Rosalía and new flamenco: the controversy that changed the genre

An orthodox flamenco training before the controversy

Before becoming a global phenomenon, Rosalía spent years as a disciplined student of traditional flamenco cante. She studied at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya (ESMUC) in Barcelona under Catalina “La Chaqueta,” a cantaora and teacher of Roma roots who passed on to her the purest, most orthodox cante: soleares, seguiriyas, tonás, the whole cante jondo repertoire that holds up the edifice of flamenco from within. That training period was neither a symbolic gesture nor a résumé decoration: Rosalía spent years singing in peñas flamencas, memorizing centuries-old lyrics, and submitting herself to the judgment of a world — traditional flamenco — that hands out recognition to no one based on credentials alone.

The result of that period was “Los Ángeles” (2017), her debut album, recorded with guitarist Raül Refree with minimal instrumentation — voice and guitar, barely any ornamentation — and a flamenco cante repertoire recognizable to any orthodox fan. Specialized critics generally received the album with surprise and respect: here was a Catalan cantaora, with no Roma ancestry, who nonetheless commanded the cante with a technical rigor that was hard to dispute. “Los Ángeles” functioned, in a way, as a credential: proof that Rosalía knew the rules of the game before setting out to break them.

The leap: “El Mal Querer” (2018)

Everything changed with “El Mal Querer,” the concept album Rosalía presented as her final degree project at ESMUC, which went on to become a cultural phenomenon with international reach. Structured as a musical novel in eleven chapters inspired by “Flamenca,” a medieval Occitan story about possessive love and gender violence, the album blended flamenco palos with trap, R&B, urban music, and contemporary electronic production, co-produced in part with El Guincho.

The difference from “Los Ángeles” was radical. Where the first album offered pure flamenco with stripped-down instrumentation, “El Mal Querer” incorporated electronically processed palmas, samples, occasional autotune, and song structures borrowed from urban pop, all without fully abandoning cante: bulerías, tangos, and coplas still appeared within that new sonic framework. Songs like “Malamente” or “Pienso en tu mirá” became massive hits, racking up millions of streams and a media impact no flamenco album had had in decades. Within months, Rosalía went from being a rising talent within the flamenco scene to a global pop star, a Latin Grammy winner with collaborations alongside artists like J Balvin, Travis Scott, and Billie Eilish.

The controversy: cultural appropriation and legitimacy

The success of “El Mal Querer” brought with it a controversy that is still alive years later. The debate can be boiled down to an uncomfortable question: does a Catalan artist, with no Roma ancestry or family ties to flamenco tradition, have the legitimacy to become the genre’s global face and, on top of that, profit commercially from a tradition that isn’t “hers” in an ethnic or cultural sense?

The harshest critics point to several issues. First, that flamenco is, historically, an art forged by the Roma people under conditions of marginalization and poverty, and that its international recognition has come faster and with greater financial reward for a non-Roma (“paya”) artist than for generations of Roma cantaores who never had that kind of access to major media or global record labels. Second, that certain aesthetic elements of the album — the use of the word “gitana” in some lyrics, the visual iconography of her music videos, references to santería or symbolism associated with Roma culture — were perceived by parts of the Roma community as a superficial appropriation, lifted from the tradition without its proper context or due respect. Roma organizations and artists, including cantaores and activists, publicly expressed their discomfort with what they saw as the commercial use of symbols belonging to someone else’s culture.

Rosalía’s defenders, for their part, argue that flamenco, like any living art form, has never been a closed or “pure” tradition in an essentialist sense: it was born from a blending of Roma, Andalusian, Arab, and Jewish cultures, and its history is full of fusions and outside influences. They also point out that Rosalía trained seriously and rigorously for years, that her debut album demonstrates genuine technical mastery of cante, and that experimenting with new sounds is precisely what has kept flamenco alive throughout its history, rather than turning it into a museum piece.

The precedent of Enrique Morente and “Omega”

This isn’t the first time the flamenco world has gone through a controversy of this kind, and it’s worth recalling a direct precedent: Enrique Morente and his album “Omega” (1996). Morente, a cantaor from Granada of Roma roots and an impeccable track record within the most orthodox flamenco, surprised critics by recording an album that fused flamenco cante with alternative rock, collaborating with the band Lagartija Nick and drawing on texts by Federico García Lorca and Leonard Cohen for its lyrics.

The reaction from the more purist sector was one of outright rejection: he was accused of betraying cante, of “selling out” flamenco to the rock market, of abandoning the orthodoxy he himself had championed throughout his career. Over the years, however, “Omega” has come to be recognized as one of the most influential and innovative works in the history of modern flamenco, a direct bridge between cante jondo tradition and new generations of listeners who came to flamenco through rock. The parallel with Rosalía is obvious: both artists, trained in orthodoxy, decided to break the mold from within, and both faced initial rejection that time has since softened — although in Morente’s case the debate centered mainly on aesthetic purity, while Rosalía’s case adds the more delicate dimension of cultural and ethnic identity.

Defenders and detractors within the flamenco world

The debate over Rosalía isn’t unanimous even within flamenco itself. Prestigious cantaores and guitarists have taken opposing positions. Some voices from more traditional flamenco have openly questioned her legitimacy to represent the genre internationally, arguing that her success overshadows, in media terms, Roma artists with far longer careers and a blood-and-life relationship with the tradition. Others, by contrast, have publicly defended her talent and technical rigor, pointing out that flamenco needs new blood and visibility to survive in an increasingly fragmented global music market.

Tellingly, much of the flamenco industry — festivals, peñas, specialized record labels — has held an ambivalent stance: they acknowledge Rosalía’s positive impact in terms of visibility and drawing new, younger audiences to flamenco, but at the same time insist that this media spotlight needs to translate into real opportunities for the Roma flamenco artists who sustain the tradition day to day, far from the big international stages.

Impact on flamenco’s global popularization

Setting the controversy aside, it’s undeniable that Rosalía has had an extraordinary impact on flamenco’s international visibility. Thanks to “El Mal Querer” and her later work, millions of listeners who had never had any contact with the genre — especially young audiences outside Spain — have discovered flamenco palos, rhythms, and aesthetics through a pop vehicle that was far more accessible than a pure cante record. That “gateway” effect has, in practice, benefited flamenco festivals, record sales for more traditional artists, and general interest in flamenco culture on streaming platforms.

At the same time, this phenomenon reopens a question flamenco has been asking itself for over a century, long before Rosalía or Morente: to what extent can an art form fuse with others without losing its identity, and who gets to decide where that line is? There’s no settled answer, and there probably never will be, because flamenco itself has historically been built out of similar tensions. What does seem clear is that, whether or not you like the specific artistic result, Rosalía has forced the global music industry to look at flamenco again — and that attention, if well managed, can become a real opportunity for the whole genre, not just for her.