“You have to deal with this.” With these brief explanations, the Madrid rapper Rayden has announced that he is canceling the end of his career with one last concert in his hometown of Alcalá de Henares, where the PP and Vox govern in a coalition, out of “moral obligation” after the “arrival of the extreme right to the councils”.
The singer reported last March that he was leaving his musical career to focus on writing and announced a final tour that he wanted to end in Alcalá de Henares, for which he had already closed a date, in August 2024, with the previous Alcalá government, occupied by the PSOE.
After the arrival of the PP and VOX at the mayor’s office, the celebration of this concert was left in “the air”, sources from the singer’s team have told EFE. Although the artist has finally decided to unilaterally cancel his performance.
“With the arrival of the extreme right in the departments and, watching with astonishment, the censorship and cultural cancellation with which art is being punished in localities with the same representation, I see myself with the moral duty to cancel my performance scheduled for the end of August 2024” in Alcalá.
For this reason, his last concert in the Community of Madrid will be on December 2, 2023 at the Wizink Center in Madrid, not including his participation in festivals or large parties.
“I have always understood concerts as a meeting point. A place where the public gathers, together with their loved ones, with singers, groups, musicians and their entire technical team to remember and chant, for a couple of hours, those songs that were written one day. A place where music is a dialogue in which we all feel a little less alone and have a place in this society,” Rayden said in a statement.
He also recalls that during his musical career he has made “songs that talk about respect, self-esteem, mental health, reciprocity, equity, feminism, integration, immigration, love (in all its forms), of vulnerability”. And he has criticized “any establishment that attempted against all this.”
“One of the great milestones that I have had, on this path, has been having an audience that has made these songs their own until venues are full and exhausted. Rooms free of sexist violence and spaces where the LGTBI collective felt safe,” he added.
The singer regrets the cancellation but assures that his conscience would not leave him alone “if it were from the same hand that promotes and profits from hatred, that ‘sends the LGTBI collective to the trash’, that votes against the trans law and that the sees, together with the immigrant population, as third-class citizens, deprived of the same rights as the rest”.
