Is a concert without musicians a concert?

taketonews

sergio knight, co-director of Sónar and responsible for its amazing image campaigns, told this newspaper a couple of months ago about the problems that the festival ran into at the dawn of the 90s to get sponsors: “You were looking for brands and they didn’t understand anything. Electronics was the devil. People, including journalists, expected an artist to sweat on stage, not push buttons on a machine. the rancid suspicion I not only questioned whether a disc jockey session was music, but also a hip-hop concert, with its pre-recorded rhythmic bases, or an audiovisual super montage of, say, The Chemical Brothers or Daft Punk: there was no guitars or drums or keyboards to use, but a couple of guys in the dark manipulating dishes, keypads and ‘laptops’. That, it was said, was not a concert: it was a karaoke with machines.

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The passage of time, fortunately, ended up sweeping that ancient conception of live music in which the presence on stage of flesh and blood instrumentalists seemed obligatory, preferably in the traditional format of guitar, bass and drums. The debate could already cause some laughter in the 90s, but today, in 2022 and in the midst of a reactionary tsunamireturns with all its strength, as evidenced by the criticism that, from social networks, has been directed these days not so much at the figure of Rosalía, but at the concerts of the ‘Motomami’ tour “there are no musicians on stage” (only dancers), thus violating a supposed canon about what a typical ‘live’ should be. The unstoppable emergence of the neo-rancio has also reached here and, without going any further, the delegate of Culture of the Madrid City Council, Andrea Levi, joined the demonization of the “no-concert & rdquor; with a tweet in which he described Rosalía’s show as “pretty bluuff & rdquor; [sic] and “everything bet on the video clip image, without connecting with the public & rdquor ;.

Always two steps ahead of the rest of the world, already seeing what the second half of the decade will be like, Rosalía is an artist of infinite imagination and audacity and, therefore, the staging of their shows cannot be anchored to the traditional aesthetic references of pop or r&b macro-concerts. Given that ‘Motomami’ is an album with a markedly experimental and futuristic character, the tour must be as well: the omnipresent camera ‘steadycam’ who records images on stage that are then projected through two vertical video screens evocative of the audiovisual language of TikTok or the ‘stories’; the systematic use of ‘playback’ and pre-recorded tracks typical of current urban sounds; or the conscious minimalism of the ‘stage’, as opposed to the old capitalist sense of the ‘brilli-brilli’ show (cranes, platforms, fireworks, changes of scenery) of divas like Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez or Dua Lipa. What sense would it make to transfer ‘Motomami’ and its status as strange, complex and visionary album to the conception of the usual direct? To question that is to question Rosalía. And that’s not ‘motomami’. Stir up purists and archaics, yeah.



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