Iggy Pop Still Wants to Be Somebody
GQ
Chris Heath
October 21, 2019
Welcome to GQ's New Masculinity issue, an exploration of the ways that traditional notions of masculinity are being challenged, overturned, and evolved. Read more about the issue from GQ editor-in-chief Will Welch here and hear Pharrell's take on the matter here.
When life throws changes at us, however unexpected, we all need to learn how to adjust. Iggy Pop is doing his best. “I’ve always been the chronically angry paranoid person,” he reflects. “As my circumstances have improved in life, I forget about that often…. I know something good is happening. People are treating me well in life. People are nice to me.”
That is why Iggy Pop now finds it much easier to be a man who can enthuse about how
he treasures swimming in the sea and good food and a fine glass of wine and his daily qigong exercises and the ability, when need be, to think carefully and deeply about things, as well as the ability, when need not, to not think too much about anything.
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But all that having been said, he wouldn’t like to mislead you. “And then there are other times,” he says, “when you’re, ‘**** all this ****!’ and ‘**** that guy!’ and ‘**** that chick!’ and ‘**** those people!’ and ‘**** this!’…”
So that’s all still in there?
“Yes, that’s still in there.”
Where does it come from?
“It’s justified! It comes from reality! It’s the correct and justified emotional response to reality. To the more irritating parts of reality, when I’m forced to come into contact with them.”
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On the cover of his new album, Free, Iggy Pop is pictured naked, walking away into the ocean in the half-light of a Miami Beach dawn. This turn of events can’t be considered entirely surprising, given that Pop has spent a lifetime—he is 72, at least in human years—finding various ways to be less dressed than most of us, just one part of the ongoing Iggy Pop master class in doing things your own way.
Told through the soft gauze of nostalgia, Iggy Pop’s story is one of the great ones: In the late 1960s, James Osterberg, a small Michigan youth with big ideas, takes a new name and forms a group, the Stooges, in which he lays down one of the no-nonsense propulsive templates for punk rock, years ahead of time, and recklessly extends the possibilities of how one’s body might be used and abused on a stage—for just one aspect of this, he is often now credited as the inventor of the stage dive. Then, in the 1970s, with acolyte David Bowie alongside him, he makes two remarkable classic-packed solo albums, The Idiot and Lust for Life…and on it has gone ever since. As others around him have withered and fallen, he has persevered and triumphed.
That’s the way pop-culture history is generally written, where you know that every oddball and pioneer and long shot at the beginning of the story is always going to be acclaimed and get their due before the story’s end. It ignores the fact that once the outcasts have been cast out, most of them never find their way back in, and that long shots are long shots because most of them will never see their number come up. In truth, Iggy Pop’s story was messy and uncertain for a long time, and it ending well was no sure thing.
These days he rebuffs the inevitable invitations to write his autobiography, but a scrappy memoir with his name on it, I Need More, did come out in 1982, long before the ground beneath his feet stabilized. It has a brief foreword by Andy Warhol, including the lines: “I don’t know why he hasn’t made it really big. He is so good,” and a text that offers plenty of clues to clear up the mystery for Warhol.
The first two sentences we get from Pop in the book, setting up an anecdote about how he was once mistakenly arrested under suspicion of being a murderer, are these: Yeah, so when I was in the Stooges a lot of dumb things used to happen to me. I remember one night I was sitting up, just sitting up all night with our road manager, John Adams, shooting coke with a hypodermic needle. And it continues like that. It’s not so much the excesses that strike a modern-day reader but the sense of a chaotic life without a center or a moral compass or viable path forward.
It’s been a long way from there to here, and there were plenty more difficult years along the way, but now he is thriving in all kinds of ways: touring regularly to big crowds, making new records, selling old records (“all the studio albums are in print and they all sell, all the live albums sell—I have 79 or 84 or 102 or whatever they are—reconfigured, repackaged albums; licensing and the Stooges’ licensing is through the roof…”), acting (most recently as a zombie who still hankers for coffee in Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die), making endorsements (most recently his own signature brew of, er, Stumptown coffee), doing voice-overs (recently narrating both the surreal art movie In Praise of Nothing and the art-world documentary The Man Who Stole Banksy), and for several years now, hosting his own weekly radio show, Iggy Confidential, for BBC6 in the U.K. (he records it in Miami, where he has lived for nearly a quarter of a century), displaying a thoughtful and esoteric taste in music. And along the way, Pop has become aware that he has achieved, or attained, something that somehow stretches beyond all of this.
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“In the process,” he tells me, “I became something vague-to-articulate but very, very solid to people in general—way, way, way from anything to do with music. Cops like me. Customs officers like me. All sorts of everyday people, they like something about me that has something to do with stick-to-ativity.” By which I think he means something to do with endurance that also relates to a peculiar kind of obstinate dignity. “I’m not sure how that all works,” he muses. “I haven’t gone into it too much, but I realize it’s important.”
For over a decade now, conversations with Iggy Pop have generally included a moment in which he explains how he has no more in him, and how he thinks he should probably shut up and go away. But retiring has turned out to be one thing at which Iggy Pop has proved spectacularly poor.
“Just lately I kind of gave up on that,” he concedes. “I just sort of realized I’m so used to being somebody. I might be nobody if I retired, you know. I was going to be more a nobody in comfort—probably not a good dynamic for me.”
What would happen?
“Alcoholism. Sloth. Depression, probably. All those things. I don’t have any problems like that right now.”
