Barcelona, (EFE).- When fans and journalists asked the singer Mala Rodríguez if ‘A strange world’, an album born from the artist’s latent memory, would be in physical format, the rapper agreed: “How can it not be be?”
However, this statement contained a play on words; The ‘physical format’ consists of an exclusive and private performance for the highest bidder who wins an auction that begins on Monday, May 27 and ends on Friday, June 28.
This is how Mala Rodríguez (Jerez de la Frontera, 1979) intends to make her new work “understood as a work of art,” as she confessed to EFE in an interview held at Villa del Arte, a gallery in Barcelona that is will be in charge of auctioning the private concert throughout the month of June.
A visceral artist
“It’s going to be something exceptional because it has never been done before in history and I think it’s very nice to be able to meet someone who wants to give themselves this pleasure,” confesses the rapper, who also explains that the idea arose as a result of disconnection. between artists and the public caused by the pandemic.
“When I am singing a song it is because I have lived that, it is because I feel every word that comes out of my mouth and it is because I am freeing myself from many things by singing them and by making the songs,” says Rodríguez, who finds in these experiences the fusion point between writing and acting.
The artist’s viscerality is found in songs like ‘Brava’ or ‘Ángel’, songs that she assures make up a work that represents her “time in life, the heartbeat of the world, my heartbeat,” a stage that Mala admits has It has been a “very big” crisis, something she did not expect to have to experience.
An album that comes from looking back
“I have never wanted to remember in my life and now I have remembered. Life has put me in that situation of having to look back and from there came an album that explains an internal journey, but also an external one,” adds the rapper about the creation of ‘Un mundo rare’, which is also the title of the song that opens the album.
Under this concept of a ‘strange world’ and based on songs like ‘Who are you?’, ‘We already know each other’ or ‘Valor’, full of sharp lyrics that delve into the artist’s memory, Mala recounts “many vivid fragments.” , which form a journey and arrive at a port”, which has activated a “liberating process” for the Jerez woman.
“I felt it was an act of liberation. The album talks about a woman in conflict and who frees herself through weapons,” says Mala, in what is not just a lyrical metaphor: the album cover shows the artist just out of the shower, on a bed, stroking an AK-47.
“I’m clean, but I’m going to make a decision, I’m going to take up arms,” says Rodríguez about the cover, who adds that behind the album there is “a lot of symbolism,” both from her personal and artistic life.
As for the music, ‘A strange world’ has a lot of “atmospheric variety,” since “it sounds like trap, but suddenly there is something that seems more tribal or something that looks like an opera overture,” says Mala. , which still sticks to the rap label: “it is urban, contemporary music, because what rules there are the lyrics.”
The idea of the ‘strange’, so present throughout the thirteen songs that make up the album, is not limited only to the lyrical or musical part, but the artist gives it another twist with the auction of the private performance.
“I love that it feels good to be locked up with a stranger, I love strange things,” the artist confesses when considering all the possibilities that the private concert opens up for her.
“I live it from the outside, I look at myself and I never want to stop being an observer of what happens. I am the artist and the muse. I want to be everything, I want to be able to see myself on all these different levels,” says Mala about the show she will give in the presidential suite of the Mandarin Oriental hotel and whose profits she will donate to the NGO Save the Children. EFE
Guillermo Cabellos
