goo deluge vs. taste laser

I listened to Rosalía's new album LUX in the car on its release day, driving to and from a lil happy hour with friends in Silver Lake. It's incredible. This shit a dang opera is what I thought, like two songs in. I do not speak Spanish, nor any of the many other languages sung within LUX, but it doesn't matter, in the same way that it doesn't matter whether you speak the language when you go to see an opera. The emotion and the theatricality is what carry you through—and perhaps the translations that appear as supertitles projected above the stage. Or in La Rosalía's case, we have lyric videos:

I wouldn't say LUX is necessarily a "challenging" album, at least in the sense of listenability; it feels like it will be legible to people who aren't afraid of a little Bizet, Mozart, Wagner, whateva, people who carry tote bags representing public media companies, people who know the people who carry the tote bags. If you are aware of what a bassoon is, or are at least familiar with the word "bassoon," you will know the basics of what is going on here.

But LUX is an album that will challenge people who got into Rosalía through her work as a pop / hip hop artist because it doesn't follow the genre conventions of pop or hip hop. It's a grand and dramatic statement, and it asks a bit more of you than a collection of short radio-friendly songs tends to ask. (Not that Rosalía is in the business of making short radio-friendly songs, as we have seen from her incredible previous album Motomami, which I once listened to while walking around Manhattan on mushrooms, an ideal listening scenario if you can swing it.)

This blog isn't an intensive breakdown of LUX—I don't think I have the vocab for such a thing, honestly!—but I wanted to write about it because the act of asking for more of your audience is something very striking to me right now. The way I am categorizing it in my head is a TASTE LASER: a targeted, clear statement of artistic intention that requires a certain level of buy-in from the audience. The beam of the taste laser is narrow—the art is not designed for everyone. By working with the London Symphony Orchestra and with capital-A Art-coded individuals like Björk, and by bringing in elements of classical and operatic compositions, and by existing as a full album rather than a collection of potential singles, LUX is making a clear statement: it's elevated, sophisticated, international, cosmopolitan, continental.

Compare the TASTE LASER to the GOO DELUGE, which is when you just barf out a huge amount of output, all with a similar flavor and texture, and you leave it to your audience to paw through the goo for any particular bits that strike your fancy. There is no obvious thesis statement in such a release; it is up to you to do the work to decide what the art might mean for yourself. In the streaming era, the GOO DELUGE is common because it'll juice your numbers and maximize your commercial surface area, and it will also overwhelm potential critics to the point where it's difficult to make a singular critical statement about the work in question other than to go "oh, wow, that's a lot of music, damn."

The most recent GOO DELUGE I can call out is Justin Bieber's recent Swag and Swag II: 21 and 23 tracks, respectively, all fairly similar lo-fi, borderline-bedroom, guitar-accented, soft-R&B, sorta confessional (or maybe, more accurately, devotional) songs, released with a fast blast of fanfare (Swag II also dropped as a surprise) that got everyone talking for about three days before kinda fading from the chat. Of those 44 songs, "Daisies" spent a while in the top 10, and the rest are chillin where they lie.

I listened to both Swags and it's not like I hated either, but neither really asked anything of me other than to chill out and hear Biebs cooing about how much he loves his wife and Jesus Christ, not necessarily in that order. And by the end of the double album, I'd gotten goo-boarded so hard that I was exhausted. I definitely felt like Bieber was the guy at the party who wouldn't put the acoustic guitar down, which is a wild thing to think about the little guy who gave us "What Do You Mean?"

Not everything needs to have an intense thesis statement, a hard genre swerve, a capital-A Art approach, etc. but I really appreciate those who are going for it. Going for TASTE LASER over GOO DELUGE means potentially alienating some of your fans, and limiting your commercial prospects, which 'in this economy' is obviously a tough call. Orchestras are expensive! They are hard to record well, and there are a lot of people in them! But on the flip side, putting out something specific means people have something clear to react to...which starts conversations...which piques interest...and even gets bloggers to write about your shit...and eventually boosts you to that special level of Maybe This Is Is The Best Album of the Year, which Steven Hyden has predicted over at Uproxx.

It's a sloptastic year, 2025. Any effort to put out something refined and effortful and intense, any effort to make something that, as Grace Robinson-Somerville wrote in her Pitchfork review of Whitney's latest album, isn't just destined for hotel lobbies and hotel elevators, is worthy of my time. And even though I do not 'understand' LUX just by listening to it without the aid of translations or external critical analysis, I understand the expressiveness and virtuosic performance of Rosalía's voice, which is simply so beautiful it made me tear up a couple of times, and that's all that matters.

Frank Zappa, another unique artist who recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, raged about "hateful practices" in commercial music in his autobiography: “All of the norms came into being because the guys who paid the bills wanted the tunes they were buying to sound a certain way. The king said: 'I’ll drop off your head unless it sounds like this.' The pope said: 'I’ll rip out your fingernails unless it sounds like this.' It’s the same today: 'Your song won’t get played on the radio unless it sounds like this.'" So shout out to the TASTE LASER, which zaps your ears out of those cursed norms, rewires your soft gooey brain, and, just maybe, lends you a new way of listening.

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