Towards a critical approach to flamenco hybridity in post-Franco Spain: rock music, nation, and heritage in Andalusia

Abstract

This chapter examines some of the conflicting dynamics surrounding flamenco hybridity through a case study of rock music in Andalusia during the Spanish Transition to Democracy (ca. 1975–1982), a period when regional identities, political claims against centralization, and the resignification of cultural discourses and practices (re)emerged. On the one hand, this chapter focuses on so-called rock andaluz bands (from now on referred to as RA), a hybrid musical phenomenon mixing progressive rock and flamenco that reached its peak in the 1970s. On the other hand, I consider other rock music bands in Andalusia during the period that did not use flamenco music in their recorded songs.2 Drawing on press sources, oral interviews, and recorded songs, I analyze how flamenco evocations became an aesthetic and ideological requirement for rock bands to be considered as genuinely “Andalusian” during the second half of the 1970s. Moreover, such evocations became a symbolic imperative in order to create, during the Spanish transition to democracy, a “genuine” and “authentic” rock expression that could articulate an identity distinct from that of the Anglo-American canon of progressive rock. In Andalusia today, the RA movement has become progressively canonized as one of the most important stages in the history of Andalusian popular music. These two main ways of understanding rock—that is, bands that included “authoctonous” musical references such as flamenco and bands that shunned these aesthetic devices in the construction of their identity and image—coexisted during the transition to democracy. However, recent heritagization processes of the history of Andalusian popular music of the second half of the twentieth century primarily reinforce the centrality of a flamenco hybridity in the construction of narratives about the “real roots” of rock in Southern Spain.