Iggy pop workout6/11/2023 ![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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