2023-09-19 15:15:20
This Tuesday the new final casting of Operación Triunfo is held, which will decide which candidates are left out and who access the springboard that can lead them to glory or failure. And all of them will have to go through a very violent moment, as revealed by the singer Lola Indigo on the podcast The Sense of Beer.
«You sign a pre-contract before entering the program. Before passing the final casting, you are already sentenced to be with a record company,” explains the Madrid artist. “For how long?” asks the interviewer. «For three albums. So he is quite leonine. That’s the word the lawyers taught me. I don’t know where it comes from, it must be because they eat your head in one bite, because something else…”
«He is very aggressive, very aggressive, especially for kids of that age. “I was 25 years old and I didn’t have shit in my gut, so imagine a 19-year-old signing that.” The interviewer then asks him if he had the opportunity to take that pre-contract to consult with the family or his lawyers, and his answer is surprisingly blunt: “No, no, wait, because on top of that you sign it right there, in the casting, and it’s “either you sign it, or you don’t enter the final casting.” Then he said in the contract: “This has been reviewed by who knows who…”, and no one has reviewed that! This happens in other talents, it is not a criticism of OT, there are much worse cases. But guys, read the contracts, especially if you go to a talent club. “That then it’s very screwy to get out of there.”
Universal Music is the label that has published the vast majority of the albums by the Operación Triunfo contestants and the three Lola Indigo albums (‘Akelarre’ in 2019, ‘La Niña’ in 2021 and ‘Dragón’ in 2023). The singer continues to work with them, so her statement is not a settling of accounts after fulfilling that condition of the contract, but rather it can be seen as an act of bravery, honesty and solidarity with the ‘triumphants’ who come after her to that they know what to expect.
It is not the first time that Lola Indigo has harshly criticized Operación Triunfo. She once publicly lamented that so many editions were made in such a row, “without letting the public breathe, as if OT were the goose that laid the golden eggs.” And a year ago she assured that she had a “very bad time” because since she was the first to be expelled from her edition, she had to wait for the contest to end to be able to work. «It was tough because I had to wait a long time for the program to end. All the time I spent at home until they told us that the sixteen of us were going on the tour, I spent it calling the record companies telling them that if there was nothing for me, they should let me work. While they were telling me if I was going to be on the tour or not, I started playing gigs in clubs, on my own. Thanks to the LGTBI community, which gave me a lot of support, I had a job.
She also recalled all of this in the aforementioned podcast, where she said that she asked her label to let her return to China, where she had worked “very comfortably” previously. «They told me: «No, you wait, we have plans for you…». They were the worst days of my life, having to live with uncertainty until the program ended. It was horrible, because I didn’t have money. “It was very traumatic for me because I had to earn a living, I couldn’t live off my parents and I couldn’t wait for the program to finish.”
He also went so far as to say that on that OT 2017 tour he felt “the last piece of shit”, since he did not have the same conditions as other more successful colleagues in the contest. «It didn’t affect my self-esteem because otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten out of my head, honestly. Nowadays I think about it and say: ‘Holy shit, I don’t know how I had the strength to see myself as I was.’ When no one gives a dime for you, but in your head you imagine otherwise, it’s bad. I have always said that believing is creating. If you believe you are something and you work to do it, you study, you train, you prepare… in the end you can achieve it and it’s not Mr. Wonderful or shit, it’s a reality. “You have to work to achieve things, and above all, stay strong and not let yourself fall.”
#conditions #leonine #aggressive