From Concha Piquer to Bad Gyal: Spain's music canon shifts

From Concha Piquer to Bad Gyal: the Spanish musical canon breaks

The comparison was launched by a veteran nearing 50: placing Concha Piquer against Bad Gyal, and Antonio Molina against Quevedo. The result, he says, is that what sounded outdated in his youth now seems like art. This is not an isolated nostalgic complaint: it confirms that the canon of Spanish popular music has shifted its axis, with Latin urban sounds, led by reggaeton, winning the generational baton.

The diagnosis rests on uncomfortable data for purists: today’s dominant Spanish artists are not bands but individual brands. Rels B, Sarracena, Bad Gyal, Lola Índigo, Quevedo and Rosalía top the charts, mostly through occasional collaborations and rarely as stable band formats. The rock group, that invention which structured popular music since the sixties, has diluted.

Why were the Beatles the reggaeton of their time?

The most repeated defense in the debate is not for reggaeton, but for pop history itself. The Beatles, argues one side, were exactly what reggaeton is today: a product designed to heat up young audiences, packaged by a manager —Brian Epstein— and a skilled producer —George Martin— who made them digestible for the mass public. Before that, hours in clubs and on the road, and an initial rejection by Decca, the biggest British label at the time.

The comparison stings but has logic. If the criterion for judging music is fan volume and mass appeal, the Beatles’ 1964 Washington concert —over half an hour on a small stage, with Ringo going wild and guitars tuned by ear— does not hold up better than a current urban festival. The difference lies not in quality, but in who decides what quality is.

Flamenco as exception: complexity versus fusion

The debate gets serious when flamenco enters. Against the thesis that everything is now a sad, uniform flamenco-fusion, technical defense arises: flamenco, with its palos (styles), rhythms, and internal variations, is a musical system of a complexity that cannot be compared to urban pop. Soleá, seguiriya, tarantos, or bulerías function as autonomous genres within the same trunk. Rumba is not flamenco. Neither is the cajón. Calling everything with guitar and clapping 'flamenco' is, for this view, the true ruin of the art.

Evolution is not new. Chick Corea had already fused jazz and flamenco in the seventies with Return to Forever, and John McLaughlin took that mix into electric virtuosity. McLaughlin’s collaboration with Paco de Lucía and Al Di Meola in 1979 marked a turning point: contemporary flamenco soaked up jazz fusion and peine the door to all that trinc. Fusion, therefore, is not degeneration. It is tradition.

Lost folklore and generational complaints

There is a third thread, less technical and more sociological: the feeling that festive repertoire has been lost. Pasodobles, sevillanas, jotas, cheerful and cheeky coplas. In their place, it is argued, everything has reduced to a melancholic mix ranging from deep song to authorial flamenco-style. Spanish popular music, this current says, has ceased to be joyful. And that gap has been filled by Latin reggaeton, which does propose partying.

Data reinforcing this thesis comes from the industry itself: Spanish artists succeeding in urban genres adopt the Latin style, not vice versa. Influence travels in one direction only. Meanwhile, previous music —grandparents', folkloric singers'— is claimed from an unexpected place: those who laughed at it in their youth now listen with respect. Juanito Valderrama’s El Emigrante, with its «Adiós, mi España querida», becomes an emotional test for those living abroad.

What remains of the classic canon?

The underlying question is not whether Bad Gyal sings better or worse than Concha Piquer. It is who decides what real music is. The imposing answer is uncomfortable: for decades, radio stations, television, and a handful of labels with trend-setting power played that role. Grunge didn’t reach Spain spontaneously, but because a label scout saw business in the Seattle sound. Same with literature: without backing from powerful publishing groups, many names consecrated today would have published nothing.

The canon, therefore, was never natural. It was constructed. What happens now is that the builder has changed hands, and those who grew up with the previous one do not recognize the result. The complaint is not musical. It is about ownership.

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The discussion stalls exactly there: on whether the loss of a shared canon is a cultural tragedy or simply the normal relay of an industry that always worked this way. No one has yet provided a list of Spanish Renaissance works that competes with the narrative of flamenco as the peak. Without that list, the defense of tradition remains in the realm of faith.