2023-06-11 10:03:02
Everyone knew it wasn’t going to be easy. What to organize a festival for 50,000 daily spectators Almost 40 kilometers from Madrid, in the middle of nowhere, a wasteland between highways more typical of a dystopia than the happiness associated with a musical event of this type, it was quite a challenge.
Friday’s day started reasonably well, with an enclosure in apparent good condition after what was seen in the previous days and a transport set up by the organization that worked correctly. But the thing, beyond the musical, was faltering throughout the day. Traffic jams in the accesses forced to delay the concert Depeche Mode 45 minutes so that their fans could get to see them. The artificial grass that covered the mud began to make monumental puddles in the early evening on the small stages because it could not soak up as much water. And then the drama of the return for a few hundred people: those who chose to return on the “official” shuttles once the festival finished at 6:00 a.m. had to wait up to two hours to get on the bus, with the sun already high in the sky. Nothing new in a Madrid event, a city that has always been given to regulate the organization of festivals, if we remember what happened with the Mad Cool and taxis last year, but something that many would not have expected from a festival that claims to be one of the best in the world and that already has franchises in a handful of large cities on the planet, from The Angels a Buenos Aires.
The attendance figures that the organization announced on Saturday afternoon were, despite everything, good. Thursday’s day canceled due to the possibility of storms, the spectators in the rock city from Arganda reached 90,000: 42,000 on Friday added to the 48,000 expected on Saturday because of the tickets placed. Placed, not sold: the organization did not want to count how many of these tickets had been given away in order to generate a sensation of fullness, and rumors have been heard that even pointed to ten thousand. We insisted, rumors, such as those that said that in the companies sponsoring the festival there had been a shower of extra invitations in the days before the start of the festival.
What was clear, beyond the business aspect, is that Primavera is a well-oiled musical machine, and the programming was taking place in Arganda without excessive problems, producing great concerts and memorable moments. Saturday was to be the big day of the festivalbasically by one of their proper names: Rosalía. The Catalan is our most global star, but she also dominates at home. It was demonstrated by the immense mass that attended his concert last Saturday in Barcelona within the framework of that mirror festival with that of Madrid, and he did it again this time in the capital. At two in the morning, when his show started, there was no room for a pin on the great avenue that leads to the two main stages of the festival. A motley crowd that ranged from young gender-fluid motomamis to KPMG consultants to Díaz Ayuso’s hardcore fans.
His deployment on stage was, how could it be otherwise, imperial. The show started with the roar of a motorcycle and ended with industrial sounds, but in the middle there was a concert of immense humanity. The scenery and costumes were rigorously black and white, minimalist except for the projections, and the Catalan woman was surrounded by her usual dancers and that camera that relentlessly pursues her and shows us each of her gestures in detail. She was not at home, like at the concert in Barcelona, but she knows that Madrid is also conquered ground for herand thus he greeted his audience, which he reminded them of how difficult it is to endure a year and a half tour like his, but in Madrid, he came to say, everything is easier.
It has been said a thousand times, but it must be repeated: what this woman has achieved is prodigious. Mixing the popular with the experimental with that mastery, giving it an absolutely genuine personality, embroidering both the field of creation and interpretation, with its performance side included… And all without falling into the absurd divism of so many artists. Because Rosalía is close, friendly, affectionate even with her audience. He adores him, and she responds in kind. She opened the show with Just in case and continued with cake: gasoline so that the public entered the rag from the first moment. It wasn’t easy to dance with the dense mass of people watching her, but she found a way to shake to the sound of Famethe song he made with The Weeknd, to which he alluded again when he sang his Blinding Lights. She sang and danced flamenco, gave the microphone to the audience in the front rows and got her hair wet in one of those studied actions that she manages to pass off as spontaneous. When she sat down at the piano to sing, she alone on stage to sing Hentai. Nobody remembered the absurdity of the lyrics anymore, because the only thing that mattered was feeling Rosalía. She would later dance reggaeton with The Versace combi and would fall too Badlyto prop up a setlist irreproachable and to which the public surrendered with open arms.
Girl power
This Saturday was an eminently feminine day in the Primavera Sound, a reflection of an industry where more and more they are the ones that dominate, at least as far as the artistic field is concerned. It was a day in which there were also no old glories among the headliners, as it was the day before Depeche Mode, magnet for a whole generation of tall viewers.
The afternoon started with the fun experiment that embody Domi & JD Beck, a very young French and Texan duo that recover and reinvent the electronic jazz of the 70s at the command of piano and drums, respectively. With an aesthetic like Licorize Pizzathe grandchildren look like Herbie Hancok would have wanted to have, and on stage they have a blast, as if they were still playing toy instruments but reinventing a genre that was all the rage 50 years ago.
Always on small stages, it was the turn of the woman from Cádiz Judeline, a kind of Rosalía passed through the Caños de Meca, something more hippy than the Catalan, more dreamy in her lyrics. “We are going to end up old people with a house in Zahara”, she says in the song that has that town on the coast of Cádiz as its title. Throughout the afternoon, the small stage area acquired a certain protest character: Steve Albini, at the command of his mythical Shellac, what we could call the house band del Primavera, vindicated the work of the Chicago scrap collectors to the beat of guitars almost hardcorey West Indian Villaina true beast of urban sounds that made an eminently young audience dance tirelessly, did the same with women and the LGTBIQ+ community, to finish off his show taking off a t-shirt viniciusthe Real Madrid player who denounced racist insults on the field a few weeks ago.
In the territory of the big stages, one of the most interesting dishes of the day started very early. Arlo Parks He has a prodigious voice and goes through different genres with the naturalness of someone who goes from the first to the second course. Lately he has taken to claiming the powerful guitars of the 90s, and one day he appears with a Sebadoh t-shirt and another with one of Rage Against de Machine, as was the case this Saturday. His repertoire, with jewelry from bedroom popwith approaches to r’n’b and to disco music and with moments of guitars as forceful as those of his admirers Nirvana culminated in the Primavera with a beautiful Softly that the public chanted while accompanying waving their hands.
reinventing pop
As the afternoon wore on, the heavyweights’ turn approached. Women with a torrential personality who, beyond producing songs that are hymns or pieces of art, are defining an era where you have to stick your head up high so that one (one) can distinguish it, because we are flooded with music. Annie Clarkbetter known as St. Vincent, is one of the best examples. A teacher of an instrument, the guitar, which she masters like few characters on the current pop scene, and an experimenter who knows how to ally herself with the teachers who were also revolutionaries in her time (and still are), such as David Byrne, Clark hasn’t released an album in a couple of years. But what does that matter when you have a solid songbook like yours and when their concerts also have a stage component that makes them grow and that envelops their artistic games around pop, rock, jazz, electronics or any sound that gets in the way with magic. listen to how he sings New Yorkone of his classics, is always exciting, and even more so with those almost naive illustrations of skyscrapers that he uses as scenery.
St Vincent had not yet finished and, things of the Darwinism of festivals, which force us to make painful choices or run from one place to another snacking on the different dishes on the menu, it started in another setting Forgive me. The Washington DC artist is pure musical and aesthetic elegance, and moves comfortably between the territories of soul and electronica. In Madrid he made his purpose clear: “This is a dance party with live go-go dancers, so I want to see you dance.” She was completely alone in the middle of a minimalist stage, with all the pre-recorded music and no instruments in sight, so those go-go dancers were clearly the audience. She was achieving her goal based on songs in which she dominated the drum & bass, that turn-of-the-century rhythm that is back in fashion, but with Contactthe star song from his latest album, many were already dancing as if they had been put on a platform.
But if there was an artist expected beyond Rosalía tonight, this was it. Caroline Polacheckwhich in the last two years has become a kind of high priestess of musical contemporaneity. With one foot in mainstream and another in the alternative sphere, Polacheck does exactly what he wants. Yours could be called hyperpop author or simply postmodern pastiche, because in their songs they can sound from rumbas and flamenco echoes (as in Sunset, which he dedicated to Spain) to howls that could come from the most ancient of songs, but always without losing sight of what we could call “the modern”. It has fans and detractors, but it undeniable is the quality of a show in which his overwhelming presence and a spectacular technique that allows him to reach unattainable voice ranges hypnotize despite the constant running and dancing from one side of the stage to the other. He told the public that just after her concert in Barcelona last week he had lost the time, but he had miraculously recovered it this Friday. It was that same voice that, after finishing with the pretty So Hotallowed him to shout to the public: “Everyone ready for Rosalíaaaa!”.
In Calvin Harris The responsibility of starting the nightclub fell before the performance of the Catalan. He was the perfect opening act for her: the one who was gathering the crowd in front of the big stages and preparing them so that later Rosalía would blow their heads and shrink the hearts of everyone she had in front of her. There were still things to enjoy, such as the already legendary session of DJ Coco who for many years has closed all Primavera Sounds by playing songs that someone has performed at the festival mixed with classics. But the important work was already done. Now all that remains is to know what will happen to Primavera Sound Madrid next year. In the capital it stays, in Arganda it is not so clear.
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