Rosalinda Galán, singer taking part in Benidorm Fest: “I embrace RTVE’s decision to abandon Eurovision” | Culture | EUROtoday

From her personal title, with which it seems registered on her delivery certificates, Rosalinda Galán admits that she feels predestined: “Look at my name, my mother gave birth to me as a coplera.” This 35-year-old singer and actress from Seville, born in Los Palacios, a city close to the Andalusian capital with very robust flamenco roots, is popping roots music and nationwide folklore the other way up with a mission during which she passes the standard copla—of which she is a profound scholar, with an virtually anthropological vocation—by the sieve of digital music. After having sung in musicals and having hidden behind the stage title of Machita, a musical mission with a band with which each their lyrics and their songs “were somewhat more classic,” Rosalinda Galán comes out.

“I have taken back who I have always been. I am an actress and when I was auditioning for some musicals they told me that I was very colera, as if it were a problem. I have run away from my name. And now I have said: ‘Of course I am,’ I am Rosalinda Galán and I am a colera.” The artist explains it in Seville in an interview with EL PAÍS earlier than returning to Madrid to arrange her participation within the subsequent version of the Benidorm Fest, which shall be held from February 10 to 14 of subsequent yr with a brand new reinterpretation of herself, making a similarity with Rosalinda Galán herself.

Until this yr, the winner of this contest has been the artist who has subsequently represented Spain within the Eurovision Song Contest, a goal that ceases to exist in 2026 after RTVE leaves the European occasion because of the participation of Israel.

“When they call me from the Benidorm Fest, this is already on the table. The idea is to turn it into a festival to highlight national artists, to give a boost to the musicians who we have been working on for a long time. Make it a festival in itself and not a springboard towards Eurovision,” explains Rosalinda, who’s blunt in regards to the decision of the Spanish public entity: “I embrace the decision of Radio Televisión Española, the siege of the Palestinian people is something that I embrace. “It has left me with many sleepless nights, which has generated loads of ache, loads of anguish, loads of helplessness. I do not know precisely what issues might be carried out on a political degree, however I feel that on this case the choice they’ve made appears to me to be the best one, past the truth that to me as an artist the journey of successful the Benidorm Fest, taking part in Eurovision and experiencing all of that will have appeared tremendous cool,” he explains.

This commitment that he extends to his lyrics—his first single, Be quietis an allegation against sexist violence—has a lot to do with the look that Rosalinda Galán poses on the copla, the genre that made her an artist since she first got on stage at the age of five to sing. sand tower, the famous title that Marifé de Triana performed in the fifties of the 20th century. “It is a track that represents the cultural and inventive imaginary that I’ve relied on for a very long time. The copla had a brutal significance within the society during which it was developed, a society during which girls weren’t free to open a checking account. And these girls who carried out the copla have been economically and socially free inside a framework of freedoms that we already know what it was, however they sang lyrics that for me are actually punk and revolution for the time as a result of they sang to girls of doubtful popularity, at all times with realities on the margins, not formally allowed,” he explains.

Rosalinda Galán, who speaks along with her eyes, along with her palms, who looks as if a volcano that naturally expels all of the drive she carries inside, assures that she was “a super withdrawn and even a little sad girl” who the copla helped her “to survive”: “It seems like a cliché, but for me, in those nineties, getting into my father’s Fiat Tempra to listen to the songs of Marifé de Triana, with that hyperdramatism of the songs, allowed me to express myself. copla sustained me”, he’s honest.

Even so, he assures that at this time he’s not occupied with persevering with to journey by the standard copla —“I have a deep respect for the genre, but I am not afraid to do other things either,” he clarifies—, which is why he has present in digital music the right car to replace Andalusian custom and folklore. “It’s not that I think that the copla is out of fashion, it’s that I don’t feel like doing that as an artist. I feel like giving it a spin and doing whatever I want with my vision, with the references that I have now. With electronics, my insides move and everything I have inside.”

This conjunction of musical previous and future makes Rosalinda finish the interview by expressing a want, an ambition: “To give an intergenerational overview, I want the ladies to love it because it reminds them of what their life was like; but I also want people like my niece who is 16 years old, to awaken something that has to do with her.”