In 1984, Metallica released Fade to black, an acoustic ballad integrated into your album Ride the lightning. That a bunch of thrash metal he includes a slow and melodic song which is enough to trigger an immediate reaction among part of his audience: they want to hear more accessible, more commercial songs. In short, they were “sold out”. The accusation is not new, but it will be later: every time a rock group moves away from its original crudeness, part of the public interprets this gesture as a betrayal of an imaginary group. In Spain, one of the paradigmatic cases is that of Evaristo Páramos, singer of La Polla Records. The band has represented anti-establishment punk since the 1980s. When they began to sell out venues and Evaristo was able to make a living from music, economic success was seen as a break with the original spirit of the genre. In the 90s, there was a recurring debate: if you were independent You couldn’t join a multinational. Decades later, in a different way, C. Tangana would receive the same qualification by abandoning his beginnings in rap. underground to embrace, like El Madrileño, melodic and folkloric sounds under the multinational Sony Music. In all these cases, the accusation responds less to concrete facts than to a cultural expectation: an artist authentic should behave in a certain way.
This debate has been reactivated among several groups. One of them is the Madrid group La Paloma, which has just released the album A stroke of luck. Formed by Lucas Sierra (29 years old, Gran Canaria), Juan Rojo (31 years old, Madrid) and Nico Yubero (30 years old, Madrid), the group receives EL PAÍS in a café in Tetuán (Madrid) to talk about the reactions aroused by the album. His first album with the multinational Universal presents a cleaner and less distorted sound than his first, a turning point that certain sectors of the scene (accustomed to saturation and aesthetic amateur) This was interpreted as a marketing signal. “It seems that, thanks to Sonar Mejor, you are suspicious, as if you have a hidden agenda behind it,” comments Yubero. The cursed word comes up again: sold. From her entourage, Joan Guàrdia (45 years old, Castellar del Vallès), artistic director of La Paloma within La Castanya, explains that the transition is more structured and natural: “We have made strategic and logistical decisions to continue moving forward together without losing the essence that encouraged us to form a team”. On the agreement with Universal añade: “Considering a commercial alliance between two record companies was decisive.” For him, the idea that a multinational remains authentic is outdated: “Today, the majority of people are still behind records.”
Although the term reappears cyclically, the debate over the authenticity of rock is as old as the genre itself. Since the emergence of rock and roll in the 1950s, its values (rebellion, spontaneity, counterculture) have been consolidated as immutable realities. The philosopher Theodore Gracyk explains it clearly: the recording industry on the ground exploited the image of rock rebellion, since it participated from the start in its construction. In your article Rhythm and noiseexplains how the aesthetic of rock (invigorating attitude, anti-system aura, controlled imbalance) was deliberately shaped to make it a recognizable product. What was understood as spontaneity was, in large part, an aesthetic code agreed upon among artists, performers, and mediums.
For Fernán del Val (43, Madrid), sociologist specializing in popular music, authenticity functions as a moral category rather than a musical one. “Authenticity is not a whim of rock, it is a deep cultural value that we use to evaluate music on the ground, it is also people and behaviors,” he says during a video call. It is not an objective quality, but a shared construction which acts as an ethical thermometer. “Since Walter Benjamin and the Escuela de Frankfurt, there has been the idea that industrial production has lost its aura. This aura can be understood as authenticity, and this debate remains alive.” Although today’s industry works differently (streaming, algorithms, accelerated professionalization), the tension between the artistic and the commercial continues to mark the public’s reception. “The scenario has changed, but the conflict remains intact,” assures Del Val. “The public does not reject the profession, but the perception of artifice.”
This framework helps to understand the reactions to La Paloma. The band emerged at the height of post-pandemic guitar rock, when distortion and urgency became a canon of authenticity for a generation. Your first album, However, infits this mold. The contrast with a second album that was more relaxing and supported by clean guitars therefore generated friction. From the inside, they insist on the fact that at the heart of the calculation: “Nadie was thinking about a scripted direction. We had songs, we worked on them sincerely, and everyone asked for something”, explains Nico, “the album existed before Universal”.
So, one of the keys to the report is the automatic association between sonic beauty and commercialization. “It seems like if you’re the best, you automatically sell out. Like if you’re already good, you can’t have artistic intent behind it,” Sierra says. This damage reveals that certain areas of rock have linked the “authentic” to precariousness. For Rojo, the conflict comes from too narrow a mold: “It matters a lot to us that a group is authentic. But we don’t really know what that is. You just know that if you don’t fit into a very concrete mold, you won’t succeed.”
The stylistic endogamy of the scene also influences: “The references of many groups are other groups from the same scene. Del Val coincides: authenticity is a symbolic agreement. “Fans can see authenticity where critics see artifice, and in reverse,” he explains. What weighs the most is not the sound, but the coherence: what the artist does is linked to what the public believes he should do.
A final tense element in the debate: the personal exhibition. At a time when naturalness in networks has become cultural capital, many artists feel the pressure to share intimacy in order to be accessible. This is not new: Del Val studied how Dani Martín, in his years of greatest media pressure, turned to closure to counter the perception of inauthenticity of his group, El Canto del Loco. “This naturalness was not accidental,” he explains, “it was just a way of contesting a space that criticism denied.” Today, this mechanism is amplified across networks. Even projects born in rigid commercial structures (like Katseye, formed according to K-pop standards) build their image authentic through intimate and spontaneous gestures which function as a real test in front of their audience: they present to their peers the open discourse of their sexual orientation. La Paloma rejects this logic. “I don’t think it’s necessary to show your life for people to understand your music. Music is one thing, your personal life is another,” says Rojo. “If society demands that we know about an artist’s life to validate their music, what’s broken is society, not the artist,” he added.
La Paloma’s case is just the most recent example of a debate that has lasted more than half a century in popular music. What is (recently) discussed is not just sound or strategy, but cultural identity: what we hope will be an artist, who will decide the rules and how to change the idea of ”being authentic” in a musical ecosystem that doesn’t resemble stadium rock or punk fanzines. As Del Val tells his own musicians, authenticity is a negotiated, mutable, and collective value. More than a verdict, it is part of the ongoing conversation between creators, industry and public: a space where, for better or for worse, rock has been discussed since it existed.
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