El mal querer
El mal querer is the second studio album by Spanish singer and songwriter Rosalía. It was released on 2 November 2018 by Columbia Records. The album was written by Rosalía and co-produced with El Guincho on an initial low budget as an independent artist. Presented as experimental and conceptual; a "romantic document that seamlessly links flamenco's characteristic melodrama to the storytelling of modern, woman-flexing R&B", the album follows the anonymous 13th-century Occitan novel Flamenca. It served as the singer's baccalaureate project upon her graduation from Catalonia College of Music with honors.
Promotion prior to the album release encompassed the release of three singles: "Malamente", "Pienso en tu mirá"—both accompanied by music videos that went viral on social media—and "Di Mi Nombre". Two other singles, "Bagdad" and "De Aquí No Sales", were released after the album. Other promotional initiatives included the display of a billboard in Times Square, as well as live performances at several Spanish festivals, a sold-out concert at Plaza de Colón, the 2018 MTV Europe Music Awards and the Latin Grammy Awards. To further promote the album, Rosalía embarked on the El Mal Querer Tour, which commenced in March 2019 and ended that December.
The album received universal critical acclaim for its experimental production—the use of flamenco elements mixed with pop and urbano music—Rosalía's vocals, and accompanying visuals. It became a commercial success, reaching the top of the Spanish Charts and the US Billboard Latin Pop Albums chart. It also scored her second consecutive Premio Ruido win. Since June 2021, El Mal Querer holds the record for the longest-charting album in Spanish history.
All aspects of El Mal Querer, including visuals, engineering, composition and vocals, were highly awarded by the Recording Academy. At the 2018 Latin Grammy Awards, "Malamente" was nominated for five awards including Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Short Form Music Video, Best Urban Fusion Performance and Best Alternative Song, winning the latter two, and at the next year's ceremony, the album won for Album of the Year, Best Contemporary Pop Vocal Album, Best Engineered Album and Best Recording Package, while the song "Pienso En Tu Mirá" was nominated for Best Pop Song. With six awards, it became the most awarded album by a female artist and the only female artist to win Album of the Year after Shakira. The album also won the Grammy Award for Best Latin Rock, Urban or Alternative Album at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards. In the 2020 update of Rolling Stone
Background and release
The record cycle for Rosalía's sophomore album, El Mal Querer, began in late 2016 as her baccalaureate project at the Catalonia College of Music. She chose to work alongside Spanish musician El Guincho and spawned its concept alongside friend Ferran Echegaray, who bet on the Romance of Flamenca to follow the album's storyline. Thus, every song on the album would be a chapter of the story narrated in the anonymous Occitan novel. Despite having no budget to produce the record as she was an independent artist working on a university project, Rosalía invested a lot of her own money, to the point of almost going bankrupt. However, she continued working on it, stating that "my goal was to find a way to explain this tradition that I'm obsessed with in the most personal way without fear and with risk. Before releasing the album I was in debt and had no guarantees that this would work but I had the hope that, since I was making it from my heart, whether it was a few or many, that those people that liked it, would like it for real". The album was almost completely recorded at El Guincho's apartment in Barcelona with a computer, a microphone and an audio interface.At the end of April 2018, Rosalía published a short documentary video to her social networks where she talked about her new album. She said: "Everything I have I am leaving it here; I'm in the red, I'm risking a lot. This project is what I've always wanted to do, I've been thinking for a long time about making an album like the one I'm going to release. The flamenco inspiration is still there but, at the same time, it is something else." Three days after the international release of the song "Brillo", composed in collaboration with Colombian reggaeton singer J Balvin, Rosalía announced on her social networks that she was going to release a new single in the coming days. Finally, on 29 May 2018, "Malamente" was released. Rosalía confessed that El Mal Querer is actually her final bachelor's degree project, graduating from flamenco studies.
Music
El Mal Querer is a flamenco pop, experimental pop and Latin R&B record that mixes flamenco music with contemporary urban sounds drawn from pop and reggaeton. Critics noted the experimental tendencies in the production.Critical reception
El Mal Querer was widely acclaimed by music critics; at Metacritic, the album received an average score of 89, based on five reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". Writing for The Guardian, head critic Alexis Petridis highly commended the album, giving it the highest rating and describing it as "the calling card of a unique new talent." He praised Rosalía's vocals for giving the album "a head-turning freshness", noting that her singing style "is audibly rooted in a different musical tradition to the usual styles in which pop vocalists perform."Pitchfork ranked El Mal Querer the sixth best album of 2018, with Philip Sherburne complimenting its combination of traditional and modern styles, and praising Rosalía's voice, saying, "Whether breathy or belting, she's as commanding a presence as Spanish-language pop has encountered in ages—less an ambassador for flamenco than the inventor of her own fascinating hybrid."
Conversely, Rosalía has been accused of cultural appropriation by some Spanish publications, due to her use of gitano symbology. She is from Catalonia, which has underlying "cultural and political tensions" with Andalusia, the home of flamenco. Paula Ibieta of Phoenix New Times cited "the questionable nature of Rosalía's aesthetic and use of Andalusian slang". Rosalía has responded that the controversy is positive, and that flamenco elements will always be present in her work.
Year-end rankings
Decade-end lists
All-time lists
Impact
Literature
After the release of El Mal Querer, demand skyrocketed for Flamenca, the medieval novel that inspired the album. In September 2019, Roca Editorial reissued the novel, marking it as "a 13th-century classic feminist novel" and noting the inspiration the novel provided for Rosalía's project. Anton M. Espalader, who translated the book into Catalan, stated to Verne, "We have to congratulate Rosalía and thank her for this phenomenon that is not currently occurring in other countries. It is always good news that a medieval novel of these characteristics returns to bookstores." The themes surrounding the narrative of the album, which revolves around the toxicity of a heterosexual relationship, became instruments for teachers and professionals to explain topics related to gender violence. It also became a narrative to analyze didactically in literature courses. Parallelly, El Mal Querer spawned controversy in Spain as it mainly takes inspiration of flamenco and gypsy culture and symbolism. While some personalities and media outlets, like The New York Times, defended Rosalía by saying "the debate on the cultural appropriation of the Spanish singer is unfair: her music embodies, with height, the most eloquent artistic form of globalization: the remix", many others criticized Rosalía's privilege as a white person within the music industry, stating that a Romani female would never have had the same amount of opportunities as her. These topics were analyzed in many college theses. María Guadalupe Benzal Alía, a degree student in Translation and Interpretation and with a diploma in Intercultural Communication ratified by the Comillas Pontifical University of Madrid, wrote her thesis about the album, which she titled Análisis intercultural del álbum musical de Rosalía Vila, El Mal Querer y el consecuente rechazo de la comunidad gitana española. Peter Manuel, ethnomusicology professor emeritus, published the journal article The Rosalía Polemic: Defining Genre Boundaries and Legitimacy in Flamenco also based on the controversy.All sociology and musicology behind El Mal Querer was compiled in the 2021 essay book Ensayos Sobre el Buen Querer, written by thirteen authors.