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To be human is to be contradictory. So is the premise of MOTOMAMI: the bold and immersive Spanish record from 2022, a declaration of loyalty to the creative self in this always-changing world.
The Motomami is dedicated to a life of freedom. She chases liberation, she makes daring decisions, she fearlessly loves, and she does it all with a sense of humor. She is the always-changing muse.
I listened to MOTOMAMI for the first time just a few weeks after its release, after a sample of SAOKO’S insatiable melody got lodged in my head.
What came next was a year spent following its themes and expanding my capacity for reality and the role I’m supposed to play in it.
t's a concept album, with motorbikes and roaring engines as the roots in this wide visionary world of luxury, love, sex, connection.
And what role does RosalÃa play? The Lover, the Woman of Faith, La Fama, the Motomami.
The Motomami World Tour would make its stop in New York City in September 2022. I anxiously sped from the east village at 7:30 for that 8:15 show, a show I was sure I had time to make if there was an opener and the main act didn’t start on time. They usually didn’t.
I found my seat the same second the show started.
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I didn’t have time to note how RosalÃa is dedicated to professionalism or how that reflects in her race towards being a well-rounded musician and human being. In seconds, lightning had struck, and SAOKO burst through the crowds.
She rose from a formation of dancers - los Motopapis - inconspicuous at first and then impossible to ignore. The bass was heavy, the drums loud. I could feel it in my body: that in just a few minutes RosalÃa had managed to unite space and time for everyone at Radio City.
In her hands was the steadicam that broadcasts the stage for the rest of the theater. The camera? An iPhone, reminiscent of the TikTok-forward virtual mini-concert from earlier in the year that illustrated all of MOTOMAMI in half the length but double the production.
RosalÃa is in a white room — her blank canvas — which she y los Motopapis paint with song, dance, and at some point with actual red paint blasted from a fire extinsguisher.​
We see it all through her smart phone in hand. She pulls us into her, she is inviting us to experience the intimacy of making music with her.
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Intimacy has been repurposed, reformed, and reframed throughout the centuries. It’s taken the shape of love letters and sonnets, poems and art. But the makeup of it, the expression of it, has never before been handed the reins of an iPhone.
Back at Radio City, RosalÃa is singing directly into her phone. For LA COMBI VERSACE, she’s positioned it to capture her as she embraces the floor. When she links with the crowd, she films us like we film her. We're on stage with her for what feels like a FaceTime call.
We have to ask whether this is a legitimate form of intimacy, digital as it is, or rather the result of a global pandemic and the human being’s recurring approach to advancement in technology: how do I control it? How do I connect with it? How do I receive love from it?
But RosalÃa is not asking these questions. Being a pioneer of understanding oneself, she is asking, through the MOTOMAMI experience, how do we release, connect with, and receive love from ourselves? From each other?
The last track on MOTOMAMI is SAKURA: a personal ballad digitally adjusted to sound live from an arena. In it, RosalÃa sings to us, as ghostly as a cautionary tale, that praise and adoration, beauty and fame, are as seasonal and as fleeting as the globally adored cherry blossom.
But this doesn’t close the MOTOMAMI show in New York City. In fact, it is second to Cute, which reminds us, in spite of the exceptionalism that is New York City and MOTOMAMI, that the greatest artist is the one we can’t see, hear, or feel.
The greatest artist is in the proof of life all around us.
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