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- [00:01]
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- [01:00]
Cole Kushna
Foreign welcome everyone to a special emergency episode of Dissect. I'm your host, Cole Kushna. Ladies and gentlemen, we are in the presence of greatness. I could probably count on both hands in the last, what, 10 years of albums that upon first listen I understood were masterpieces. I think about To Pimp a Butterfly, the first experience I had with that album, understanding how special it was, not fully understanding what it was, but understanding it was special and a great masterwork of our time. I think about similar feelings with Frank Ocean's Blonde. I personally felt this way about Kanye West Yeezus when I first heard that record Kid A by radiohead back in 2000 when I first heard that record. And I got the same feeling when I listened to Rosalia's new album Luxury. Sometimes you just know. And for me, Rosalia's Lux is that fucking album. It is that good. It is a masterpiece. Rosalia for me has entered that final tier of artistry where I do place the Kendricks, the Franks, the Radioheads, the Bjorks, the Kanye's, the Outcasts. You know, she's there for me now. Luxx confirmed it. She has a great body of work behind Lux, but Luxury for me is the one. I've been very vocal about this on social media and specifically because I think there's a lot of barriers to this record that could potentially turn away some listeners because it is sung in 13 different languages. She is a Spanish artist. There's not a lot of drums on this record. It's very classically influenced, which we'll talk about. And so I can see these things being barriers of entry for some people. And I'm deliberately being loud about my opinion on this record so that hopefully it breaks some of those barriers and inspires people to give this record the time it deserves. Even if it doesn't translate to you personally on first or second or even third listen, I promise you, I promise you, it's one of them albums. She is doing what we want from every great artist working at scale who has the attention of popular culture. Lux is ambitious, it's innovative, it's collaborative in the best way possible. There's incredibly rich and I would say eternal and timeless themes in this record. And it's an artist that is really trying to make something great, who has pushed herself to greatness and uncompromisingly fulfilling her vision by any means necessary. You know, Lux is grand in scale and vision. And it's one thing to have a vision like Lux, it's another thing to execute it this well on this scale. And she is doing what I love to see from any big artist that does have the world's attention and that is challenging us with every project. You know, for those that aren't familiar with Rosalia, she is a Spanish artist that was raised in Barcelona. She formally studied flamenco in college, and she released essentially a traditional, but kind of a modern take on a flamenco album in her debut, Los Angeles. Her sophomore album, El Marquer. I'm going to butcher some of these names. I am so sorry, I'm very white. But her sophomore album is a masterpiece in its own right, kind of blending flamenco and trap music. It's a concept album that I'm personally excited actually, to dig into more because I'm not as familiar with it and the concept that I should be. But I am going to go back into it pretty heavily after I go into Lux. Then Motomami in 2022 was my favorite record of that year. And that's when I discovered Rosalia. Personally, I'm pretty late to her because she released her debut in 2017. But Motomami was genre defying. Very experimental record, but it did have very strong pop sensibilities. And it was her most, I think, accessible record. She won a Grammy for it. But each project has been different, each having its own unique sound, its own unique world, building its own unique concept. Very thought out. And this is kind of what the greats do, you know, every record has its own identity. It's very intentional. And none of them sound the same. And with Lux, Lux sounds nothing like Motomami, just as Motomami didn't sound like anything she had done before. And yet somehow she's able to successfully pivot with each project and only get better over time. And for me personally, it feels like one of those albums that was made specifically for me. If you listen to Dissect for a while, you know that I have a background in classical music. I studied music theory and composition in college and really fell in love with classical music during my time in college. And if you've listened to Lux, you know that it's very classically inspired. She said she was listening to and studying a lot of classical music during the making of it. And I've kind of been waiting for someone to successfully bring in classical elements into these contemporary forms and contemporary spaces. And this is the best execution of that that I've heard, I think, maybe in my life in terms of bringing classical sensibilities to the masses in this way. So I'm recording this about three days after Lux released. I've listened to the album, I want to say, maybe 10 times, 12 times in full, maybe more. I don't know. I've been obsessed with this album since it dropped, and by no means do I have it kind of quote unquote, figured out in terms of its concept and its, you know, themes and what it's trying to say. But I do have a general sense of the heart of it, I guess. And so I wanted to share some of my findings or thoughts on specifically the themes and the concept of the record as much as I can, three days out. So usually when I'm kind of quote, unquote, dissecting an album, I start with two things. I start with the title, obviously, that can tell you a lot about the work and what it's, what it's trying to say. And I also listen very closely to the beginning of the record and the end of the record. Because usually in a concept record, things will be set up in the very beginning, whether it's the first or second track, and then, of course, conclusion coming at the end. And oftentimes it'll kind of somehow call back to the beginning, so. And just like a well written movie, it'll pay off what it set up in the very beginning. And Rosalia, unsurprisingly, does both of this. So let's start with the album title. Lux is Latin for light, and I think she means divine light. So for those that aren't familiar at all with the record, this record was inspired by female saints throughout history. So Rosalia said she took a year off from going to the studio and writing music, and she just read and researched and wrote the lyrics for. For this record. And she was researching specifically female saints throughout history in different cultures and religions and different time periods and eras for inspiration for each one of the songs on the project. And one of the most unique things about this project is that she sings in 13 different languages. And the reason for that is that each of these inspirational female saints that she researched and that are expressed through song, she sings in their native language to honor them. So if she's singing about a Japanese female saint, she sings in Japanese. If they're Italian, she sings in Italian and so on, which is just incredible on its own, and I think adds to kind of the grand and almost like, universal and timelessness of this project. But it also ties into one of the biggest questions that she asked on the album, which is, you know, what is the relationship of humanity across time and within our own lifetimes? Like, do we all share a soul or our souls passed on over time? There's one song where she talks about someone dying and losing 21 grams, which is, you know, the supposed weight of the soul and whether that soul carries out and finds another body. And if the stories of that soul are also passed on in that new body, is there a history to each soul that we inherit? And so, for me, when Rosalia is singing about and through these female saints across history in these different languages, she's really embodying that concept and that idea, like, literally becoming these women across time in song. It's a very powerful part of the album for me, you know, even if I don't know exactly what language or what she's saying a lot of the time, just if I don't have the lyrics pulled up in front of me, I just think that concept is really, really cool. And I'm really excited to keep digging into each language and learning what she says and how it reflects each sa. That's the kind of work I'm going to be doing over the next couple months as I continue to obsess over this record. Okay, so she said that there are four movements on the record. This is coming from her. This is not my idea. This is her saying that there are four movements. She even listed out what songs belong with each movement and the general theme of each movement. So I'm going to kind of just read what she said about each movement. It's probably going to be a little bit abstract at first, but I'll make it make sense in just one minute. So movement number one incorporates tracks one through five. And she said this movement is about, quote, purity and the departure of purity. Movement number two incorporates tracks six through nine. And she said it's, quote, gravity, being friends with the world. Movement three is tracks 10, 11, and 12, which she said is about, quote, grace and being friends with God. And then finally, fourth movement is 13, 14, and 15, which she said is the farewell, saying goodbye and the return. So when she says the return here, she means, I think, a return to purity, a return to the start, where we started in purity. And movement one. And so you can see the bare bones of essentially a full circle story, starting in purity, gravity, taking us down to earth and trying to manage a life on earth and all the temptations and sin and heartbreak and things that come with a life on earth. And then movement three, grace, being friends with God, kind of restoring a relationship with God that you might have lost along the way. This is where the female saint inspiration comes in. You know, finding your divine light, finding your holiness while on earth. And then last movement, the farewell, goodbye and the return, being returned to that purity, that pure light that you began with. And she sets this up really, really well in both the beginning and end of the record, which I'll share for you now. So movement one, track number one is called Sex, Violence and Tires. Again, this is movement one is the purity and the departure of purity. So she begins the record singing. And this is the best English translations I could find. They're probably not perfect. What I'm finding is that the kind of quick translations online are maybe not the best and most accurate to the native language. And so this is all based on some English translations that I found on the Internet. They could be wrong or not ideal, but I think we get the kind of general sense of what she's going for. So the album begins with her singing, who could live between the two? First love the world and then love God? Who could come from this earth and enter heaven and return to earth, that between earth, earth and heaven there would never be ground. So already right here, she's setting up dichotomy of the second and third movement of loving the world, befriending the world, and gravity bringing you down to earth. And the experience is here in movement two. And then. And then love God, literally, she says, and then love God, which is movement three. And in the very first line, she expresses this desire or this question of who could live between the two, between the world and God. The answer to that question, I think, is being a saint and finding that divine light. But then she goes on in verse three to describe each of these realms. So she says in the first, sex, violence and tires. So in the first meaning on earth, sex, violence and tires, bloodshed, coins and throats. Then she says in the second, second, being heaven. Here in the second flashes doves, saints, grace, the fruit and the weight of the scales. And then outro, she says, who could live between the two? First love the world, then love God. So again, she's setting up the entire journey. This entire first song is laying out everything. It is kind of establishing the journey of the album. It defines the central question of the album about living between the two. She describes what life on earth is. Sex, violence and tires. The second meaning, heaven, she describes as flashes of light, doves and saints. And so can you see the mastery here? I mean, this is like textbook storytelling. Setting it all up in track one and laying out everything we need to know for the journey of the album. And so let's now fast forward to the end of the album. Like I said, I always look at the beginning and the end to find these connections to. To kind of confirm that there is a journey going on across the entire album. And that is definitely the case with this record. So, final track is called Magnolias. It's absolutely beautiful. It's gorgeous. Gorgeous song. The first verse, it essentially depicts her own funeral or her character's funeral. Begins with her singing. They say that if you were to see death pass by your side in that long Mercedes, it brings you good luck. All of you have come, even my enemies today they cry. And then the chorus is Throw me Magnolias over and over. Verse 2, she says, over my coffin, KTM's burning rubber. Tears and smoke melt into the wood Gasoline and red wine, cigars and chocolate Dancing with love on top of my corpse Today it's all excess, mocking fate and what I didn't do in life, you do in my death. And then she repeats throw me magnolias. So some pretty abstract images there. And a lot of references to cars to. Are burning rubber. Ktms I had to look up is an Austrian motorcycle company. So the image here is like people burning rubber on her, on her corpse. But tires keeps coming up. It's, you know, the first song is called Violence, Sex, Tires, or Sex, Violence and Tires. I'm trying to figure out what the tires mean. I think maybe it's like some kind of symbol or metaphor for, like, life on earth and industry and routine and industrialism, things like that, I think. I don't know. Not sure yet. But it's obviously pretty important because it's at the end and it's at the beginning. So I got to figure out what tires means. If you have any ideas, let me know. But essentially, again, she's depicting her funeral. And towards the end of the song is where we kind of get the conclusion and the resolution of the story. So in the bridge, very beautiful moment in which a choir comes in and sings. God descends and I ascend. We meet in the middle. So recall that we began the album with this idea of earth, God and wanting to find the in between, the halfway between those two who could live on earth and with God. And here at the end, God comes down and she goes up and they meet in the middle. She finds that in between that she was searching for or asking about in the very beginning of the record, bringing the story to its conclusion. There's another verse after this moment. She says, a stab or two. I've taken from life again, life on earth. She disarmed me and I'm grateful for it. I think she disarmed me means God disarmed her. You know, she passed and she's grateful for the passing. She continues, promise that you'll protect me. Me and my name in my absence. And then crucially, she says to end the album, very final words of the album. Me who come from the stars today, I turn into dust to return to them. Stars being symbol of light, of divine light. She turns into dust to return back to the stars, to return to that state of purity. Movement, one, of course, being starting in purity and losing purity when you come down, when the gravity pulls you down to Earth to live a life on, on the planet, and then returning to that pure state in death. So again, resolving the album with finding that middle place between God and herself, and now returning to that state of purity that she began with. Also, the idea of returning to stars, returning to light pays off on the album titled Lux. It also pays off on the idea of sainthood and holiness and finding holiness in this life and returning to the source in death. And that's just the beginning and the end of the album. I not quite clear what happens in the middle, to be honest. I'm still kind of parsing through everything. But it's really cool how she is taking these different saints across time, embodying these different saints from different religions and cultures, and creating this kind of universal expression of life, asking these big religious, spiritual, existential questions. I mean, what else do you want from art? And also, by the way, it sounds gorgeous. This is all just like intellectual thematic on its own. The record is just beautiful. Like this passage that I'm Reading from from Magnolias will make you weep like it made me we. There's multiple times on this album that I have just wept from the beauty of the music, not even understanding what she's talking about. And that's what I mean by greatness. I feel the depth of this work without even understanding what she's saying. Like, I could feel it. It's. It comes through with the beauty and the execution of the music. But there's. There's a weight beneath the music too, that when you dig into the lyrics, you're kind of confirming that weight, but you feel it first instinctually. And that's what I mean when I. I just know this album is great because I could. I just feel it. And of course it gets confirmed through analysis, which is what I try to do on this show. But hopefully that gives you just kind of a broad understanding of what's happening on the album and the ambition of it and the scale that it's operating on, both thematically and sonically. I mean, it's just some of the best music you'll ever hear probably in your entire life. And I don't say that lightly. I say none of this lightly. Again, I had to record this podcast because I don't do this very often. There's not very rarely do I get this compelled to talk about a project, especially right after it released.
- [20:42]
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- [21:27]
Cole Kushna
It's always terrible.
- [21:28]
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- [21:43]
Cole Kushna
So good, so good, so good.
- [21:46]
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- [22:13]
Cole Kushna
I guess I don't have much else to say intellectually about the album. You know, mostly I wanted to do this episode to inspire you to listen again, especially if it didn't resonate or if you haven't listened at all. Hopefully the insights that I provided can provide some entry points into the project for you. And I guess in that vein, how I wanted to end the episode was to share just my personal couple favorite moments on the project so far. Because there are multiple times, you know, I think about, you know, the greatest moments in the 21st century. I've been thinking about that a lot since we're 25 years into the 21st century. One of the greatest musical moments of the century so far, you know, ones that I always tend to point out is like, you know, the self control bridge and the entrance of the strings and Frank Ocean's the I I I know you got to leave, leave, leave beautiful singing part. Like that's kind of my go to to explain what type of moments that I think are the best in the past 25 years. This album for me might have like three of them. And I'm not, I'm not joking again, I do not say this stuff lightly. There are multiple times on this album where I just like literally weep just because how beautiful it is. Just the emotion that she captures in her voice and the beautiful production and arrangements behind her. It's also about how songs develop. You can tell she would just not didn't have any formulas for any of these songs. There's like verses and choruses, but they're not your traditional verses and chorus. Structurally. She said that she one of the rules that she had for the album was there's no loops. She wanted this, you know, meaning there's no kind of copy paste of, of a drum loop or anything like that. Everything had to sound human, she said, and so they each part needed to be even if it was a repetition of the same part, it needed to be played uniquely by humans in order to to kind of avoid a mechanical feel and make it as human as possible. I think she was very successful in that and rarely I think I've been listening to music so long and studying it so long, I can usually tell where songs are going within like the first handful of seconds. Kind of get an understanding of like what the song is. And it kind of usually always develops and plays out in a way that you expect more or less. You cannot say that about any song on this record. There's nothing predictable about any of the. You're, you know, figuring out one song is not going to help you figure out another song because each song is like, very unique to itself. It's very singular and idiosyncratic, which also was themed to me by design. She said that she didn't write a lot of songs for this record, that she essentially just chose the 15 to 18 songs she wanted to write and then just exclusively focused on those for like three years. So she didn't write like 50 songs. A lot of artists would write a bunch of songs and then kind of pick the best 15 for the project. She was very deliberate in the ones that she chose and developed them to be the best that they could be, which I think she was very successful at. Including one of the best stretches of three songs that I've ever heard, probably in any project, which is number four through six. Track four is Porcelana. Track five, Mio Christo, Pianga Diamante. I'm probably butchering these names. I'm Very sorry. And number six, Bergain, the single. Phenomenal. This three song run is incredible. So Porcelaina is a great example of the unpredictable song arrangements and development on Lux. I want to take you through kind of the journey of the song quickly to kind of show you back to back just how things progress in such a unique way. It starts out with like these really tragic strings. So thematically, I think Porcelana is the departure of Purity that we talked about earlier in terms of the. The first. This is the first movement, towards the end of the first movement. And so the first couple songs establish that purity. And she said there's also a departure of purity in this first movement. I think Porcelana is where we start to see this. So in this intro, she's singing, my skin is thin, fine porcelain, cracked at the rim and it emits radiant light. So we're still feeling some of that porcelain, but there's also cracks and we have this really beautiful kind of tragic string kind of ballad feel in the beginning of the song that quickly shifts to this incredibly dark and distorted. I think it's either a cello or double bass with these really dark string accents. So here she's singing Pleasure, numbs my pain Pain numbs my pleasure. And so I think this is kind of hinting at, you know, the worldly desires and temptations and vice that we kind of explore during our time on Earth that tempts us. And then it moves into this really hypnotic drumbeat, like this really seductive dance beat. And she sings, I am nothing I am the light of the world I am nothing I am the light of the world so we're getting this kind of existential dichotomy of being feeling or being useless, but also divine. And I think, again, this is that dichotomy of the album in the second and third movement of earth and gravity and divineness and light. So if we skip ahead a little bit in the song, we get a part that's sung in Japanese. And this is a direct influence from a Japanese female saint. Her name is Ryonen Jenso. I'm probably saying that wrong. She was a female poet and a monk and a teacher. She was an incredibly devout Buddhist. She joined a monastery for six years as a nun, but then left to seek even greater Zen study. But she was rejected entry into this higher monastery because she was too beautiful. And they said that her beauty would be too big of a distraction to the other students. So she ended up mutilating her own face, which is, of course, tragic. But Rosalia, in an interview, said that she was inspired by this story because of how far she was willing to go in her devotion to God. So the passage we're about to hear is sung in Japanese, and the translation is, I'll tear off my own beauty before you do it for me if you think I'm crazy that's the gift I was born with, Queen of Chaos because my God made me this way. So for me, learning details like that, the backstory behind that Japanese saint is really cool and contextualizes a lot of these language changes. But then the song totally shifts. Once again, we get a three, four piano sequence, which is a different time signature than everything that came before it. And also it's paired with these flamenco hand claps. But even with the changes, this part is still kind of dark and brooding. But then another really unexpected shift happens. And the hand claps sustain. But then out of nowhere, this, like, transcendent, like, beautiful coral string section emerges out of nowhere. And it's just transcendent. I don't know what else to describe it as. It's just transcendent and beautiful, Sam. And these kind of shifts are, like, all over the album. You think you're in one place. And all of a sudden the rug pulls out and like. And something unexpected happens. In this case, it goes from just dark to transcendent and just a snap of the finger. And again, this is like. The whole album is like this. You just can't get comfortable in any one place because you know as soon as you get comfortable, you're somewhere else entirely. And specifically this outro is a really great bridge into the next song, which is Mio Christo Piangi Diamante. This song. I don't even know what to say about this song. I was contemplating what I would say about it. I don't think I'm going to say anything aside from the. And I'm not going to play anything because to pluck out a section of this song out of context I think is just. Is detrimental to the experience of this song. And I don't want to ruin it for anyone that hasn't heard it in full. This song is one of the best songs I've ever heard. I don't say that lightly again. It makes me cry every time I hear it. It has some of the most beautiful singing you'll ever hear in your life. There are multiple parts of this song that gives me chills every single time I've heard it so far. It is one of the best songs of the century. If you take nothing else from this episode, listen to Mio Christo in the Dark or something. Just. Just put on headphones, just dedicate five minutes to this song and just listen to it and go through the experience of this song. Let me know what you think. Actually, I would be really curious to know your experience with it, but that's all I'll say. And then we get to be. It's very Mozart coded. It's. The string intro is very much Mozart. Feels like the operatic sections with the choir is very much drawing on his famous Requiem. It's such a powerful song. It's so cool how the song develops. And then Bjork comes in like she gets such a grant. They set her up so well. When she comes into the song, it's like so powerful, powerful. And I feel like she's playing almost like this living saint, female saint. She's kind of offering the protagonist of this song, who's singing about this, like, obsessive love, some advice in terms of, say, she says we need divine intervention. The only thing that's going to stop this is divine intervention. Oh, it's just so cool. And there's a ton of stuff going on in the song and the Video is great and there has a ton of Easter eggs and I feel like it kind of expresses the journey of the album in a single video. But this caps off like this three track run that is again among the best three songs on an album. In a sequence that I have ever heard. Just one more moment I'll shout out is La U Guiler. Specifically the ending of La Ula track number 11. So essentially she develops this one kind of thematic idea. It's the passage that I'm going to play starts with her singing, I fit in the world and the world fits in me. I occupy the world and the world occupies me. I fit in a haiku and a haiku occupies a country. A country fits in a splinter. A splinter occupies the entire galaxy. The entire galaxy fits in a drop of saliva. A drop of saliva occupies Fifth Avenue. And it goes on and on and on like this, where she's kind of playing with this idea of something so large can fit into something so small. And this concept kind of continually builds into the final line where she says, and a continent does not fit in Him. Capital H. I am him, meaning God. But he fits in my chest and my chest occupies his love. And in his love I want to lose myself. So it kind of culminates into this really beautiful and grand gesture of about God's presence and divine and divinity fitting within you and all of us having a piece of God, all of us having that divine light inside of us. And it's so small that it fits inside of us, but yet it is so large and it's just such a beautiful part of the album. I can go on and on about this. There's so many moments like this on the album, but I'll stop there. I hope this episode was helpful. Sometimes with an album this good and three days out from it, I just some. I don't know what to say. I guess I said I talked for 30 minutes, but I still feel like I didn't say much. But this album is great. I really love it. I hope my passion for it is inspiring you to go give it a listen right now. Thank you for listening to this. I also published another episode today which is a 15 minute explainer on Mr. Morale. Essentially, I took the 100,000 words that I wrote on the album for season 13 earlier this year and I condensed it kind of the all the main learnings and takeaways to a 15 minute explainer which I hope will inspire people to listen to the full season if you haven't already. So check that out and it's more of a video essay, so if you're watching it on Spotify, you have the time actually watch it. There's a lot of visuals that I think help illuminate the concepts that I'm talking about. So check that out if you're interested. I will be publishing episodes until essentially Christmas, so look out for new episodes every Tuesday until then. Next week's episode is the most genius number schemes in rap history. So essentially, I'm tracing the evolution of numbers being used in rap lyrics, from Rakim's famous 7 MC line all the way to Kendrick Lamar's nostalgia. So check that out next week if you can. And thank you for listening. I appreciate it. Let me know what you guys think about Lux. Really curious if this album is resonating with others as it is with me, go listen to it right now a hundred times. Love you all. Bye.