Three decades after starting his journey with Los Planetas, Juan Ramón Rodríguez, better known as Jota, has decided to undertake his first solo project with the help of film director Iván Zulueta. This is not a soundtrack for the director, who died in 2009, but rather a project sponsored by the National Film Library to set music to a selection of pieces from the director's personal archive. Unpublished short films, images without sound recorded in Super8 or scenes from the Basque director's childhood recorded by his parents are revisited by Jota's music, in a meeting sponsored by the countercultural vocation of both artists. “The culture is similar, it derives from the factory of Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground,” explains the musician from Granada in a telephone conversation. “It is the scene that interests me most in rock'n'roll of the last 70 years, in pop culture.”
Known both for his cinematographic work and for his work as a poster artist for directors such as Garci, Almodóvar and Buñuel, Ivan Zulueta's work was characterized by his experimentation, which he connected in the 70s and 80s with pop art and the North American artistic movements of Vanguard. From his personal archives, acquired in 2021 by the National Film Library, Jota accessed five hours of unpublished material from which he selected 70 minutes with which he has illustrated ten themes with the label that characterizes Los Planetas. “The images really are hypnotic, magnetic and fantastic, practically anything you touch on it seems like something good.”
The result is Plena Pausa, a title taken from Arrebato, Zulueta's second feature film and his best-known work. More specifically, it comes from a scene in the film and refers to the moment of artistic inspiration, of artistic creation in which an outburst occurs, a situation of ecstasy. “They refer to this situation as being in the middle of a pause, in full flight, in a rapture, a way of expressing what that outburst is.”
The sequences chosen by Jota propose a chronological journey through Zulueta's life that begins with his childhood to learn about the evolution of a cult artist misunderstood by the general public who dealt with heroin addiction. “There are other more interesting images, even the ones that were rejected are all very good, but I opted for others that gave a somewhat uniform idea of Iván's evolution and also of the things that Iván Zulueta's work has in common with my training , with the culture I come from,” explains Jota.
This link between both artists is the counterculture, “which, depending on whether the era is more conservative or more progressive, is more hidden or more visible, has more influence on power or less.” In any case, it is an always current culture "because it is necessary for the survival of humanity that there always be some critical artists", otherwise "we would not evolve, we would go backwards or we would disappear completely." Which does not prevent the fact that, in the long run, the accessible parts "will always be partially absorbed by the dominant ideology", while the more radical ones "will continue to look for their spaces as soon as they are visible."
This screening has also affected Jota's musical generation, born in the 90s, when a countercultural window opened with groups like Nirvana "that allowed that thinking that was alternative, critical and independent, to have quite a bit of acceptance and influence." A period that, for the singer of Los Planetas, closed with the emergence of the Internet "and the control of the media by large companies, with large monopolies" that diluted the proposal to increase "economic benefit."
“There is a pop culture and a popular culture that differs from another type of culture, high culture, which is what the elites have,” Jota reasons, asked why it is what characterizes pop. “Popular culture, more than the culture of the elite, is what really moves the world and people's thoughts” with its function of making people enjoy and at the same time transmitting knowledge. On the contrary, Jota warns of the existence of “pseudomusic” that is used “to control people.” It is “a false culture that the elite tries to sell by saying that it is also culture, and that it is promoted by music platforms or television. The reality is that it is just propaganda, misinformation.”
The publication of Plena Pausa comes precisely at a time of pause for Los Planetas, with its members immersed in personal projects, meeting only for some concerts like the one they will perform this Friday at Festival B in Barcelona. “We are trying to prepare something for next year, but at the moment we don't have it planned,” explains Jota, satisfied with the reception of his previous work, The Water Songs, which in the group's 30-year career is the highest has climbed the sales charts. “We have a fairly loyal audience, who goes to the stores to buy the albums when we release them,” he points out, highlighting the pride they take in “maintaining such an important audience base for so long.”
