Rock n’ Roll is an interesting pop culture development. Since its origins parents have been afraid of Rock n Roll for the same reasons the young attracted to it. It represents sex, discontent and rebellion. Rock n' Roll connects us to our most primitive instincts, whatever we happen to think those are when our parents first complain about our taste in music.
What does it look like?
Does it look like this?
What about this?
Maybe this?
Well, sure, at the time but times change. And let’s face it, all those are a bit polished, aren’t they? The Beatles want to hold your hand, but Rock n Roll in its pure form might want to do something a bit more…inappropriate…
Close
Fun Fact: If you google search "Rolling Stones 70s" you get images of either very young stones, or very old stones.
Closer. Definitely.
Much closer, yes…
Close, but a little pretentious. Okay, a lot pretentious…..
…isn’t rock about loss of all pretense? Isn’t that what happens when the id is completely uncaged? In that case, Punk is probably the essense of Rock n Roll…music that almost despises the need for instruments, nothing but speed and sweat and sex and drugs and…well, rock n roll… Also, Rock is about rebellion against society. There is something suspect about being too popular in the rock n roll ethos. In that case, there can be only one true exemplar of Rock n Roll, one man who truly carries not the torch, but the very flame itself in his hand….
IGGY POP. YOU WILL WORSHIP HIM.
Iggy Pop, since 1969, has been Rock n Roll’s One True God. His most famous band, The Stooges, is in many ways, famous for its spectacular failure. They were doing punk music at least a decade too early. It has always been a mystery to me how they even got a record contract in the first place.
The Stooges-1973
The Stooges in 2007. Note that being clean and sober has actually made Iggy more insane.
Iggy in Australia 2019. Even in his 70's, he rocks harder than you.
“That band could kill any band at the time and frankly can just kill any of the bands that built on this work since, just eat any of those poodles”
–Iggy Pop on The Stooges
They recorded three albums in less than five years, and were dropped from their label for total failure to sell records. Their last album, Raw Power, was released in 1973 and peaked at #182 on the Billboard charts. Their management dumped them in 1974 after it was discovered that the money that had been advanced them had been used up to buy drugs. The band broke up after their last show was stopped short because the band and a group of bikers felt their need to fight couldn’t wait until after the show. All three of their albums (especially Raw Power) are now considered classics, and frankly deserve that status. They recorded a new album in 2007. I like it, but it’s not the old Stooges. It’s what The Stooges would have sounded like in 2007 had they never broken up and never stopped recording. It’s just a matter of whether or not you want to listen to that.
Iggy departed for a while…he became plain old Jim Ostergberg from Ann Arbor and wandered around LA in what can only be called a drug-fueled stupor. Iggy demanded that he must survive, and so Jim checked them into the UCLA neuropsychiatric institute so they could clean up. He had few visitors, among them David Bowie, who encouraged him to clean up and make music again. There’s also a rumor that Bowie smuggled him cocaine. Probably both are true. When he got out of the mental institution, Bowie took him on tour in 1976. Bowie’s addictions were spiraling out of control and Iggy’s were not being helped.
Bowie basically fired everyone, and broke off ties with every friend he had except Iggy. They moved to Berlin and cleaned up. This time for real….for Bowie at least, and Iggy for the moment. Iggy would kick drugs entirely in the early 80’s. Personally I think he began to feel they were inhibiting his madness.
“Some singers in bands can do about one tour where they wreck it like Iggy Pop and then they have to pull back from either sheer pain or good sense. Iggy never pulls back. He is, quite simply, the best. This is fact, not opinion.” —Henry Rollins”
Once they were off drugs, Bowie got Iggy a manager again, and they made music. Fantastic, Wonderful, Miraculous music. Bowie made Low and Heroes at the same time Iggy was making The Idiot and Lust For Life. They both feature heavily on all four records. They are two of Bowie’s absolute best, and The Idiot is probably the single best thing Iggy would ever record.
“…a defiant, funky, robotic, hellhole of an album.” –critic David Buckley on The Idiot
Basically, Iggy never stops. Truly, some of his music is absolutely unmitigated crap, but how Rock n Roll is that? Besides, the 80’s were hard on everyone. On the balance, there is more good than bad, if you have the taste for it….and frankly, some don’t, and it’s hard not to understand why. Something about Iggy Pop is scary. His music is always so raw, sometimes it sounds like any minute now the music will just dissipate, or vibrate into total incoherence. On stage he is a swaggering, thrusting, slinky, shirtless beast who seems to get older only from the shoulders up. Offstage, he’s been published in several scholarly journals, and has repeatedly demonstrated the intelligence that Marilyn Manson and his art-student-flunkout-postmodern-dilettante ilk only seem pretend to have because its more fun to make sophomoric criticisms of things like christianity and money while posing on a cross for their album covers and buying islands so they can paint palm trees black. Part of the reason Iggy has never been commercially successful is because he does not pretend, and has no pretense in him.
“If 3 am had a sound, it would be the sound of Iggy’s voice, no matter what he’s singing.” –Johnette Napolitano
In the halls of Rock and Roll, he is the Beast, the Avenging Angel, the Destruction, the Salvation, the Beginning and the End. If you see teenagers playing an awful excuse for music on neglected, seventh-hand pawn shop runoff instruments in their mom’s garage next to a shiny, shiny Suburu SUV, you are looking at Iggy’s children. When you hear that slightly too-loud punk / pop band that you can tell is deeply, yet secretly ashamed of the “/” in their genre and everything that follows it, the voice in their head whispering “Something awful is happening–this isn’t right,” has Iggy’s deliberate Detroit drawl. Whether his people know it or not; if they worship Rock n Roll, then Iggy Pop is their God.
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