Rosalía - Malamente

Flamenco music is one of the most renown Spanish genres, and normally offers images of the recent past: women in red dresses and long skirts dancing with ornamented fans while a "cantaor" sings passionate verses while plays the Spanish guitar. Since the release of her first album, Los Angeles, las years, 25 year old Rosalía Vila embarked on a mission of subverting those stereotypes and images, and with that, bringing Flamenco to the future, offering a path to evolve and stay relevant in contemporary music scene.

Malamente is her most daring effort to date. Here, she not only brings freshness to a genre that seemed rooted in the past, but mixes it with one of most important post-millennial trends: trap, but also subverting the negative connotations of it (misogyny, glorification of violence), to challenge at once past and present, the old and the new. She wants to discomfort purists and confront all sorts of toxic masculinity in the way that only a strong talented woman can do it.

With rhythmic claps as the backbone of the song, Rosalía starts singing about presenting the break of a crystal, a mysterious dark magic that is replicated in the synths. The imageries of gypsy culture are present all over the lyrics, and she displays her collection of amulets to protect against a bad omen. Rosalía's voice is sensual and effervescent, with hard accents breaking the song and giving it cadence, opposing the vocal curlicues traditional of flamenco singing. It is not until the last verse of the track that we found out what's the dark power that she's protecting against: "I won't lose a single minute in thinking you again".

Produced by El Guincho, Malamente proves that Rosalía is playing on a league of her own, and she is making sure that the stakes are high for anyone trying to join it. The level of sophisticated experimentation displayed through the track is stunning, creates a fantastic world where old gypsy legends get to live in a postmillennial world and are told throgh social media, a feeling very well captured in the music video, where a bullfighter is confronting, with his red cloak, a furious Rosalía in a motorcycle. She is, indeed, a raging bull ready to hit rancid structures and music stereotypes to come victorious with elegant innovations.