This is not an article about Zahara; we’re not dedicating it to anyone in particular.
This is not an article about motivation, but it is about intention.
This is not an article about past traumas, although they may be a driving force.
This is not an article to criticize anyone, but rather to extol the audacity, exploration, and blessed leaps of faith we sometimes find in certain artistic trajectories.
Zahara’s career seemed well on track: a (great) singer-songwriter with a clear path, continuing to make good songs without looking back or, more crucially for our purposes here, to the sides. So many artists have built entire careers this way, from performers and singer-songwriters like Ana Belén, Joan Manuel Serrat, or Silvio Rodríguez to bands like AC/DC or Iron Maiden. Creators who embrace their style and compose songs for decades that move thousands of people.
Is there anything intrinsically wrong with not changing?
No, no ‘buts’ or reproaches to the aforementioned artists, who have forged wonderful careers and achieved impressive milestones.
The matter at hand is simply different, and as in life, variety is the spice. And it is precisely this diversity that calls to us, because it is in those tangential spaces, those places where something barely brushes against us and which we often overlook, where truly exceptional works can be conceived, or at least pieces capable of making us reflect or feel emotion, fundamental objectives of art.
Art and liminality
When we don’t ignore that tangential point where we no longer know exactly if we’ve crossed to the other side, liminal spaces open up: places where we inhabit ambiguity, where previous rules begin to lose their usefulness and it’s time to unlearn, experiment, and, at times, start from scratch with certain elements.
It’s a clear moment of crisis caused by taking that leap without a safety net, and it’s precisely this that also turns it into a space of maximum creativity, of metamorphosis, by breaking with previously learned rules.
Before extolling risk, allow me a note on motivation and intention
Intention and motivation are not exactly the same. In the realm of plastic arts, examples abound, such as Rubens: his fame generated enormous demand, and he even set up a workshop to produce his work at scale. It’s clear that those ‘industrialized’ super-productions by the Flemish painter responded to a financial motivation, but does that diminish the value of his work?
As for music, let’s take Dover’s dance era as an example. Was their motivation exclusively financial? I don’t know; maybe yes, maybe no, no one is inside their heads, and we can make all the conjectures we want, which will remain irrelevant. The pertinent question, in my opinion, is another: what was their intention? In this case, it seems clear that it was to create something new and different from their past. And it is this, intention, that makes artistic decisions truly human.
The motivation of an AI can be understood as its functional engine: reward is the force that guides its behavior. But an AI has no intention, because there is no internal and subjective experience of wanting to achieve something, no consciousness behind the process.
What do Zahara, Radiohead, Björk, David Bowie, Madonna, and Rosalía have in common?
Well, a priori, besides being artists and, we assume, music lovers… they don’t share a country or a language.
But it is in their trajectories that those leaps of faith emerge, which so enrich the scenes and serve as parachutes for future artists.
Bowie built his career on liminality, but his most extreme turn came in the mid-seventies: trapped in his persona of the Thin White Duke and struggling with drug problems, he fled to Berlin with Iggy Pop and, far from the industry, immersed himself in krautrock and ambient alongside Brian Eno. From this period, Low and «Heroes» were born, electronic minimalism and avant-garde pop.
Björk, queen of electronic indie pop thanks to Debut and Post, isolated herself in Malaga after unbearable media pressure in London and shifted towards a rawer, less happy sound, with classical strings evoking the volcanoes and cold of Iceland: thus she signed Homogenic (curious, by the way, to be inspired for it from Malaga).
Madonna has been at the forefront from the beginning; Rosalía surprises album after album with a new twist (also alongside Björk on «Berghain», from LUX); and Radiohead went from what some considered the zenith of alternative rock with OK Computer to the electronic universe of Kid A, fleeing the suffocation of fame and the guitar, bass, and drum format they already felt was a cage.
CODA: Risk as part of expanding limits
For an artist like Zahara to go from classical singer-songwriter to organizing raves at her concerts with beats from The Prodigy or Nine Inch Nails is not, shall we say, common, but it is a godsend. It’s not that the previous style had less value, but rather that pushing certain boundaries and breaking with what should or shouldn’t be holds value per se, both in art and in life.
It didn’t always turn out well, nor will it always turn out well. How much Dover has been reviled for their dance album, Follow the City Lights, by their own fanbase after the enormous success of their previous albums. The band, according to their own statements, simply wanted to try new things and enjoyed doing it.
This is not a rant to lecture that every risky album must be liked, but rather an affirmation of risk as a creative element and, above all, of understanding and empathy towards the artist. So long live Zahara, Morente and Lagartija Nick’s Omega, or, of course, Metallica and Lou Reed’s Lulu.