And the 10 SONGS that should have been HITS
Featured in Far Out Magazine
Winner of the 2020 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, Iggy Pop’s music may be more familiar to contemporary audiences for its use in advertising and film than it is for its influence on punk. Over the last twenty years his gnarled features and gravelly voice have become synonymous with car insurance, designer fragrances, travel agencies and surfwear. Like rock mythology itself, Pop is conceptualised as a ‘special case’ of mass consumption. The oft repeated mantra that "he never sold out" is now offset by the commercial power of his legacy. Iggy himself is phlegmatic about this tension between art and commerce: “My policy on that is, use them for sausage, use them for cars. I do not care, because they were not commercially conceived.”
In the 21st Century Iggy Pop has come to symbolise some kind of short-hand longing for a world that is less woke. A world in which heroin addiction seems glamorous and self-harm is a theatrical performance. In his latter years, Iggy has found a new form of pop alchemy. The 1996 film Trainspotting habilitated his career in much the same way that Mamma Mia repositioned Abba: as a ‘franchise’. Since then, the corporate sponsorship deals have flooded in. That sometimes this borrowed interest is a little incongruous does not seem to have harmed the brand. In 2004, when cruise-line Royal Caribbean appropriated ‘Lust for Life’ for a series of promos, one customer commented ‘Nothing says maritime comfort like a song about shooting up junk’.
Riding the wave of this unexpected celebrity status, his 2016 album Post Pop Depression (produced by Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age) has been the best selling of his career: reaching number five in the UK and Top 20 in America. The accompanying film American Valhalla earned plaudits. As did the documentary Gimme Danger, The Story of The Stooges: Iggy won the Critics' Choice Award for the “Most Compelling Living Subject of a Documentary Award” (2016.) And, in 2019, GQ crowned him “Man of the Year". But what about the music? Here we take tour (through the sewer) and explore the ten most commercial songs Iggy Pop never had a hit with, alongside those recordings (often by David Bowie) that did crossover.
Read complete article in Far Out Magazine October 2020
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