What is the point of unearthing the term ‘casanova’ in 2023? That conquering, seductive, flirtatious man of today smells like mothballs, to say the least. But Madrid’ Recycled J (Jorge Escorial, 30 years old), cradle rapper who has been collecting daisies in songs for a long time, saw the opportunity to reformulate the concept and destroy it to rebuild it. He is the one who always exploits romance with pop atmospheres, ‘Casanova’ was released last June, concept albumaesthetically it has also been pampered, processed and polished and is launching its ‘luxury’ version this Friday.
There are two things that pushed him to create an album, already the third about this concept (in 2019 he released ‘City pop’, a timely expression of new urban pop): first, finally making a complete work based on love; second, honor his grandmother Matilde, surnamed CasanovaThe person who died while finishing the album. “I looked at myself, at my feelings… And I looked at the figure of Giacomo Casanova, who might have been on the rise before and who represented values that I did not share. I wanted to fight against them and reinvent the term,” Recycled J. says. I tried to find the breadth of love,” adds one Carabanchel.
To complete the concept of the album, he considered the image of a rose “as a perfect symbol of romance”, with its beautiful part, leaves and stem, and the harmful part of its spikes. “The album is an emotional journey, you go from one place to another and that is the introspection part,” he says. There is an innocent and exciting first part – ‘150 songs’ -, while another part is about the search for his past that ends with an explosion – ‘10,000 Kms’, ‘Primadonna’ and finally ‘Pa no Volver’. inevitable step mood. In other words, it is a personal album with no room for collaborations. The artist says, “I wanted this to be Recycled J’s Casanova journey and to have no other interlocutors. I wanted to be the one narrating these experiences and the viewer interpreting them according to their own thoughts.” Ah! In the album, ‘Perro Hungry’ is also mentioned, that legendary and blocked song that they recorded with Rauw Alejandro years ago and which seems to never see the light of day ‘due to commercial problems’.
The man from Madrid has always been the most popular among rappers. And this album of bombastic choruses – “there’s nothing more pop than a catchy chorus” – is the latest proof of that. “Where I come from [el rap] Maybe it was something that could be criticized. When people rapped differently, I did something different. And I love a label that’s the ‘poppiest of rappers’ because I’m also the ‘poppiest of rappers’ and I think it makes sense,” he says. Recycled J didn’t put rap on hold. He joined Natos and Waor’s combo called Hijos de la Ruina and Don’t leave alone when he reveals his “lower” side. “I continue to do rap songs, trap songs and all the sounds I try. “The problem is that this is my pop scene, but that doesn’t mean I won’t make other songs in parallel,” he defends.
In fact, in ‘Rosas freestyle’, one of a dozen songs on ‘Casanova’, its entire essence can be seen in a powerful song about self-love with this message: “There is nothing worse than owing a favor to a pompous person; If not, ask their children. Does a successful artist like Recycled J maintain class hatred? “Consciousness, yes. I can understand that someone else is experiencing other things, life makes them that way, but that doesn’t mean I share it. Moving closer to pop, there’s not that social aspect to it. I charge it as rap, I always try to leave my seed there : development, effort… I come from a working-class family and this is what I see,” he replies.