La Corrida: Not a Metaphor.

I don’t usually listen to music like this. Too clean, too deliberate, too close to the edge of sentimentality. But Tidal knows me better than I’d like to admit, and one day, it dropped La Corrida into my speakers. I didn’t expect to listen twice. I didn’t expect to be undone.

The voice in the song isn’t human. It belongs to the bull.

This isn’t a metaphorical bull. No wounded masculinity, no cipher for political rage. Just the bull. In the ring. Uncomprehending. The world has turned cruel without explanation, and he is inside it.

The brilliance of the song lies in its restraint. The bull isn’t made wise or tragic. He’s given just enough voice to register confusion, defiance, pain. To say: I was led here. I charged because you asked me to. I thought there was a way out. I don’t know the rules of your theatre. I hoped to be spared.

That is what undoes you — the narrow scope of his understanding, laid bare inside a system too vast and stylised to negotiate.

We rarely speak of animals as others. They appear as companions, projections, symbols, resources. We narrate them in our own grammar, clothe them in our emotions. We call it love, or stewardship, or culture. Yet something is missing. Full otherness — not inferior, not exalted — just beyond. Minds without language as we know it. Desires without translation. Interests we fail to recognise.

I don’t care whether the bull in La Corrida is plausible. That isn’t the question. The song doesn’t seek agreement. It lets the voice pass through and leaves disturbance in its wake.

This is what ethics requires: the discipline to recognise a mind we cannot enter. One that will never ask to be heard on our terms. The animal does not speak. The animal does not need to. What remains is for us to learn how to listen — without mistaking the echo for understanding.