LUST FOR ROCK
Iggy Pop defiantly refuses to let his music become comfortable
If rock ’n’ roll is dead, Iggy Pop has missed the memo — or maybe he burned it. At his recent Toronto concert, he prowled shirtless around the stage and up the aisles for nearly two hours. Toward the end, after an expletive-laden tirade, he pointed at the audience and yelled: “I’m sick … and it’s YOUR FAULT!”
The line is from his new album, Post Pop Depression, which he has said might be his last. But as his contemporaries die off, or play bloated arena tours, or spiral into self-parody (Alice Cooper’s Hollywood Vampires, coming soon to a casino near you), and as rock music itself languishes far down the charts, the 68-year-old Iggy remains defiant.
Western culture still wants to believe in rock, and some of our biggest artists — Rihanna, Beyoncé, Kanye West — refer to themselves as rock stars. Pop acts often seek to borrow rock’s energy, as when Justin Bieber, Skrillex and Diplo turned their hit Where R Ü Now into a guitar-and-drums stomper at the Grammys.
Rock ’n’ roll, however, isn’t just about loud amps and jumping around. It isn’t about the artifacts in Hard Rock Cafés, or the Rock ’n’ roll Hall of Fame, which 72-year-old Steve Miller, inducted this year, denounced for all but ignoring women. Rather, rock, as Ice Cube said in N. W. A’s own induction, is “a spirit.” No one embodies this better than Iggy Pop, and here’s what his career can teach us about rock ’n’ roll.
DANGER
“Gimme danger, little stranger / And I’ll feel your disease,” Iggy sang when he fronted The Stooges, who in their career in the late ’60s and early ’ 70s ( before the inevitable reunions) genuinely scared audiences. He was a threat to himself — drawing blood with shards of broken glass or a rusty kitchen knife — and sometimes, it seemed, to others. In Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s oral history of punk, Please Kill Me, former Stooges manager Danny Fields recalls Iggy’s having “raised a … bench over the heads of the first rows of kids in the audience like he was going to slam it down, and you thought the momentum of the swing was such that he couldn’t stop it.”
You don’t need to be literally dangerous to be rock ’n’ roll. Certainly Iggy has toned down on his current tour, and onstage violence has lost much of its allure after the Paris massacre. But rock does need to be unpredictable.
Choreographed dance routines are out, as is rigid adherence to backing tracks: Rockers shouldn’t be able to be replaced by robots. Guitars are ideal because they’re temperamental instruments, subject to going out of tune or strings breaking, and one can wander around a stage while playing them. Plus, they’re easy to break theatrically. Smashing a laptop onstage is less satisfying.
Audience interaction is crucial, too. Iggy became infamous by crowd-surfing before it became cliché.
CONFRONTATION
It’s not enough to be unpredictable — after all, jazz musicians make things up on the spot. Rock should resist expectations, and it should make people uncomfortable. The Stooges’ music shocked people with its intensity, its combination of art and thuggery and its nihilistic lyrics. Having cut his teeth in blues bands, Iggy decided he needed to devise something true to his upbringing: hence, what he called The Stooges’ “white suburban delinquent music.” It angered not just the middle class, but also the hippie counterculture, too, and it helped usher in punk. In Post Pop Depression, Pop, the elder statesman, sings in a cavernous voice about American malaise.
Rock should be confrontational, but it must never punch down, which makes it harder for old, rich white guys. At a 2013 concert in Hamilton by The Who, Pete Townshend infamously mouthed the words “F--- off” at a little girl carrying a sign that said “Smash your guitar, Pete” — not a good look. The Rolling Stones’ Havana show in March made them look less like street-fighting men than executives discovering a new market.
But confrontation survives among a younger generation of rockers. Among them: Montreal’s Ought, who were galvanized during that city’s student riots; Halifax’s Wintersleep, whose single Amerika sounds like a defibrillator directed south of the border; Savages, the U.K. all-girl quartet with their smash-the-system intensity; and artists confronting oppressive regimes. Think of Pussy Riot and Mali’s Songhoy Blues, whose Music in Exile was crafted in the capital of Bamako after they were forced to flee the northern part of the country by music-hating Islamists.
And hip hop, when it fights the power, is definitely rock ’n’ roll.
FUN
After Iggy’s Toronto rant, he assured the crowd, “Bless you! It’s nothing personal.” It wasn’t always thus: in his early years, he’d sometimes leave the stage taunting the audience while being pummeled by projectiles. No one wants to be hectored by a humorless harrier; similarly, rock can’t be all tension and no release. Lust for Life may be a song about how “people with real enthusiasms are vulnerable to getting … really screwed,” as Iggy has said, but it still has an irresistible beat.
Having hit No. 17 in the U.S. with Post Pop Depression, Iggy is enjoying an unexpected commercial breakthrough.
But true to form for a man who always seems ready to sabotage his career, he’s ready to walk away from it all. But first, he’ll enjoy himself, in his own way.
“Here comes success,” he sang at the end of his Toronto encore. “I’m gonna hop around like a frog.”