2023-12-24 17:04:10
We have been observing for some time how the newest pop has been incorporating ingredients of the culture root (work songs, square tambourines and anise bottles), which not so long ago seemed anachronistic and village-like. And we had not realized that, in that ‘traditional values’ package, another clue has been filtered, that relating to transcendence, not in the form of a religious tribute, but as recognition of spirituality as genuine and authentic line (that word that made us laugh in times of postmodern lightness).
Reactionary turn? Nothing to see. In Spain, for generations floods during the Franco regime or in its wake, mysticism and faith were embedded as ungrateful legs of the dictatorial agenda. But, at this point, that association is far away. And the ecclesiastical management is separated of intimate feeling. It is surprising to see new pop artists singing about overcoming the earthly and the search for answers to the big questions.
We have been able to see it these Christmas days with the interesting ‘revival’ of the medieval liturgical drama ‘El cant de la Sibil·la’, which the Council of Trent vetoed as pagan and which UNESCO recognized. Lately, very modern voices such as Maria Arnal or the Majorcans Joana Gomila and Júlia Colom have approached him. There is not one there vindication of clerical doctrine nothing, but face to face with our destiny, the expression of a inner anxiety and the aftershock to materialism (practiced both right and left).
Let’s keep going. Rosalíain ‘Motomami’, proclaims that “God comes first.” In María José Llergo you breathe the longing for transcendence: “Singing is my way of praying,” he told this newspaper. C. Tangana has confessed: “I was an atheist, but now I believe / because a miracle like you had to come down from heaven.” Rigoberta Bandini He had to clarify that he was not from Opus Dei, even though he confessed to being a believer (“from the left”). And in these that appears Stella Maris, the fictional group of ‘The Messiah’, staging ‘kitsch’ religious songs. In parody mode? Yes, but it does not seem to mock spirituality, but rather its accumulated liturgy and folklore.
All of this speaks to us of a time in which it is no longer obligatory to go out and proclaim to the four winds that one is agnostic, atheist or nihilistto look like the coolest in the class. He looks for the comforting, what was always there: the square tambourine, the impulse to think that everything this has a meaningas old as humanity.
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