A year ago this month, Spanish singer and songwriter Rosalia released Lux. The single “Berghain”—which features gritty club music, operatic influences, and a guest appearance by Björk—had already gone viral online. As a Rosalia fan, I knew I could expect striking vocals, bold genre mixing (flamenco, pop, hip-hop), and powerful storytelling. Her Grammy Award winning 2018 album El Mal Querer was inspired by a 13th-century romance from southern France concerning domestic violence, and I anticipated more of that kind of complex worldbuilding on Lux as well.
But I also found more than this. The songs on Lux take us on an intimate journey through Rosalia’s own spiritual awakening. Like the Scivias of Hildegard of Bingen, one of Rosalia’s many muses, Lux is an homage to God caught up in a worshipful ecstasy—but on first listen, it may sound like blasphemy.
Rosalia is not the first pop star to use religious metaphors to depict desire, pain, sex, and love. Others have employed loose metaphors or double entendres, as Madonna did in “Like a Prayer.” Sometimes they use intentionally blasphemous religious language to critique the church’s oppression of queer love, like Hozier in “Take Me to Church” or Lil Nas X in “Montero (Call Me by Your Name)”. Blasphemous art can stimulate social reform. This was the article I was expecting to write about Lux.
After repeated listens, though, I was delighted to find that Rosalia had in fact done the opposite. In four orchestral movements, she meticulously incorporates the stories of female mystics and heroines of faith with her own path toward loving God.
Rosalia has described the first movement as a “departure from purity.” The first lyrics of “Sexo, Violencia y Llantas” are, in translation, “Who could live between the two? / First to love the world, and then to love God.” What follows is a lament for the lack of fulfillment found in the excesses of the world, romantic love, and human frailty. In “Porcelana,” her existence is caught between the experience of pleasure and pain: “Pleasure anesthetizes my pain. / Pain anesthetizes my pleasure.” The song is inspired by Ryōnen Gensō, a 17th century Japanese Buddhist nun known for her charity, for her poetry, and for scarring her own face in order to be accepted by Haku-o Dotai’s temple after being told that he could not see past her feminine appearance. Rosalia recasts Gensō’s self-scarring as a self-empowering move by casting off of her own (albeit culturally imposed) physical limitations. She is accepting her life as a “divine ruin.”
In “Divinize,” her frustration gives way to the desire to simultaneously love the world and God as an imperfect vessel for shining God’s light to the world. She includes herself in God’s work not despite her body, pleasure, or heartbreak but because of them. In “Reliquia,” she wants to give herself away as if she were a relic, so that she may bless people long after she dies—like her namesake, the 16th-century saint Rose of Lima. St. Rose is known for her care for the poor, her extreme asceticism, and the veneration of her relics—including parts of her body—around the world.
In the second movement, the track “Mundo Nuevo” is a cover of an early 1900s flamenco song by the legendary singer Pastora María Pavón Cruz, known as La Niña de Los Peines. Rosalia joins herself to the singer’s longing to leave the world to find a better one: “I would like to renounce this world entirely / To dwell once more. . . / To see if in a new world I might find more truth.” During Cruz’s time, it wasn’t socially acceptable for women to sing flamenco publicly, especially without dancing to accompany the songs. Later in her life, La Niña stopped creating music because of her husband’s jealousy; he was also a well-known flamenco singer. Rosalia places herself in the heartbreak and longing of a woman whose light was threatened by crippling cultural expectations and limitations.
The desire to leave the world behind for something higher has a rich tradition in Christianity. By highlighting Pavon Cruz’s song in an album drawing inspiration from women mystics, Rosalia joins her own feminist spirit with traditional mysticism. She wants to construct a better world for women than the one Pavon Cruz had to live in.
In the third movement, Rosalia resolves that she will give herself to the divine cause. “Jeanne” references the execution of Joan of Arc by the French church in 1431. When Rosalia sings, “My father shall not be a man, nor a woman. / It is my heart that names me,” inspired by Joan’s courage and assertion of self, Rosalia finds that her self-possession will give her the strength to give her life over to God. In “Focu ‘Ranni,” she sings, “I will not be your other half, never your property. / I will belong to myself and to my freedom. / What is built with love is harder to set ablaze.”
By the fourth movement, Rosaslia takes us to her imagined funeral, where she invites guests to sing rather than cry as she gratefully returns to the earth that formed her. The lyric “I come from the stars. / Today I become dust to return to dust” recalls Genesis 3:19. In “Magnolias,” Rosalia states that she was inspired by the funeral of Hindu saint Anandamayi Ma (Nirmala Sundari), whose funeral purportedly was so peaceful and joyful that even those standing outside of it could feel it. Rosalia is asking herself what her own legacy will be.
When we casually say someone is a saint, it’s usually synonymous with being perfect. Rosalia affirms another meaning: a sainthood that fully embodies womanhood and self-determination in order to pursue holy light. While she admits that she is imperfect, she believes “God descends and I ascend. We meet in the middle.” Accompanied by her spiritual mothers, she is uniting with God by becoming herself.
