E-Mail This Article to a Friend The battle for bulería David Bisbal, Alejandro Sanz, and the question of authenticity BY JOSH KUN

This year’s Latin Grammy Awards on September 1 in LA’s Shrine Auditorium began with a performance by David Bisbal, a singer best known for his head of curly blond ringlets and for winning Spain’s version of American Idol, Operación triunfo. Bisbal, who was joined by Jessica Simpson for a bi-lingual melismatic soap opera, makes perfectly polished Latin pop, yet he named his newest album Bulería, after the traditional flamenco song form revered for the speed and the improvisation it demands of its singers and guitarists. On a title track that sounds like Ricky Martin with castanets, Bisbal professes, "Bulería so deep inside of my soul, the blood of the land where I was born." Yet Bisbal is not a flamenco singer, and "Bulería" is only a song about bulería. It isn’t one itself.

The big winner was another light-skinned Spanish pop star who pledges ties to flamenco, Alejandro Sanz, who has likened his radio-ready songs to "flamenco pop." His MTV Unplugged (WEA International) album ends with "Todo es de color," an acoustic ballad he also labeled "bulería," even though it too wasn’t. (It was way closer than Bisbal’s, but still not in the right time signature.) Sanz’s latest, No es lo mismo (WEA International), which even by Sanz standards is formulaic, won the Album of the Year award, beating out Lágrimas negras (RCA), a collaboration between an actual flamenco artist, Gypsy singer Diego el Cigala and legendary Cuban pianist Bebo Valdés.

In fact, Lágrimas negras — a remarkable album of quiet, experimental conversations between Afro-Cuban boleros and flamenco cante jondo, or "deep song" — lost four of the five awards it was nominated for, winning only the one Grammy it had no relation to at all, Best Traditional Tropical Album. Like Bisbal, El Cigala and Valdés were invited to perform, but their improvisations and solos seemed rushed and uncomfortable crammed into three minutes toward the end of the show.

The awards were a reminder that even within the ethnically specific realm of the Latin Grammys, racial hierarchies continue to rule. The music of the trampled is still worth less than the copies others make of it. This is an old story of complaint and protest that doesn’t need further rehearsal here, but let’s just say it makes perfect sense that Bisbal is the one whose name fills up the first two pages of a Google search under "bulería," not any of the Gypsy singers who have spent their lives dedicated to the form.

These public victories of flamenco appropriation over actual Gypsy flamenco have put El Cigala on the attack. While taking swipes at Bisbal, he’s called Sanz’s bulería "a catastrophe" and the idea of flamenco pop "horrible, a nightmare." He recently told the Argentine newspaper El Clarín, "Sanz should be careful and respect the world of flamenco because he doesn’t have any clue what flamenco is."

I’d like to think that El Cigala’s point is not about policing the authenticity of music. (After all, he’s known for putting flamenco in dialogue with boleros, tangos, and Latin jazz.) Instead, it’s about defending the integrity of the culture that makes the music in the first place and making sure that pop’s new Gabriels don’t forget who gave them their suits.

Flamenco is not a genre or a marketing term — or for that matter, a table dance with flapping fans and "Olé" shouts to entertain you while you eat paella. It is sorrow transformed into art, the centuries old musical expression of Gypsy suffering that continues to this day. Even though El Cigala titled his 2001 album Corren tiempos de alegría (BMG) — roughly, "Times of Happiness Are Here" — he went out of his way in the album’s liner notes to reaffirm the relationship between flamenco and suffering: "I want to dedicate this work to all those who don’t have times of happiness, to all those who suffer anywhere on the planet."

The model for this musical life of suffering is Camarón de la Isla, the legendary flamenco singer who after years of heavy smoking died of lung cancer in 1992, age 41. A new three-disc retrospective, Alma y corazón flamencos (Universal Music Spain), follows Camarón from his stripped-down alegrías and siguiriyas to flirtations with tinges of rock and jazz. But because his voice never falters in its melancholic intensity, there is nothing that feels evolutionary about his career, no sense that he was moving away from the traditional and toward the modern. The instruments and the arrangements that surrounded his voice changed over the years, but what drove that voice to sing never did.

His "Una estrellita chiquitita" is a classic example of what a bulería sounds like. Four hands deliver chattering palm claps and two guitars — Paco de Lucía and Ramón Algeciras — riddle each other with syncopated string runs as Camarón turns a tale of heartache into a vicious roar of blood. Where singers like Bisbal and Sanz have to declare their love for bulería, Camarón just suffers it, as natural as hurt.