It’s hard for me to talk about Iggy Pop without sounding like a nauseating fangirl, so please bear with me everyone. With his band the Stooges, Iggy Pop was one of the very first acts in the nascent American punk scene. Often referred to as the “Godfather of Punk,” much of his music sounds closer to straight-up classic rock. His influence on punk is more due to his outrageous and iconic onstage antics than his musical style. He invented the stage dive and crowd surfing, was a notorious heroin addict, and was cutting himself up onstage before Isaac Brock was even born. But Iggy Pop’s compelling persona goes deeper than superficial rock-star swagger. In a classic interview with Peter Gzowski, he defined punk as “music that takes up the energies, and the bodies, and the hearts and the souls and the time and the minds of young men who give what they have to it, and give everything they have to it.” It is this fervor and sincerity that continues to make him a box-office draw after all these years. His songs are simple, energetic, and passionate, and when I listen to them I have the feeling that I’m listening to a man who’s lived through all the pain he sings about and has done the best he could with the chances he’s been given. (As a side note, he gets extra points in my book for being perhaps the only punk rocker ever to publish a scholarly article in an academic journal.) While he might not have been the most innovative musician in punk history, he’s certainly one of the most versatile and earnestly authentic. Iggy Pop and the Stooges - I Wanna Be Your Dog (Mp3)
Iggy Pop and the Stooges - Gimme Danger (Mp3)
Iggy Pop and the Stooges - Search and Destroy (Mp3)
Iggy Pop - Passenger (Mp3)
Iggy Pop - Lust for Life (Mp3)
