"I want to believe that this neopuritanism will disappear crushed by the weight of its own stupidity"

"I want to believe that this neopuritanism will disappear crushed by the weight of its own stupidity"

José Ignacio García Lapido, Lapido, with almost 25 years of a solid musical career behind him, presents a new album, his ninth already: «A primera sangre». And as if it were the first, as if it were a gift from the gods, he is enthusiastic about it: «I cannot be more proud of the collection that I have achieved, of the work of the musicians who have played with me and of the production by Raul Bernal. Everything has come together for me to consider this new album as something very special.». And he adds that «I don't want to fall into that cliché when promoting an album of saying that it's the best thing you've ever done, but I can assure you that all of us who have participated in its recording (the musicians, the producer, the technician …) We have agreed that this album brings together an outstanding collection of songs, and the way in which they have been interpreted has moved us all. That's how it is. We are not usually very expressive when it comes to recognizing our own achievements, our small victories, but in this case I saw the faces of the people who were in the studio when they heard the final results for the first time and their expressions were very meaningful. I was sounding big».

The good health of rock

Lapido had already been part of the mythical group 091 for 14 years in which, as is logical, «you get used to a type of operation that is different from that of a solo artist. In 091 I was a guitarist and a composer, but when I started solo, in 1999, I was also a singer. The focus was solely on me, not like 091, which was divided among the five members. All of this requires a process of adaptation. And it is also difficult for the public. He has expectations related to what he knows from before. That stage did not last long because circumstances force you to take on challenges and overcome stage frights. Now, after so many albums that I have recorded and so many concerts, the public knows how to differentiate». But Lapido's solo career is one that is already well established, far from that cult group ("a label that always followed us but was not sought by us") that always remained faithful to his principles. "We were never willing for this greater repercussion to come from adapting our music to the fashion trends of each moment," explains the musician.

“We held our ground and that may have worked against our commercial luck. But that is the remote past. And so it continues in this present, faithful to putting their expressive and creative needs before any commercial requirement. "I'm not denying that it would have been great to sell hundreds of thousands of records, but that depends on external factors that cannot be controlled. I take responsibility for my songs, the words, the chords, the sounds…». And speaking of words, Lapido thinks of his influences as a lyricist: «I have always said that the readings you do when you are young are the ones that accompany you most deeply for the rest of your life», he says, «and those youthful readings of San Juan de la Cruz, Calderón, Kafka, Walt Whitman, Chekhov, Lorca, Borges, TS Eliot and many others had a lot to do with my training as a lyricist. And of paramount importance, without a doubt, were the songs written by artists such as Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Lennon & McCartney, Ray Davies, Chuck Berry and many others.

And who does Lapido admire? «I like very varied lyricists, but to admire them I have to like music too. I do not separate one thing from the other. The songs by Sisa, Vainica Doble, by Burning, by Veneno, by La Banda Trapera, by los Ilegales, by Josele Santiago, of course by Quique González, by Doctor Divago, Fernando Alfaro... Diego Vasallo is writing very good things. Raúl Bernal, my producer, in his facet as a musician and lyricist is great. Chencho Fernández writes very well».

He does not believe that rock is in poor health in our country ("we must differentiate the media and public repercussion that a genre may have from its artistic importance") in view of the exceptional rock records that continue to be released, "both by groups and established artists as well as young groups. That is undeniable. As is the fact that rock is no longer the generational beacon that it was in its golden age, the 60s and 70s. But we must learn to enjoy music without that type of conditioning. In other genres such as jazz or blues, no one asks about the age of the performers, or if they are successful on the sales charts. The people who follow those genres appreciate their musical quality, their expressiveness and their artistic truth. With rock it should be the same. And it is that in all this time, since he recorded his first album in 1981, the changes have been many: «The industry, the way of consumption, everything... I have had to adapt to these changes to survive. This is musical Darwinism. The one that best adapts is the one that survives. Since 2005 I self-manage my career. It was that year when I created Pentatonia Records and from there we tried to continue being free weathering the storm.

It is not surprising that the new times, this suffocating excess of political correctness, the rise of the cancellation culture, is something unheard of for Lapido: «It is a kind of neopuritanism, but instead of coming from conservative or ecclesiastical positions, as in the past, it comes to us from leftist positions. Presumed left, I would qualify. I can not understand it. If we start to ban authors because they offend this group or this other, or because they once did something that someone doesn't think is right; If we begin to rewrite children's books or make lists of books that cannot be in public libraries for this or that, it is not that freedom of expression is in danger, it is that intelligence itself and the greatness of information are in danger. artistic and intellectual creation. It is a current that comes from the US, and it is already known that what comes from there has a great capacity for contagion throughout the world. The good and bad. I want to be optimistic and I want to believe that it will be an ephemeral movement and that it will disappear soon, crushed by the weight of its own stupidity.

of stone and gold

By Javier Menendez Flores

A century and a millennium were dying hand in hand when José Ignacio Lapido, the fuel of 091, launched himself to defend with his only name some songs that, at that time, seemed to him his ceiling. It was an overdose of recklessness, something like walking on hot coals with your feet dipped in gin: if you come from a "cult" band, a designation of origin that oscillates between legend and curse, between the wings of the eagle and the very heavy anchor , and you open a trail alone, you expose yourself to your faithful conspiring to dethrone you. Even more so if the hymns they grew up with or fell in love with bear your signature. Because every time the siren of the Zero howls in a room or in a bar, at the moment one of their imperial songs starts like a detonation, a spur stings the heart of one of the thousands of apostles that they have scattered all over the world. the country and who know that the charts are the exact antonym of artistic justice, if there is such a thing.

But talent is like that tongue of disheveled water that manages to penetrate the last crack of a crack, and to the stony nature of this artist's last name we must add the gold of his gifts. Well, it was the talent in living blood that made him soon obtain the desired pleasure and that his public allowed him to show more of his present self, although in exchange he had to give him shreds of the totem. Being a titan for so many must weigh an egg.

Lapido treasures a major work, a soloist of singular vigor and genius, in which prestige continues to look down on the commercial response. But what are platinum records and your songs fucking around on the radio at all hours next to the love forever of a brotherhood united by absolute veneration for you. And although pop has monopolized radio stations for centuries and trap has broken into schools and institutes as one more subject, if you give Lapido an SG you will notice that the world trembles under your feet like a rising earthquake. And there you have an unequivocal definition of what rock is and will always be, beyond the futile fashions.

Sometimes, the past visits him unannounced and his head is completely occupied by Joe Strummer, that wolf number one hundred and one -or the first, who knows- who, devoured by a particular Stendhal syndrome, put his wisdom at the service of some boys who all they had done so far was bury cars. But when he opens his eyes, Lapido is once again in the kingdom of Pentatonia, where the sun never gives up, not even at night, and where his job is to tear from himself those verses and notes that raise his fever and are like lava. in the stomach. One day he had the idea of ​​lying on the ground just to hear the grass grow and what he heard was the thunderous digestion of the 20th century, so bloody, so inhuman. And between fascination and terror, he visualized a million images of good and evil and understood how alone we men are in the middle of nowhere, and he told it.

"At first blood" is a set phrase, but it speaks to us of a challenge, a fight and a wound, and in these three images we see the smell of gunpowder and saltpeter of the epic, the greatness of the species, which must collide to ascend . And if life is bad – “and life is neither noble, nor good, nor sacred”: Lorca – let us dance desperately to scare away the demons. Right until the blood appears.