Rosalía, karaoke and the selfie camera

It turns out that the line between concert and karaoke was much finer than we thought. That is another of the discoveries that we owe to Rosalía, a girl with so much power to make everything she touches modern, that she even makes us believe that what we have already seen never really happened. The Madrid post-doublet controversy, unleashed by some music critics (and also a political one, although there smacks of extra-musical reasons there), alludes to the absence of musicians on the ‘Motomami Tour’. Those of us who were not there cannot and should not believe those on social networks who claim that there were, hidden under the stage, but let’s assume that there was indeed only canned music. Can you really criticize the Catalan for something that hasn’t been blamed on artists as disparate as Madonna, Sleaford Mods, Pet Shop Boys, Jay-Z or Kraftwerk themselves? In addition, a good part of ‘Motomami’ is made with ‘samples’ and ‘loops’ of Rosalía’s own voice. Do we prefer to see her there tied up with the schedules, instead of sweeping the stage? Do you know what is really irritating, even terrifying if it becomes a trend? The new format of singer-director that, yes, she has invented. In crowded concerts, most of the respectable end up seeing almost the entire performance on the giant screens. That is nothing new either. But that of going around the tables with a microphone in one hand and a selfie camera in the other, so that everything seems like a real-time broadcast on Instagram… All that was missing was for the Wizink screens to see the parade of likes and emoticons, And we can’t go through there. In the ‘mainstream’ the difference between a concert and a karaoke hardly matters. But if what blurs is the line between the concert and the ‘story’, one day the applause will end.