Rosalía's "El mal querer". Case Study on Building Stardom in the Digital Age

Abstract

We propose the idea of stardom as a form of contemporary mythology in which stars and celebrities function as semiotic-cultural and somatic-emotional receptacles. To explore this contemporary phenomenon, we take the case of Rosalía. Following the release of the album El mal querer on 2 November 2018, this Catalan singer of urban music and flamenco has dominated the Spanish media landscape, achieving the status of the most searched personality on Google by the Spanish population in 2018.Five years on, it is undeniable that the conceptual universe of El mal querer has created a national mythology specific to the millennial generation: its intergenerational leitmotif - the "trá trá" of Malamente's chorus - the faceless portrait of the singer created by the popular artist Coco Dávez, the collision between the traditional Spanish imaginary and the millennial zeitgeist or Rosalía's hypertrophied gel nails are elements that are already a sign of identification for younger generations. Due to the polymorphic nature of stardom, this pioneering research adopts a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on musicology, social communication, cultural studies and visual analysis to analyse this object of study, which in 2018 (the year of the start of this PhD) had no academic antecedents.