Anne Carson on Rosalía's Chicago concert and lyrics

Poet Anne Carson attended a Rosalía concert in Chicago with twenty thousand other fans. She describes the singer's voice as a wonder that can do anything, rising above the sound system like a silver arrow.

Carson reports that Rosalía studied flamenco at the Taller de Músics in Barcelona and later at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya. Her pop songs mix flamenco with electronic music and her own coloratura vocals. The Chicago performance ended with two flamenco-pop songs accompanied by stomping and clapping. Carson observes it is a truism that flamenco asks for age in the voice, suggesting Rosalía's still teenage-bright voice might become miraculous in a few years.

The audience's reaction

For the entire two-hour concert, every person in the audience except Carson and her companion stood and shrieked without stopping. Total adoration poured towards the stage. A few fans lined up to touch Rosalía and weep. Carson writes, "I have never heard a sound like it."

Analyzing the lyrics

Lyrics in multiple languages were flashed on a screen, though Carson could only see half of it. She notes much of it seemed to be processing radical metaphor with Google Translate. She hesitates over a stanza from 'Mio Cristo piange diamanti,' which includes the lines "You are the most beautiful hurricane / That I have ever seen / The finest of dolmens / Would rise for you." Carson looked up 'dolmen' later, finding it defined as a prehistoric monument thought to be a tomb, and calls the image uneasy.

She finds an equally uneasy thread in the mix of pop-song procedure with traditional mystic emotion. Carson states Rosalía has a serious affection for the mystic insights and saintly example of Simone Weil, whom her lyrics almost quote. The lyrics mention God, Christ, sacrifice, and redemption. Carson cannot tell if this religiosity is grounded in belief but notes, "I don’t think anyone cares." She describes the audience as wanting to contemplate the religious vessel of Rosalía herself.

Performance and persona

Carson reflects on the role of video in the performance. From the upper reaches of the basketball arena, the performers were a tiny diagram, reminiscent of ancient Greek theatre. However, Rosalía's face was projected six feet high behind her. Carson mostly watched this video feed, calling it a palimpsest of bad love flooded with emotional opulences. She confesses saturating herself in the video felt uncommitted and too easy as a form of attention.

She writes that we require heroism from our entertainers, wanting them to sacrifice themselves. "No one can sing this loud, and yet she does. No one can dance this hard and long, but she goes on," Carson states. She contrasts Rosalía with Björk, saying Rosalía goes deeper into femaleness itself, drilling past the mutilations of flamenco to a place of power where she feels new.

Despite the intensity, Carson notes people throughout the arena were "so very happy" and screaming. Her companion kept saying it was nice to see people happy. Carson admits to envying Rosalía, calling her a 33-year-old embodiment of female glamour and force who represents a new feminism through her parody of seductiveness.

After the show, Carson observed no shared camaraderie or communal exhilaration among the audience on the train platform. Each person was singularly in love with Rosalía and dropped into private reverie.