Spanish singer Rosalía’s new album, Motomami, has received a lot of media attention for its melding of “every sound at her disposal”. Grounded in her flamenco background, the album sways from pop to jazz, is inflected with hip-hop and reggaetón beats and even features elements of bachata and salsa.
Rosalía rose to mainstream visibility in 2018 when her studio album El mal querer (The Bad Loving) landed in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. But the recent comparison by academics of Rosalía’s rise to fame with the “evolution of reggaetón from its Afro-Caribbean roots to a genre with global cachet” speaks to the silencing of the music’s rich socio-cultural history.
