![]() And hearing you mention him makes me wonder if you can do that, too, because it’s clear from reading books about you that back in the ’70s you were pretty much living the stereotype of the sexual-free-for-all rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. Whether he’s accurate or not, who knows, but he’s opening a window on certain ways of thinking. But one subject that makes people take issue with him is the way he writes about sexual power dynamics. Michel Houellebecq is a writer a lot of people disagree on. The point of all this is, if you keep going, possibilities open up. I was asked to contribute a song to a documentary about him, and then other songs on “Préliminaires” were triggered by Michel’s books. There are some very comic, soulful and sensible solutions to middle-aged male problems in those novels. And “Préliminaires” came about because I was at an age where Michel Houellebecq’s novels were important to me. But I always believed that if I did it - whatever it was - for real, then an audience was going to be there. I was also having a divorce, so I wanted to sing about a Nazi girlfriend and trying to her on the floor. But if you quietly say it to some sepulchral music, that’s a different thing, because you’re facing darkness once you hit 50. ” If you yell, “I ain’t gonna take any ” on a rock song that’s one thing. Finally it got to a point with “Avenue B” - I was hitting 50 and hitting a wall, and I was fed up, and as I said on the first song, “I didn’t want to take any more. But what happens is, if you do that over and over, it peters out. Is that how it feels to you? I went on that Iggy path with the Stooges, and once you start and you get somewhere, you just go with it. The music on “Avenue B” or “Préliminaires” sounds much less attached to a preconceived persona and much more like a guy singing about his life. But to my ears, anyway, the space between the two seems to have collapsed as time has gone by. Is it interesting that the voice in your head said “Jim” and not “Iggy”? Because my understanding is that for a long time there was a Jekyll-and-Hyde relationship between Iggy Pop the persona and Jim Osterberg the real person. Iggy and the Stooges around 1969 - from left, Scott Asheton, Ron Asheton, Dave Alexander and Iggy Pop. But I’ve been going to bed early for years now. I remember when cocaine came in the Detroit area - started coming in big, probably with the biker gangs - and I did some at a party where everybody was doing it and the music was loud and the drink was flowing and an inner voice said to me, “Jim, this isn’t what you do well.” It didn’t stop me, because I heard that other voice too. I did hang and do drugs with some tough boys. It’s just that if you’re living in a different way, different situations are going to present themselves. But my question - and it’s more general rather than specific to you - is whether an artist needs to live outside the boundaries of polite society in order to make music that also exists outside those boundaries. You can’t listen to that stuff and think it was made by choirboys. I think a big part of why your music still radiates, especially the Stooges’, is that its feelings of danger and transgression don’t fade. “When I started, the demand was very low,” Pop says with a conspiratorial smile. Yet here he is, with 75 years behind him and a strong new album, this month’s “Every Loser,” ahead. It’s neither glib nor callous to say an early death probably wouldn’t have shocked those who knew him. Pop is infamously uninhibited as a live performer - tales of self-mutilation and physical abandon are legion - and as a person (also legion are tales of substance abuse). The other half is that he lived long enough to reach beloved elder-statesman status. ![]() But his musical perseverance is only half the tale. Still, he didn’t really get his due until middle age, occasioned by the cultural ascension of those artists he influenced and the Stooges reforming in 2003. Pop’s solo work has been almost as artistically significant - and somewhat more commercially successful - with albums like “The Idiot” (1977) and “New Values” (1979) continually finding eager listeners among successive waves of young musicians. The savage and hair-raising ruckus he made with the Stooges in the late 1960s and early ’70s was some of the greatest and most influential rock ’n’ roll ever, and it was basically ignored or derided by the mainstream during the band’s brief original existence. Iggy Pop’s life and work constitute one of music’s most remarkable survival stories. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |