I can’t say if the algorithm got closer to Spanish or if the Latins conquered it thanks to ‘chambear’. This is how the King Midas of world music, Bad Bunny, number one in the ranking, explained his fight to the ‘New York Times’. … list from ABC Cultural and (almost) everyone else: “Puerto Rico is a very small island, but I always knew I could be big and successful being Puerto Rican, with my music, my slang and my culture. “I worked to reach as many places as possible while still maintaining my roots.”
They also asked Benito if he wasn’t worried that many people wouldn’t understand his words. The artist, sure he knew he was at the top, resolved the problem by humming: “I don’t care!” And when he appeared on “Saturday Night Live” in October to announce he would perform at the Super Bowl halftime show — remember, 128 million viewers — he commented in Spanish: “More than one of my achievements, it belongs to all of us (Latinos), who are showing that no one can erase our mark in this country.”
The dart was of course aimed at President Trump’s immigration policies. In case that wasn’t clear, he warned: “If you didn’t understand what I just said, you have four months to learn Spanish.” For Puerto Ricans, singing in their language – that of Cervantes and Gabriel Garcia Marquez– is indisputable, because he knows that he has the algorithm in his hand, unlike Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias, Shakira and Marc Anthony of the late 90s, forced to also sing in English to conquer the Yankee market.
“Now music is no longer sought after, it is offered to you by the algorithm,” La Mala Rodríguez lamented a few weeks ago about this supplement. And the algorithm now offers Bad Bunny and Rosalía after the tsunami of “Lux”, which became the most listened to album in the world according to Spotify – the ring that rules us all –, displacing Taylor Swift. With one difference compared to Karol G, Nicky Jam and Becky G: the Puerto Rican and the Catalan not only reign in the world of streaming, they have also won over the most cultured and refined critics, and that’s something new.
The crack of the algorithm
You should know that having Alexandria’s song library within earshot, in the hands of a few, has the counterpart that consumers are – we are – more exposed to the subjugation of their personal judgment by these algorithms. As I said: music is no longer found in buckets, they send it to your home without asking for it. He is what Mr. Chinarro also calls in these same pages “the tyrant”. Independent artists and labels have lost the battle against Goliath, the new technological monopolies, but they continue to find a way out.
This is evidenced by our lists (voted by 11 critics), where Rachid B, a Moroccan musician and artist who arrived in Madrid twenty years ago, one of those for whom Trump would make life impossible in New York, but who settled in the Hortaleza neighborhood, brings us a beautiful album made between friends that almost toppled Rosalía. A journey, “El Ghorba”, through the geography of the soul similar to the one that Lorena Álvarez made with “The power over oneself” by San Antolín de Ibias, there, in the emptied Spain of emptied Spain.
Art (this other art very different in its ambition and scope from that of Rosalía and Benito) always finds a way out, like life. Like Rocío Márquez, our heterodox singer and her “Himno vertical”, an experimental work that could please everyone. The perfect balance. Or beyond our borders Horsegirl or Richard Dawson, to whom their number of reproductions, this standard which measures everything, does not do justice. Look through the crack, please don’t wait for the light to come in through the window.
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