provided by El Guincho, standing demurely upstage) worked. And the reference set was going wider every day. Her encore that night was an a capella version of an Argentinian tango song, “Volver,” by Carlos Gardel. 

Pleasure is the ball-bearing that popular music depends on: that you can have principles and a spiritual life but it can all be swayed by something you don’t necessarily understand. Therein lies the sale. That said, the pop artist is still aping the rules of community, and hoping for the loyalty an indigenous culture organically creates. As Santiago Cortés told me, about someone I also love, “I don’t need my pop stars to be totally good culture. I love Shakira. God, she’s a shapeshifter. She’s been Indian, she’s been Arabic, she’s been Brazilian. She’s done more egregious things than Rosalía to a degree.” And what ties that artist’s work together and makes us trust them? In Shakira’s case, it may simply be a sense of humor and humility. Or take Björk, who Rosalía namechecks constantly. The Icelandic artist has not given herself over to the corporate fashion brands that Rosalía seems to spend much of her time working with, nor has she abandoned the fact that she is quite simply from Iceland. “Every move Rosalía’s made has been geared toward not artistic integrity or clarity of vision but massive fame,” the writer and cultural critic Marianela D’Aprile said to me. “As far as I know she’s not taken a stance on the question of Catalonian independence—egregious, as far as I’m concerned, given that she’s far and away the most famous person from that region of Spain.” And if we want to lower the bar, where is Rosalía’s song cycle about being a teenager in Barcelona? Before the oscillations became too extreme, people trusted Kanye for admitting he was an “asshole.” Where someone in a community lives with both implicit and explicit ties to her extended family and its lore, the pop star has an agreement to stay consistent within whatever bounds she establishes. I promise this will make sense over time. 

For the MOTOMAMI tour in 2022, the Rosas had been replaced by a sort of stock, queer-coded multiracial Benetton grip of males who escorted her a la Nineties Madonna. Far from making her seem more open-minded, this activity began to anonymize her as yet another easily ported fashion avatar. But the MOTOMAMI show at Radio City Music Hall was an even bigger triumph than the Webster Hall show, even as I began to wonder what exactly Rosalía thinks of as the frame of her work. The bright white backdrops worked well against an army of smartphones and cameras on stage, giving the feeling of being inside technology that everyone had been trapped with during the pandemic. “De Plata” came back for a church-sized rendition featuring electric guitar (a musician standing way off to the side) and an endless black tulle train that had been affixed to Rosalía’s fluorescent green motorcycle leathers. Even my crappy iPhone footage of this still gives me chills. The Arabic roots of flamenco singing are at the center of her performance, which is where you can find the artist lost amidst the adverts. It’s loose and exploratory and not pinned down and I am extremely glad I got to see it happen live.

But then, “Bizcochito.” The MOTOMAMI tour had the top-shelf visual side with glowing white motorcycle helmets and tightly-focused images and then there was this sloppy, long-distance telescoping of reggaeton and hip-hop. There were gold grills, nails, and a clutch of default-setting queer affectations. Even now, every performance of “Bizcochito” opens with Rosalía chewing gum like some kind of Latinx Leather Tuscadero. (When a film series called CineHealth can present Fierce Pharma Week and Israel can mount a festival called Pride Land in El-Bariyah, identity politics has reached its terminus, a barren marketing ouroboros that can no longer eat its own tail or anything else.) “With her, that gum chewing thing,” Santiago Cortés said, “I was like, there you go again!” Which begs the question—where is she going? What won’t she add to her popularity matrix? “I see her flirtation with a pan-Latinx aesthetic—slicked baby hairs, long-ass acrylics, that Euphoria stint—as a further bid toward legibility in the American market,” D’Aprile said.

Welcome to LUX, released two years into the genocide and close to schizophrenic in its apple-shining, A-student vote-mongering. There are 13 languages used across the album’s various versions, which maybe matters to her grandmother—I can’t say. She has repeatedly insisted that her use of an orchestra was a strike against AI, and that she made LUX somehow free of technology, which she obviously didn’t. There are beats on the album (strong ones) and she herself used Google translate to work on the lyrics before taking them to actual translators. Here we have a sort of perfect indigeneity log jam. What if you were from everywhere and nowhere? If everything was just a question of hiring someone or something to create your own individual history?  

Rosalía’s increasing comfort with Zionism seems relevant. She appeared as a stripper on Euphoria, a celebration of pedophilia with VSCO filters that was adapted from an Israeli show. She has also appeared in Skims ads, a brand opening new stores in Tel Aviv as we speak. For LUX, Rosalía even released (sort of) a track called “Novia Robot” with an outro that contains the Hebrew lines “I was born to rebel / and I rebel against being born again” (allegedly about the prophet Miriam). The idea that she doesn’t know the context for such lyrics right now is contravened by the fact that she did not make “Novia Robot” available on streaming services. The track is only available on LPs and CDs of LUX, which, for large sections of the population, is the same as not releasing it at all.

But that’s what some call outside issues. What was the LUX tour like? In June at Madison Square Garden, mere days after the Knicks had borne all of New York aloft, there was a capacity crowd, very enthused. There is evidence that Rosalía channeled various female mystics but the overall look of the album is Catholic. All the fans dressed in white with veils reinforced that this was ultimately a single-faith show, a fact eventually driven home by the theatrical interlude wherein a celebrity enters a confessional with Rosalía to tell a story. On our night, comedian Marcello Hernandez confessed to buying a bottle of wine with a fake ID for a date but the date never showed up. It was cute!

The second song in the LUX tour set is the second song on the album, which is also the current single: “Reliquia.” Rosalía and her six co-writers, including composer Caroline Shaw and a former Daft Punk, created a jumpy string bed that may have been intended to land in the same general area as Bjork’s Vulnicura but which feels more like Untitled Pixar Project 5. The alleged female mystic inspiring this track is Rosa of Lima, who deformed herself to escape suitors and whose body was divided into relics after her death. The lyrics alternate between a list of things she’s lost in cities all over the world and a chorus that says, roughly translated, “take me with you, I’ll be your relic.” The lyrics feel like the punch list of someone who has the money to travel very extensively.

The lyrics projected that night were not roughly translated; they were, in fact, entirely translated. “In Japan, I cried and frayed my eyelashes” is less appealing in English. “I lost my blunt in Mexico” doesn’t help anyone in any language. (It would seem that if anybody at any point in history could get weed quickly, it’s Rosalía.) We also turn out to be “dolphins jumping, leaving and entering the scarlet and shiny ring of time,” though a light rig was blocking my view and some of these may be a few words off. “Reliquia” made me feel like I was going out socially for the fifth or sixth time with a co-worker I’d been more or less cool with only to realize at karaoke that I know nothing about them and don’t really want to and that I’ve trapped myself into a long night that is going to cost much more than I can afford.

We also got the LUX fan cam: appearing inside a frame, the cammed fan was shown a famous painting and prompted to IMITATE THE POSE!, a variation on a pandemic TikTok trend. The angel wing costumes reminded me of Victoria’s Secret runway shows, and the whole night reminded me of something else I saw at Madison Square Garden fifty years ago: the Harlem Globetrotters. The difference there is simple but consequential. Their repertoire of trick shots and slapstick and set pieces was not presented as an actual basketball game. Rosalía, one assumes, is still presenting herself as an artist, and on a few, not many, of the songs, I could feel the energy that propels her best work. Mostly I felt like she was thinking about her brand endorsements and trying very hard not to go off-script. I was deflated. One of my younger friends concluded that I was “a grouch”—guilty as charged, but not always. I did a gut-check and watched the entire show again, or a version filmed by a fan in Los Angeles, which was almost identical. I had the same feeling of the physical world being sliced into something like the world of apps. Or more to the point, New York itself, in the grip of portfolio capital and Airbnb, where people appear for a few months and then leave. One is nostalgic for good old-fashioned gentrification, where new families stay for a few generations. Commit for long enough and that trust builds. You’ll never be accepted fully but you achieve the kind of grace Shakira enjoys, maybe. Nobody gets onto the billboard without losing something.

Still, I was frustrated by my own frustration. Even when the bells are ringing inside, being a scold feels terrible. But the bells ring. So what makes us trust one synthetic performer over another? God knows that popular music is full of brilliant imitations and inspired knock-offs. Any attempt to rein in the opportunistic heart of a pop singer seems both pointless and contrary to the nature of the game. So I texted Marianela again, trying to pin down the trace of these feelings. “I do think it’s cool when art has a clear origin point,” she wrote back. A few days later, she wrote back to me again. “I guess the more eloquent way of saying it is that art that lasts through time and beyond trends tends to be born from a real place of struggle, even if it’s personal. And usually it’s not the struggle to become famous.”

This remains popular music, and as such there can be no final score. I find Rosalía’s flamenco affecting, though you could make the case that it is as inauthentic as any other move she’s made. Me, influenced by reading in a way that is ultimately unfair to the song, I hear a lot of hard work and spiritual alignment. The Gitano people do not, necessarily. Move from there, and accept that popular music does not really accept authenticity as currency, as much as it becomes a point of obsession. It’s a point by point negotiation that gets worked out in the recordings. And by the time we get to LUX, I’m worn out. The problem became not so much an appropriation imbalance but more like a symbol storm. When bits and pieces of things you half-recognize fly by, are you supposed to forget that something sounds like gabber or dembow or The Sound of Music? Or just carry it around cradled in your sweatshirt hoping that at some point you can redeem it somewhere and that sense will emerge?

On October 7, 2026, Rosalía appeared on The Tonight Show. It seemed appropriate. Jimmy Fallon has devoted his existence to making powerful people feel better about themselves by interviewing them without the encumbrance of dignity. One of her stories was about trying to attend Sunday services at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. The punchline was that the church was full, a state of affairs which would only be surprising if you were a celebrity. Later, she told a story about being scared of her security guard.

A month or so after seeing Rosalía, Heidi and I were walking back from a movie, going north on Avenue B. A song was wafting from above us, sounding live, maybe a guitarist and saxophonist on a roof. It was “Baile Inolvidable” by Bad Bunny, from what the Grammys deemed album of the year, Debí Tirar Más Fotos. The song is addressed to a woman who is gone, maybe from the singer’s side, maybe from existence. “You were my unforgettable dance,” Bad Bunny sings, and later “I thought I’d grow old with you.” (There are rough translations of the original Spanish.) The video shows our Benito as an old man, smiling, possibly remembering when he was so in love he couldn’t imagine growing old without this person, or maybe still thinking and feeling what he had once thought and felt. The old Bunny becomes the young, as he learns how to dance. This takes some humility on the young Bunny’s part, as he must pretend to not know how to do something he does better than most.

And a country is not the same as a song or a heart or a sense of who you are, not least of all for a place like Puerto Rico, long caught between colonizers and bad parents like the United States. But Bad Bunny has claimed his home as firmly as any performer has ever claimed a place—maybe Bjork and Iceland are solid competition—and “Baile Inolvidable” hits me as hard as much of the album does. There I was sobbing, just from the one line — “Pensaba que contigo iba a envejecer.” Whom was going to grow old with what or whom? And maybe it is the rootedness in the struggle of being a person from a place that establishes an emotional tenor, the confidence to connect emotionally in other ways. Confirming that you are from a real place may be an essential task for a pop star, whether it’s Dolly Parton or Cam’ron or Bad Bunny. If I once knew where Rosalía is coming from, it is obscure to me now.