Is Rosalía a problem for flamenco, or its salvation? There are all kinds of opinions about this, for all tastes. Flamenco doesn’t need to be saved because it hasn’t been kidnaped and it’s not in danger of extinction. It’s true that it’s going through a bit of an identity crisis which has caused confusion, but it has overcome worse challenges in the past. Do you remember when Demófilo said that Silverio was going to destroy Gypsy cante, and it turned out being the other way around, as he rather prevented it from vanishing, by opening cafes cantantes, creating a company of artists and striving to dignify it?

Everyone knows that Rosalía is not a cantaora. She’s just a  singer with delusions of being a cantaora, nothing more. It’s annoying when people say that she has never tried to portray herself as a cantaora, because it’s not true. She did just that, because she knew that it was a good way to become what she became, a singer of global success who gets paid whatever she asks for. She likes fame and money, without a doubt, and she picked cante flamenco, instead of opera of Spanish pop, because she knew that the outrage of flamenco purists would perfectly suit her goal.

She threw her nets in the ocean of cante flamenco to see who would get entangled, and even prestigious flamencologists — those modern and progressive — fell for it. No need to say names. Some of those flamenco visionaries even said that this singer from Barcelona was a kind of revolutionary who had come to rescue flamenco from dying in the mud of boredom and routine. They even dared to compare her to Niña de los Peines and they’re still on the loose. Well, they said that a couple of years ago and we’re still waiting. “She sings before tens of thousands of people!”, they claim. And so what? This has already been done by other flamenco artists.

Then there is the argument that Rosalía is damaging flamenco. We don’t think she’s that powerful, even as she shows up everywhere. The same was said about Silverio, Marchena, Lebrijano and Morente, to name a few examples of true revolutionaries. Could we conceive cante without those geniuses? Not at all. Yet, Rosalía has no importance in flamenco. None. And we don’t think she will have any positive impact with her flamenco-ish parodies. If we weren’t such an uncouth country, like we are, this girl wouldn’t be considered more than she is: a successful singer who figured out a way to become rich.