Manuel Carrasco is in full promotion of his new album ‘Pueblo Salvaje I’ and has passed through El País leaving several reflections and a direct jab at the media. With good humor, the artist reproaches El País for not covering his concert at the Santiago Bernabéu in 2024. “I was the only Spanish musician who performed there and it was not covered. I think you did not tell something remarkable… with all humility, I think it was an event to chronicle,” he comments, while from the media they remind him that there was coverage of other milestones such as his massive show at La Cartuja or several interviews in 2022.
Carrasco takes the opportunity to go a little further and criticizes an alleged structural problem in music related to prejudices and labels. “Not only in journalism, in the entire music industry people give you a label that is never good,” he says, and insists that many times his work has been read from the surface, without much analysis, something that has persisted since he became known in Operación Triunfo more than two decades ago.
The singer, in fact, seems to be referring to an old debate between flamenco and indie, and states that “there is a part of the press that has not stopped to see what happened there, and I think they should,” mentioning cases of artists like Extremoduro or El Barrio, who played with flamenco and also had to fight against certain prejudices in their beginnings in the media. “Because it is a music that draws on something very ours, which is flamenco,” he says.
From there, Carrasco suggests that in Spain people often look at what is outside with more enthusiasm than what is their own. “Sometimes we give too much attention to what comes from outside and we corner what is ours,” he says, and even cites the phenomenon of Bad Bunny as an example of how local can also become global. The artist concludes with a phrase from Lola Flores that summarizes his idea: “Why does ours have to be worse?”
Another open front also appears in the interview: the fine of 400,000 euros for noise after the Bernabéu concert. Carrasco confirms that “it is not solved”: “We have paid, but it is being appealed.”
On the other hand, the artist was tonight’s musical guest at La Revuelta, where he performed ‘Lahumanidad’. In El País, he explains the meaning of the topic, pointing out the lack of empathy of the “dominators of the world” and leaving a fairly direct reading of the current context: he talks about “whore” people, with complicated lives and accumulated frustration, who find in certain more extreme political discourses an easy response to their anger, including the young vote, increasingly exposed – as he says – to this type of messages.
