Iggy Pop (born
James Newell Osterberg,
Jr. on April 21, 1947) is an American
songwriter, and occasional
actor. Although he has had only limited mainstream
commercial success, Iggy Pop is considered an influential innovator
of
punk rock,
hard
rock, and other related
styles. He is
sometimes referred to by the nicknames "the Godfather of
Punk" and "the Iguana", and is widely acknowledged
as one of the most dynamic stage performers of all time. Pop began
calling himself
Iggy after his first band in
high school,
The Iguanas.
Iggy Pop was the lead singer of
The
Stooges, a late 1960s/early 1970s
rock band who were influential in the development
of the nascent
hard rock and
punk rock genres. The Stooges became infamous for
their live performances, during which it was not uncommon for Pop
(who traditionally performs bare-chested) to
self-mutilate, verbally abuse the audience,
expose himself and leap off the stage (the first or among the first
to
stage dive).
Pop's popularity has ebbed and flowed throughout the course of his
subsequent solo career. His best-known solo songs include "
Lust for Life," "I'm Bored," "
Real Wild Child," the Top 40
hit "
Candy" (with vocalist
Kate Pierson of
The B-52's) and "
The Passenger". A
film about Iggy Pop's life and career titled
The Passenger is in
development. He currently fronts the advertising campaign for the
UK-based online insurance company
Swiftcover, in his trademark state of
toplessness.
Early life
Iggy Pop
was born in Muskegon,
Michigan
, the son of Louella (née Christensen) and James
Newell Osterberg, Sr., a former high school English teacher and
baseball coach at Fordson High School
in Dearborn, Michigan
. Osterberg was raised in a trailer park in
Ypsilanti,
Michigan
. He is of
Irish and
English descent on his father's side, and
of
Norwegian ancestry on his
mother's. His father was adopted by a
Swedish American family, hence the family's
surname (Österberg).
Music career
Early days: 1960 to 1967
Osterberg
began his music career as a drummer in
different high school band in Ann Arbor, Michigan
. One band was
the Iguanas, from the name of which
he adopted his future moniker Iggy.
After exploring local blues-style bands such as the Prime Movers (with brothers Dan and Michael
Erlewine), he eventually dropped out of the University of
Michigan
and moved to Chicago
to learn
more about blues. While in Chicago, he played drums in blues
clubs, helped by
Sam Lay (formerly of the
Paul Butterfield Blues
Band) who shared his connections with Iggy. Inspired by
Chicago blues as well as bands like
The Sonics and
The
MC5, he formed the Psychedelic Stooges and began calling
himself Iggy. The band was composed of Iggy on
vocals,
Ron Asheton on
guitar, Asheton's brother
Scott on
drums, and
Dave Alexander on
bass.
The Stooges era: 1968 to 1975
The seeds of Iggy Pop's stage persona were sown when he saw
The Doors perform in 1967 at the
University of Michigan and was amazed by the stage antics and
antagonism displayed by singer
Jim
Morrison. Morrison's extreme behavior, while performing in a
popular band, inspired the young Pop to push the boundaries of
stage performance. Later, while inventing the
stage-dive in Detroit, rolling around in
broken glass, exposing himself to the crowd, and vomiting on stage,
among many other exploits, Iggy himself would inspire others.
In 1968, one year after their live debut, and now dubbed
The Stooges, the band signed with
Elektra Records, again following in the
footsteps of The Doors, who were Elektra's biggest act at the time
(reportedly, Pop called
Moe Howard to see
if it was alright to call his band "The Stooges", to which Howard
responded by merely saying "I don't care what they call themselves,
as long as they're not the
Three Stooges!" and hung up the
phone). The Stooges' first two albums
The Stooges, (on which Iggy was
credited, much to his displeasure, as "Iggy Stooge"), produced by
John Cale; and
Fun House, sold poorly. Shortly after
the new members joined, the group disbanded because of Pop's
growing
heroin addiction.

Iggy Pop in Montreal 1977
In 1971,
Iggy Pop and David Bowie met at Max's Kansas
City
, a nightclub and restaurant in New York
City. Pop's career received a boost from his relationship
with Bowie when Bowie decided in 1973 to produce an album with Pop
in England. With
James
Williamson signed on as guitarist, the search began for a
rhythm section. However, since
neither Pop nor Bowie was satisfied with any players in England,
they decided to re-unite The Stooges. It would not be a true
reunion insofar as Dave Alexander, who had succumbed to
alcoholism, was unable to play on the record; he
later died in 1975. Also, Ron Asheton grudgingly moved from guitar
to bass to make way for Williamson to play guitar. The recording
sessions produced the rock landmark
Raw
Power. After its release
Scott
Thurston was added to the band on keyboards/electric piano and
Bowie continued his support, but Iggy's
drug
problem persisted. The Stooges' last show ended in a fight
between the band and a group of
bikers,
documented on the album
Metallic
K.O.. Drug abuse stalled his career again for several
years.
Bowie and Berlin: 1976 to 1978
After the second breakup of The Stooges, Iggy Pop made some
recordings with James Williamson, but these were not released until
1977 (as
Kill City, credited
jointly to Iggy Pop and Williamson). Iggy was unable to control his
drug use and checked himself into a
mental institution to try to
clean up. Bowie was one of his few visitors there, and he continued
to support his friend and collaborator. It was also rumored that
Bowie would smuggle in
cocaine to give to
Pop. In 1976, Bowie took him along as his companion on the
Station to Station tour.
This was Iggy Pop's first exposure to large-scale professional
touring and he was impressed, particularly with Bowie's work
rate.
Bowie and Iggy Pop relocated to West Berlin to wean themselves off
their addictions. Iggy Pop signed with
RCA and Bowie helped write and produce
The Idiot and
Lust for Life during
1977. Pop's two most acclaimed albums as a solo artist, the latter
with another team of brothers,
Hunt and
Tony Sales. Among songs they wrote
together were
China Girl,
Tonight, and
Sister Midnight, all of which Bowie performed
on his own albums later on (the last being recorded with different
lyrics as
Red Money on the album
Lodger). Bowie also played
keyboards in Pop's live
performances, some of which are featured on the album
TV Eye in 1978. In return, Pop
contributed backing vocals on Bowie's
Low.
The Arista albums: 1979 to 1981
Iggy Pop had grown dissatisfied with RCA, later admitting that he
had made
TV Eye as a quick way of fulfilling his
three-album RCA contract. He moved to
Arista Records, under whose banner he
released
New Values in 1979.
This album was something of a Stooges reunion, with James
Williamson producing and latter-day Stooge
Scott Thurston playing guitar and keyboards.
Not surprisingly, the album's style harked back to the guitar sound
of the Stooges. Although highly regarded by many Iggy fans (some
preferring it to the Bowie collaborations),
New Values was
not a popular success, despite some strong material including
I'm Bored and
Five Foot One.

Iggy Pop, Cardiff, 1979
The album was moderately successful in Australia and New Zealand,
however, and this led to Iggy Pop's first visit there to promote
it.
While
in Melbourne, he made a memorable appearance on the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation
's nationwide pop show Countdown. During his
anarchic performance of
I'm Bored, Pop made no attempt to
conceal the fact that he was
lip-synching,
and he even tried to grab the teenage girls in the audience. He was
also interviewed by host
Ian "Molly"
Meldrum, an exchange which was frequently punctuated by the
singer jumping up and down on his chair and making loud
exclamations of "G'day mate" in a mock
Australian accent. His
Countdown
appearance is generally considered one of the highlights of the
show's history and it cemented his popularity with Australian punk
fans; since then he has often toured there. While visiting New
Zealand, Iggy Pop recorded a
music video
for
I'm Bored, and at a record company function where he
appeared to slap a woman and throw wine over a photographer.While
in Australia, Iggy Pop was also the guest on a live late-night
commercial TV interview show on the
Ten
Network. It is not known whether a recording of this interview
exists, but the famous
Countdown appearance has often been
re-screened in Australia.
During the recording of
Soldier (1980), Iggy Pop and Williamson
quarrelled over production (the latter apparently wanted a big,
Phil Spector-type sound) and Williamson
was fired. Bowie appeared on the song
Play it Safe,
performing backing vocals with the group
Simple Minds. The album and its follow-up
Party (1981) were both
commercial failures, and Iggy Pop was dropped from Arista. His drug
habit varied in intensity, but persisted.
The 1980s
In 1980, Iggy Pop published his autobiography
I NEED MORE,
co-written with Ann Arbor, Michigan arts patron Anne Weher. The
book, which includes a selection of black and white photographs,
features a foreword by Andy Warhol. Warhol says that he met Iggy
when he was Jim Osterberg, at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 1966.
"I don't know why he hasn't made it really big," wrote the one Pop
artist about the other. "He is so good."
The 1982 album
Zombie
Birdhouse on
Chris Stein's
Animal label, with Stein himself producing, was no more
commercially successful than his Arista works, but again, in 1983,
Iggy Pop's fortunes changed when David Bowie recorded a cover of
the song "China Girl". The song had originally appeared on
The
Idiot, and was a major hit on Bowie's blockbuster
Let's Dance album. As
co-writer of the song, Pop received substantial
royalties. On
Tonight in 1984, Bowie
recorded two more of their co-written songs, this time from the
Lust for Life album, "Tonight" and "Neighborhood Threat",
assuring Iggy Pop financial security, at least for the short term.
The support of his friend enabled Pop to resolve problems with the
IRS and permitted him to
take a three-year break during which he overcame his heroin
addiction, took acting classes, and got married.
Additionally, Iggy Pop contributed the title song to the 1984 film
Repo Man (with
Steve Jones, previously of the
Sex Pistols, on guitar) as well as an
instrumental called "Repo Man Theme" that was played during the
opening credits.
In 1985, Pop recorded some demos with Jones. He played these demos
to Bowie, who was sufficiently impressed to offer to produce an
album for Pop: 1986's
New
Wave-influenced
Blah Blah
Blah, featuring the
single
"Real Wild Child", a cover of
Wild One (Real Wild Child),
originally made popular by Australian rock 'n' roll pioneer
Johnny O'Keefe in 1959.
The single was a Top
10 hit in the UK and was successful around the world, especially in
Australia, where for the last twenty years it has been used as the
theme music for the ABC
's late-night music video show Rage. It remains Pop's
solitary brush with major commercial success.
Blah Blah
Blah was Pop's highest-charting album in the U.S. since
The Idiot in 1977, peaking at #75 on the
Billboard Top 200 albums chart.
Also in 1985, the movie
Rock &
Rule was released featuring performances by Iggy Pop and
Lou Reed for the character Mok. Pop's song
in the film was "Pain & Suffering" from the final sequence of
the film.
In 1987, Pop appeared (along with
Bootsy
Collins) on a mostly instrumental album,
Neo Geo, by
Japanese composer
Ryuichi Sakamoto.
The music video for "Risky", written and directed by Meiert Avis,
won the first ever MTV Breakthrough Video Award. The groundbreaking
video explores
transhumanist
philosopher
FM-2030's ideas of
Nostalgia
for the Future in the form of an imagined love affair between
a robot and one of
Man Ray's models in Paris
in the late 1930s. Additional inspiration was drawn from
Jean Baudrillard,
Edvard Munch's 1894 painting
Puberty,
and
Roland Barthes Death of the Author. The surrealist
black-and-white video uses stop motion, light painting, and other
retro in-camera effects techniques. Meiert Avis shot Sakamoto while
at work on the score for
The Last Emperor in London.
Sakamoto also appears in the video painting words and messages to
an open shutter camera. Iggy Pop, who performs the vocals on
"Risky", chose not to appear in the video, allowing his performance
space to be occupied by the surrealist era robot.
Pop's follow-up to
Blah Blah Blah,
Instinct (1988), was a
turnaround in musical direction. Its stripped-back, guitar-based
sound leaned further towards the sound of the Stooges than any of
his solo albums to date. His record label, which had most likely
been expecting another
Blah Blah Blah, dropped him.
Nevertheless, the
King
Biscuit radio show recording of the
Instinct tour
(featuring guitarist
Andy McCoy and
Alvin Gibbs on bass) reaching Boston on
July 19, 1988, remains one of punk-rock's most enduring live
albums.
The 1990s
In 1990,
Pop recorded Brick by Brick,
produced by Don Was, with members of
Guns N' Roses and The B-52's as guests, as well as backup vocals by
many local Hollywood
groups, two of whom (Whitey
Kirst and Craig Pike) would create
his band to tour and perform on his Kiss My Blood video
(1991), directed by world-famous director Tim
Pope and filmed at the Olympia in Paris. The video
attracted much controversy, as it featured much footage of Pop
performing with his penis exposed to the audience. The album was
his first Gold-certified album in the U.S. (denoting sales of over
500,000 copies) and featured his first Top 40 U.S. hit,
Candy, a duet with
B-52's singer
Kate Pierson.
Also in 1990, Pop starred in the controversial opera
The Manson
Family by composer
John Moran,
released on Point Music/Phillip Classics, where he sang the role of
prosecutor
Vincent Bugliosi. That
year he was also involved in the
Red Hot
+ Blue project, singing a version of
Well Did You Evah! in a duet
with
Deborah Harry.
In 1991, Pop and Kirst contributed the song
Why Was I Born
(Freddy's Dead) to the soundtrack of the film
Freddy's Dead: The Final
Nightmare. The song also plays over the end credits of the
film, with a compilation of clips from the
A Nightmare on Elm Street
series running alongside the end credits.
In 1992, he collaborated with
Goran
Bregović on the
soundtrack for the movie
Arizona Dream by
Emir Kusturica. Pop sang four of the songs:
In the Deathcar,
TV Screen,
Get the
Money, and
This is a Film. Also in 1992, he
collaborated with the New York City band
White Zombie. He recorded spoken word
vocals on the intro and outro of the song
Black Sunshine as well as playing the
character of a writer in the video shot for the song. He is singled
out for special thanks in the liner notes of the band's album
La Sexorcisto:
Devil Music, Vol. 1.
In 1993, Pop released
American Caesar, including two
successful singles,
Wild America and
Beside You.
The following year Pop contributed to
Buckethead's album
Giant Robot, including the songs
Buckethead's Toy Store and
Post Office Buddy. He
appears also on the
Les Rita
Mitsouko album
Système D
where he sings the duet
My Love is Bad with
Catherine Ringer.
In 1995, Pop again found mainstream fame when his 1977 song
Lust for Life was
featured in the film
Trainspotting. A new video was
recorded for the song, with clips from the film and studio footage
of Iggy dancing with one of its stars,
Ewen
Bremner. An Iggy Pop concert also served as a plot point in the
film. The song has also been used in TV commercials for Royal
Caribbean Cruise Lines (with many music critics denouncing the
usage of the song to promote peppy cruises) and as the theme music
to
The Jim Rome Show, a
nationally-syndicated American sports
talk
show.
Also in 1995, Pop released
Naughty Little Doggie, with
Whitey Kirst returning on guitar, and the single
I Wanna
Live. In 1997, he
remixed Raw
Power to give it a rougher, more hard-edged sound; fans had
complained for years that Bowie's official
rescue effort
mix was muddy and lacking in bass. Pop testified in the reissue's
liner notes that on the new mix, "everything's still in the red".
He co-produced his 1999 album
Avenue B with
Don
Was, releasing the single
Corruption. Pop produced
2001's
Beat 'Em Up, which gave
birth to
The Trolls, releasing the single
Football featuring Trolls alumni Whitey Kirst and brother
Alex.
In the early to middle 1990s, Pop would make several guest
appearances on the
Nickelodeon show
The Adventures of Pete and
Pete. He played James Mecklenberg, Nona Mecklenberg's
father.
Recent career
Pop supplied vocals for the 1999
Death in
Vegas UK Top-10 single
Aisha. The same year he
appeared on
Hashisheen, The End Of Law, a collaborative
effort by
Bill Laswell, reading on the
tracks
The Western Lands and
A Quick Trip to
Alamut. He also sang on the tracks
Rolodex Propaganda and
Enfilade by
At the Drive-In
in 2000.
For New Year's Eve 1997, Iggy was the headliner for the annual
Australian three-day concert the Falls Festival. He gave one of the
most memorable performances in the history of the festival. A
member of the audience got to do the countdown for the new year
with Pop as part of a competition to guess Pop's new year's
resolution. (It was "To do nothing and make a lot of money!")
Pop's 2003 album
Skull Ring
featured collaborators
Sum 41,
Green Day,
Peaches, and
The
Trolls, as well as Ron and Scott Asheton, reuniting the three
surviving founding members of
The
Stooges for the first time since 1974. Pop made a guest
appearance on
Peaches's song
Kick It as well as the video. Also in 2003, his first
full-length biography was published.
Gimme Danger - The Story
of Iggy Pop was written by Joe Ambrose; Pop did not
collaborate on the biography or publicly endorse it. Having enjoyed
working with the Ashetons on
Skull Ring, Pop reformed The
Stooges with bassist
Mike Watt (formerly
of
the Minutemen) filling in
for
Dave Alexander, and
Fun House saxophonist
Steve Mackay rejoining the lineup. They have
toured regularly since 2004. That year, Pop opened
Madonna's
Reinvention World
Tour in Dublin.
In 2005 Pop appeared, along with Madonna,
Little Richard,
Bootsy Collins, and
The
Roots'
Questlove, in an American TV
commercial for the
Motorola ROKR
phone. In early 2006, Iggy and the Stooges played in Australia and
New Zealand for the
Big Day Out. They
also began work on a new album,
The Weirdness, which was
recorded by
Steve Albini and released
in March 2007.
In August 2006 Iggy and the Stooges performed
at the Lowlands pop festival in the
Netherlands, Hodokvas in Slovakia
and in the Sziget
festival in
Budapest
.
Author
Paul Trynka completed a biography
of Iggy Pop (with his blessing) called
Open Up and Bleed,
published in early 2007. More recently, Iggy and the Stooges played
at
Bam Margera's
wedding and Pop appeared on the single
"
Punkrocker" with the
Teddybears in a
Cadillac television commercial. Pop was also the
voice of Lil' Rummy on the
Comedy
Central cartoon
Lil' Bush and
confirmed that he has done voices for
American Dad and
Grand Theft Auto IV, which also
included The Stooges song
I
Wanna Be Your Dog (though the game's manual credited Iggy
Pop as the artist). Iggy and The Stooges played the Glastonbury
Festival in June 2007. Their set included material from the 2007
album
The Weirdness and classics such as
No Fun and
I Wanna Be Your Dog.
Pop also
caused controversy in June 2007 when he was interviewed on the
BBC's coverage of the Glastonbury
Festival
. He used the phrase "
paki shop", prompting three complaints and an
apology from the BBC.
Pop guested on
Profanation
, the new album by the
Bill
Laswell-helmed group
Praxis, which
was released on January 1, 2008.
On March 10, 2008 Pop appeared at
Madonna's induction into the
Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame
at the Waldorf
Astoria Hotel in New York. Together with The Stooges he
sang raucous versions of two Madonna hits
Burning Up and
Ray of Light. Before leaving the stage he
looked directly at Madonna, quoting "You make me feel shiny and
new, like a virgin, touched for the very first time.", from
Madonna's hit song
Like A
Virgin. According to guitarist Ron Asheton, Madonna asked
The Stooges to perform in her place, as a protest to the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame for not inducting The Stooges despite six
appearances on the nomination ballot. Pop also sang on the
No
Fun cover by
Asian Dub
Foundation on their 2008 album
Punkara.
He fronts (from January 2009) a £25 million TV ad campaign for
Swiftcover, using the strapline "Get a
Life".
On January 6, 2009, original Stooges guitarist, and Iggy's
self-described best friend
Ron Asheton,
was found dead from an apparent heart attack. He was 60 years
old.
Pop's new solo album,
Préliminaires, was released on June
2, 2009. Inspired by a novel by French author
Michel Houellebecq (born Michel Thomas)
called
La Possibilité d'une île (2005; Trans. as
The Possibility of an
Island by Gavin Bowd, 2006), Iggy was approached to
provide the soundtrack for a documentary film on Michel and his
attempts to make a film from his novel. Iggy's favourite character
from Michel's novel is a little white dog named Fox. Iggy describes
this new release as a "quieter album with some jazz overtones", the
first single off the album, "King of the Dogs", bearing a sound
strongly influenced by
New Orleans
jazz musicians such as
Louis
Armstrong and
Jelly Roll
Morton. Iggy also admits that it's his response to being "sick
of listening to idiot thugs with guitars banging out crappy music".
The album will be available on legal download sites, CD, and a
Deluxe Boxset is available at only 6000 units worldwide. This
boxset contains the
Préliminaires album, a collector "Les
Feuilles Mortes" b/w "King Of The Dogs" 7 inch, the cover of which
is Iggy's portrait by
Marjane
Satrapi, and a 38 page booklet of drawings also by Marjane
Satrapi.
Iggy Pop sings one song on
Slash
& Friends,
Slash's
first solo album to be released at the beginning of 2010.
Iggy has also been set to appear in the upcoming game
Lego Rock Band. Iggy will appear as a
character to sing
The Passenger
and will also be the voiceover talent for the tutorials.
With reference to the song
The
Passenger, Iggy Pop has appeared
on NZ television advertising phone networks to show how he can get
a band to play together by conference call.
Film career
Pop has had a limited career as an actor. He has appeared in
sixteen
movies, including
Sid and Nancy (a nonspeaking cameo role),
The Color of Money,
Hardware (voice
only),
The Crow: City of
Angels,
The Rugrats
Movie,
Snow Day,
Coffee and Cigarettes
(opposite
Tom Waits, in the third segment
of the film, "
Somewhere in
California"),
Cry-Baby,
Dead Man,
Tank Girl and
Atolladero, a Spanish
science fiction Western. Pop also sings the main theme for
Atolladero, he is the voice of The Beast From Another
Dimension in the cult animated film
Rock & Rule and also sings its
song, "Pain and Suffering".
He has been featured in five television series, including
Tales from the
Crypt,
The Adventures of Pete &
Pete, where he played Nona's dad in the second and third
season, and
Star Trek:
Deep Space Nine, in which he played
Yelgrun in "
The Magnificent
Ferengi" episode. With The Stooges, he was also featured in an
episode of
MTV's Bam's Unholy Union as the main band
performing at
Bam's wedding.
Additionally, a portion of the music video for Iggy's
Butt
Town was featured on an episode of
Beavis and Butthead.
Pop has been profiled in four
rockumentaries and has had songs on eighteen
soundtracks, including
Crocodile Dundee 2,
Trainspotting,
Pretty Woman,
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking
Barrels,
Haggard,
Arizona Dream,
the main theme of
Repo Man and Kurt Cobain About a son,
2006.
In the movie
Velvet
Goldmine, Ewan McGregor portrays Curt Wilde, a character
loosely based on Iggy Pop. McGregor performs Pop's songs "TV Eye"
and "Gimme Danger" in the film.
In the
movie Control, Pop's
song The Idiot is used when Joy
Division frontman Ian
Curtis hangs himself in his Macclesfield
home.
Pop voices Lil' Rummy on the
Comedy
Central show
Lil' Bush.
Iggy Pop played himself as the DJ of the fictional rock station
Liberty Rock Radio 97.7 in the video game
Grand Theft Auto IV.
Pop provided the voice for a character in the English language
version of the 2007 animated film
Persepolis.
Iggy Pop also voiced a cameo in the
American Dad! episode
American Dream Factory as Jerry,
the drummer, in
Steve's
band.
Iggy makes an appearance in the 2008 feature documentary by Nik
Sheehan about
Brion Gysin and the
Dreamachine entitled
'FLicKeR'.
In 2008, Iggy's music will be featured in a
movie adaption of
Irvine Welsh's best-selling novel
Ecstasy: Three Tales of
Chemical Romance.
In January 2009, Iggy was signed up as the face of
Swiftcover, the UK-based online insurance
company. The advert was then banned by the Advertising Standards
Authority on 28 April 2009 for being misleading – it implied that
Iggy Pop himself had an insurance policy with Swiftcover when at
the time the company did not insure musicians.
Iggy Pop also featured as a voice talent in the 2004 ATARI video
game DRIV3R, which was produced by Reflections Interactive.
Future biopic
The Passenger is an upcoming movie
biopic about Pop's early career with the Stooges. The
film will be directed by
Nick Gomez. The
film is expected to be released in theatres in 2010. The movie's
budget is in the $6 million to $8 million range.
Elijah Wood will play Pop.
Wood revealed during an interview that he is "scared to death" of
doing it, because he is a huge fan of Pop and he doesn't want to be
the "person responsible for screwing that up". He also said the
movie will chronicle
The Stooges era,
for the most part.
Pop liked the
script but refused to take
part in the film. He said:
The script ain't chopped liver...
It was a work of art.
But subjectively, I don't want to be involved in any
way.
A producer and the writer sent me a very decent letter,
and asked me to write back if I didn't want them to do
it...
I don't feel negative about it at all.
Pop also called Wood "a very poised and talented actor".
Classical scholarship
An established journal of classical scholarship,
Classics
Ireland, chose to publish Pop's musings on the applicability
of
Edward Gibbon's
Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire to the modern world in his
brief article,
Caesar Lives, (Vol. 2, 1995). Pop also
relates how reading Gibbon while on tour in the
Southern United States inspired him
to a spontaneous
soliloquy he called
"Caesar".
Influence
Pop earned a place in punk rock history by popularizing many of the
stage routines that are now commonplace among musicians: he was
among the first to
stage dive and crowd
walk. Moreover, early in his career, he was known to cut himself on
stage. Although Pop has never recorded a
Top
10 album or best-selling single, his impact on rock music is
widely acknowledged.
The song
Punk Rock on the album
Come on Die Young by
Mogwai pays tribute to Iggy Pop, as it samples a
speech that Pop gave on
punk rock from an
interview on the
CBC on 11 March 1977.
During that interview,
Peter Gzowski
asked Iggy to clarify music labeled as
punk rock. Pop,
dubbed "the Godfather of Punk", sat upright in his chair and first
attacked, then reappropriated, the use of "punk", ending his speech
(or tirade) in indignant repose.
- I'll tell you about punk rock: punk rock is a word used by
dilettantes and, uh... and, uh... heartless manipulators, about
music... that takes up the energies, and the bodies, and the hearts
and the souls and the time and the minds, of young men, who give
what they have to it, and give everything they have to it.
And it's a... it's a term that's based on contempt; it's a term
that's based on fashion, style, elitism, satanism, and, everything that's rotten about
rock 'n' roll. I don't know
Johnny Rotten... but I'm sure, I'm sure
he puts as much blood and sweat into what he does as Sigmund Freud did.
- You see, what, what sounds to you like a big load of trashy
old noise... is in fact... the brilliant music of a genius...
myself. And that music is so powerful, that it's quite
beyond my control. And, ah... when I'm in the grips of it,
I don't feel pleasure and I don't feel pain, either physically or
emotionally. Do you understand what I'm talking
about? Have you ever, have you ever felt like that?
When you just, when you just, you couldn't feel anything, and
you didn't want to either. You know, like that?
Do you understand what I'm saying, sir?
Pop's solo album
The
Idiot has been cited as a major influence on
post-punk,
electronic and
industrial artists such as
Joy Division and
Nine Inch Nails.
Mark E. Smith,
Johnny Marr,
Henry Rollins,
Nick
Cave and
Jack White have all been
quoted as saying that the Stooges'
Fun House LP was "the greatest rock
record ever made". Cave and
The Birthday Party once did a
45-minute set of only Stooges songs back in the early 1980s under
the name of
The Cave Men.
One of the most popular bands of former
Yugoslavia
, Azra, recorded a song entitled
Iggy Pop on their first album, released in 1980.
Bulgarian
rock band D_2 also recorded a song called Iggy
Pop on their third album, released in 2006. UK punk
rock bands the She Devils and
Die Pretty
released a split single called
Dance Like Iggy/Summertime
in 1999.
R.E.M. referenced Iggy Pop in the song,
I
Took Your Name.
Red Hot Chili
Peppers referenced Iggy Pop in the song,
Coffee Shop.
Kurt Cobain many times declared himself
a fan of The Stooges and mentioned them frequently in his
Journals as an influence,
naming
Raw Power his favorite
album. Industrial band
Nine Inch
Nails credits the track
Night Clubbing as inspiration
for the 1994 hit
Closer (and in fact used a highly
distorted sample of the song's drum intro).
Kraftwerk mentions him (along with
David Bowie) in their song "
Trans-Europe Express".
James O'Barr, the author and artist of
The Crow, used Iggy Pop as
inspiration for the title character's physicality and anatomy. Iggy
was originally approached for the part of Funboy in the
1994 film adaptation, but touring
commitments intervened. He did, however, appear in the sequel,
The Crow: City of
Angels. The late actor
Brandon
Lee was said to have based his portrayal of Eric Draven in the
first film on Iggy Pop.
The Murder City Devils self
titled album (1997) contained the song "Broken Glass" in which
Spencer Moody Sings about Iggy "sturttn' in those tight pants" and
"..with no shirt at all..rollin' in that broken glass." Moody has
also done the "crowd walk" at many concerts, as made famous by
Iggy.
Discography
Albums
With The Stooges
With James Williamson
Solo
Studio
Live
Compilations
Notes
References
External links
- iggypop.org:
Preliminaires video and press conference transcript, Nightclubbing
II taping, tourdates, news, pix, audio/video, tradelist, archives
to 1999
- http://www.iggy-pop.com (indepth, up to date Iggy Pop / Stooges
site featuring biography, discography, photos, news, reviews, tour
dates, interviews)
- http://goto.glocalnet.net/iggy-fanpage/
- http://archives.cbc.ca/arts_entertainment/music/clips/2806/
(Iggy Pop's infamous 1977 interview with Peter Gzowski, from the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's archive)