Rosalía and work as identity

After three years of silence regarding her solo music project, Rosalía has just released LuxAn album in which she explores feminine mysticism and surrenders to religiosity, becoming a receptacle of higher wisdom, as Saint Teresa of Ávila and Hildegard of Bingen did. The artist herself revealed this in Popcast, the music podcast of New York Timesa week before the album's release.

What these first interviews have also revealed is her creative process: beyond facing a blank page, she shares her routine of waking up early and going to bed very late to spend the day in the studio. It's not the first time we've heard Rosalía talk about her dedication to her work. In her collaboration on New woman (2024) with Lisa already said "I live to sing, I don't sing to live", oa Before I die (2016), with C. Tangana, "Working every day, without rest"In recent years we have seen Rosalía projected as an artist devoted to her work at all hours of the day.

In the interview with music journalists from Popcast She says she needs to write her lyrics lying in bed. Only then, in a dreamlike state, can she write well. This image reminds us of the music video for Yours (2023), in which Rosalía appears singing, writing and getting ready in a round bed like that of Hugh Hefner, the founder of the magazine PlayboyThis famous bed, which was analyzed by the philosopher Paul B. Preciado in Pornotopia (Anagrama, 2020), was equipped with video, telephone, radio, and background music; it was a veritable multimedia production platform from which the magnate worked tirelessly—according to his biographer, he consumed dexedrine, an amphetamine that eliminates fatigue and sleepiness. Preciado points out that Hefner had inaugurated, long before the advent of social media and mobile phones, the pharmacopornographic regime, a time when work and leisure have become indistinguishable in the same space. And while Rosalía doesn't want to be defined by labels or identities, she has created a very solid one through the personification of the artist, always ready to create.

The artist or genius is a figure culturally associated with the obsessive creator, immersed in their interests and working outside of their own schedule. But Rosalía is not a solitary painter locked away in her studio. She has a contract with a major record label and works with a team that must be able to set her pace and design all her public appearances to help build the concept for the new album: the white dresses, the veils, Callao Square as a Marian apparition, the bleached halo in her hair... despite working in a profession like Richard Florida's, her public image reflects the tireless worker of our time. Philosophers like Eudald Espluga, Juan Evaristo Valls Boix, and Alicia Valdés have analyzed our relationship with work in the 21st century, especially since the popularization of social media. In the shift towards contemporary work, social media has become our mindset. Determined to make a living doing what we love, we have made work the cornerstone of our lives. Social media can become a vehicle for fulfilling our dreams, but it can also enslave us to private platforms that only seek to generate a lot of content to maintain user attention and sell data to advertisers. Work is no longer limited to the workday; in our leisure time, we choose activities that can help us improve ourselves or try to make our own lives better. hobby Our profession. Hefner's bed has spread everywhere through commercial social networks.

Contemporary neoliberalism has produced the fiction that getting our dream job and achieving career success depends on us, abstracting from everyone's material and social realities. We are held responsible for both successes and failures, as if the myth of the self-reliant modern man were real and we didn't depend on a care network that sustains us from birth. In this context, Rosalía appears as the perfect image of an era that has confused passion with productivity and work with identity. Until we can properly digest the album, we won't know ifLuxIt advocates for a dopamine abstinence or whether it ends up feeding the same logic of productivity and constant visibility characteristic of platform capitalism.