The fall of Luna Ki at Benidorm Fest has been the biggest disappointment of this 5th edition. She was one of the few artists who had a background behind her. His abandonment a few years ago for having performed with a song that required Auto-Tune was on everyone’s lips. Less is said about the fact that Luna Ki was one of the few candidates for the Golden Mermaid with a story: hits like ‘September’, a speech as a non-binary artist and a certain live ability. I had the chance to see her in concert during an edition of Brava and at least she caught me.
Little is also said about the fact that ‘CL34N’, Luna Ki’s first album, was quite good even though it no longer represents her. A follower of Lady Gaga, she now seems to be in a more ‘Joanne’, more naked stage, of “removing layers”, materialized in the piano ballad ‘I’m No Goddess’. But that doesn’t make old songs like ‘I’m going to die’ or ‘February’ any less valid.
That “I’m going to cum, I’m going to piss, open your mouth and tell me AH” is the history of the hooligan genre, whether it’s called electroclash, trap or hyper pop. It was the most graphic moment on an album that included a song called ‘Putón’ and a duet with Lola Indigo, ‘Piketaison’.
These days listening to Luna Ki’s music, I remembered that that album contained a beautiful song with Babi, which is very significant. After her withdrawal from Benidorm Fest during the first semi-final due to an anxiety crisis, Luna Ki has declared, using the title of her song ‘Bomba de amor’, that “the bomb has fallen on her.”
As expected in times of evil, in times when it seems that a conspiracy theory must be applied to everything, his decision has been met with a lot of incomprehension on the part of the audience. “If you’re not good enough to fight, why do you get involved” and arguments like that.
From a few years of some awareness about mental health, we seem to be moving to the widespread opinion that mental health cannot be an excuse for everything. Since I do not have Luna Ki’s medical record, nor do I personally need it, I prefer to talk about the fact that we are understanding that an artist has to be prepared for the media spotlight and pressure per se.
It is possible that Luna Ki did not realize her limits until she found herself on a live broadcast in front of a million-dollar audience, and thousands of people screaming; It’s also possible that he just had a bad day. But these problems are not new for those who have been informed about the cases of Zayn, who had problems with stage fright after being in one of the most famous bands on the globe; from Pastora Soler, who had the same drink after having been to an event the size of Eurovision; or Miley Cyrus, who says that she finds it “devastating” to perform in stadiums of 100,000 people.
And there is the case of Babi, who 5 years ago sang with Luna Ki a wonderful song called ‘Disney’. Babi is an artist who has been doing this for almost a decade, she does not perform live, she does not shoot large video clips, she barely has social networks and never gives interviews. She doesn’t like being in the spotlight, she has made that decision and her monstrous streams allow her to make a living from music, from the copyrights she generates with hundreds of millions of views. She usually writes alone, she doesn’t share credits with 15 people as is fashionable today, and that helps.
Now we haven’t heard from Babi for a year, but perhaps his latest songs speak for themselves. Or they are playing some kind of game with the listener. ‘Clean’, alongside Oktoba, was about overcoming agoraphobia: “I became mine again / Flying in the psychiatric ward.” ‘Sutura’, the penultimate one he gave us, brilliant in its chorus “I walk away from you because I don’t know how to love / just like I don’t drink because I don’t know how to drink”, rhymed “horse depression, galloping anxiety” with “a pair of frightening ovaries”. Contradictions that could illuminate the path of Luna Ki as much as this stanza:
«Looking into space, cars pass
I don’t even notice that I know they’re admitting me
They call me a coward and what are they based on?
“When they die in life, they’ll tell me.”
I was looking for a photo of Luna Ki with Babi from the ‘Disney’ era (2021) to illustrate this article, which obviously does not exist. And maybe it’s better that way. Maybe we don’t need it as much as the memory that one day we lost our way with what this image culture means – in the last decade around video because an image was not enough – and media exposure.
Following an article on the unhappiness of today’s young people after a study with millions of interviews that has been carried out over decades, sociologist Jonathan Haidt placed networks as a direct cause of this unrest so associated with new generations: “Social networks are a substantial cause – not just a small correlation – of depression and anxiety, and therefore of behaviors associated with these diseases, including self-harm and suicide.”
In times when it has been assimilated that to develop a career you have to expose yourself on networks, we must remember that there may also be other paths for authors apart from performing live, appearing on television or being constantly judged on Instagram and Some have even lived with their stage fright their whole lives, like Brian Wilson, Axl Rose or Cat Power. We followers of this artist always knew that when we went to see her anything could happen – one day she would start crying, another day she would hand out stickers – and we simply accepted that nothing would happen.
