Hello and welcome back to The Span, Defector’s premiere chronicle of American culture. This week, we are feeling reflective. Join us in looking back on 50 years of struggling for bodily autonomy, 40 years of International Ms. Leather, a few decades of summer camp slashers, and eight years of Rosalía.
Enjoy the long weekend!
Here are some cool blogs from Defector:
Finding Friends, Legacy, And Leather Sluts At New Jersey’s Finest Holiday Inn
This is our atomic unit: one leatherdyke connecting with another, forming something together.
Eight Years Of Rituals With Rosalía
When the weight and transformation of all my years stack on top of me and up to the sky, this album is my reminder of how wretched and beautiful it is to keep choosing.
Diabolical Motherhood
The ability to get pregnant, in our society, means that for the duration of your fertile years, you’re seen with double vision, like a ghost of yourself superimposed over who you actually are.
Summer Is For Baseball, Hot Dogs, And Watching A Bunch Of Horny Teens Get Murdered In The Woods
Summer camp slashers are best when gratuitous violence exists beside gratuitous shenanigans.
Last week, when I filed the first draft of my blog about listening to Rosalía for the last eight years, it was around 3,000 words. It took me 1500 just to get to the Lux tour, the premise of the whole thing. “Is this too long?” I asked Brandy. Well…Here are some fun facts that didn’t make the cut, and a few others!
Rosalía grew up listening to Maria Callas and Pavarotti with her grandmother, who was supportive of her flamenco training but was also kind of like…talk to me when you learn to sing classically. She spent a year creating the pop aria “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti” (My Christ Cries Diamonds), thereby fulfilling that family dream.
Speaking of Mio Cristo, the lyrics are inspired by the bond between St. Francis of Assisi and St. Clair, whose love, she sings, they could neither choose nor let fall.
I mentioned “El Redentor” in the blog, Rosalía’s version of an Andalusian saeta. Like other flamenco, the style pulls from a number of musical traditions that collided in the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula during early modern history—Arab, Catholic, Gitano, North African, and Jewish ones. Rosalía’s insistence on appropriation and genre-blending are particularly interesting given this history. She spent years training in flamenco, a genre that exemplifies that the best music—whether it’s yours to make or not—comes from true cultural exchange.
Her desire for Lux to act as a vessel was inspired in part by Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, where Le Guin argues that perhaps the first tool in the history of civilization was not a weapon, but a bag, bottle, or basket.
During her concert performance of “La Perla”—the TikTok-friendly waltz that skewers her ex-fiance for lying more than he speaks—she does a little strip tease, peeling off her dress from one shoulder and then the other. She strips off nude gloves to reveal black ones, and the stage goes black except for a spotlight on her body. A dozen or so white gloves envelop her, recreating the visual iconography of various madonnas and doyennes. Take a look.
It’s not the first time Rosalía’s taken visual inspiration from famous paintings. The music video for “Di Mi Nombre,” from her second album, takes place inside Francisco Goya’s “La maja vestida.”
Her Lux concert looks are mostly custom Dior. The best one, in my opinion, is a black jersey dress embroidered with brandebourgs, topped with a feathered headpiece that rises like horns above her, before sloping into the shape of a black heart.
She made her acting debut in Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory (2019). Not as a sex siren, like she hoped, but as a humble maid doing laundry in a river.
Rosalía said the confidence with which she made Lux differed entirely from that of her previous albums. Back then, she said, she committed to success by any means, doing whatever she had to, whatever it took. She described her confidence this time around as “a lack of a fear of failure.” Total surrender, whatever that might mean.
-Sohini