celeb news ROSALÍA covers GQ

April 26, 2022

https://www.gq.com/story/gq-hype-rosalia

Opening up, in this case, meant devising a character: the motomami. The body of work she’d accumulated— “There was a very forward point, with a lot of energy, and another one of fragility and vulnerability”—called to mind a specific quality. Then all of a sudden she remembered an old friend’s early email address: motomami. The moniker had stuck with her but now raised new ideas. It seemed hard, but soft; feminine, but not rigidly so. It reminded her, too, of her mother. “My mom has always ridden a Harley, dressed in leather,” she says. And even though it came to her late in the process, the motomami seemed like an idea that, somehow, predated her album, and maybe her life. It became a sort of affirmation, she tells me: “I’m a motomami because my mom was a motomami, and my mom’s mom is a motomami because my mom’s mom’s mom was a motomami too.”

A motomami has a funny side: One song on the album, “Hentai,” folds a list of sexual desires inside a reference to erotic manga. This caused something of a freak-out among a subset of her fans. “When I shared 15 seconds of ‘Hentai’ earlier this year,” she says, “many people liked it and I was very happy and thankful, but many people were also putting their hands to their heads, and I kept thinking: But Lil’ Kim has been writing explicit lyrics all her life!” She laughs. “But it’s possible that people are expecting certain things—because my other two projects were so serious—but this one for me, it’s giving space to humor, irony, all sorts of subjects that are part of my life.”

The motomami exists for these moments. “When a woman does not do what she is expected to do, people are often ruthless,” she says. So she has learned to be ruthless. “In the end, I say: Motomami and move on.”

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