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Iggy Pop: Building a
New Funhouse, Brick by Brick
 Detroit,
1967: a difficult time in a city beset by blue-collar tension and
racial violence. The pleasant mood of the early sixties, characterized
here by the music of Motown, vanishes. Riots in Detroit engulf national
newscasts and the city is home base for John Sinclair and the White
Panther Party, Caucasians who ally themselves with the black political
empowerment credo of the Black Panthers. On Halloween night, 1967,
Iggy and The Stooges perform live for the first time.
Since that time, much has been
made of James Osterberg, otherwise known as Iggy Pop, the man whose
throbbing, scream-and-flail musical style was ten years ahead of
the crusaders of punk: The Sex Pistols, The Clash and Gang of Four.
"I think the music I’ve made has later been of great use
to a lot of artists. I hear bits of it in other people’s work
and…I feel neat about that," Pop humbly states.
I worked for Kennedy in 1960…and he got shot and I got in bands.
When most people think of Iggy
Pop, they recall his outrageous stage antics: jumping around in
a dog collar, slicing his chest with razor blades and broken bottles
and smearing peanut butter all over his sweaty, half-clad body.
But away from bright lights and big speakers, Iggy Pop is an articulate,
informed thinker propelled by a need to know about the world around
him. To avoid what he terms the "automatic pilot" syndrome,
Pop constantly involves himself in projects, the most recent of
which is his new release Brick by Brick.
His fifteenth record, Brick
by Brick, is perhaps Pop’s most accessible record to date,
enhanced by the considerable talents of a host of guest performers.
Kate Pierson of The B-52s adds her unmistakably bright voice to
"Candy," a love song of reminiscence which is also Pop’s
first duet. Slash and Duff McKagan of Guns ‘n’ Roses play
guitar and bass on four down-and-dirty rock tracks; and Iggy covers
John Hiatt’s "Something Wild" with Hiatt himself
contributing vocal harmonies. Pop also praises David Lyndley, who
"absolutely shone," spicing up five tracks with his violin,
mandolin, saxophone, bouzouki and guitar work.
Pop admits that the current right-wing
crusade against artistic freedom may have subconsciously prompted
him to slip in the first "dirty" word on an official Iggy
Pop album. (The raunchy, metallic K-O was a bootleg import.)
Pop chuckles at the irony and remembers the reaction during the
early Stooges days. "Nobody ever censored me because I wasn’t
in the industry at the time; I didn’t have a record contract,"
Pop explains. "When I did the live shows in the original Stooges,
I went to jail a lot but it’s not like it is now. There was
no weeping sisterhood to protect me, going, ‘Oh, the First
Amendment! Save the Iggy!’"
Pop chuckles and continues, "The
whole [music] industry was like, 'Here comes Iggy. Uh, waiter,
could I have the check? Let’s get out of here,’ you know?
They just ignored me."
But the few PG-13 words on the
album weren’t thrown in as flippant exercise. With determination,
Iggy Pop has honed his social observations into a terse and lucid
view of the problems facing America in the 1990’s. The first
single from Brick by Brick is "Home," an examination
of homelessness in the United States, an experience Pop knows firsthand
from his days as a struggling musician. Pop expresses surprise when
learning that Los Angeles has surpassed New York City in homeless
persons, and describes himself as a "fatalist" when asked
for potential solutions to the problem.
"I don’t think it’s
gonna stop until this society’s forced to crash or make a major
change, because as I say in the song, nobody really knows anybody,
they want that TV," moans Pop. "You look at a corporate
headquarters these days. They do look like castles so they can duck
into [them] in case of attack. Life outside of corporate structures is
very tenuous right now, and the people who are outside of that structure
are the ones who end up on the street."
By the time I was eleven, I always said that I either want to be President or I want to be Frank Sinatra. Pop also sings about his commitment
to a decent, uncompromising life ("Main Street Eyes");
pokes fun at the ennui of the good life he has come to enjoy ("The
Undefeated"); and scathes the urban inanity he sees all around
("Butt Town," the title track and "Neon Forest").
Brick by Brick is a gritty testament to Pop’s inimicable
lust for life that re-establishes the edge which he discovered as
a teenager in The Stooges.
Where did all this social conscience
come from? Iggy Pop is obviously much deeper than the crazy rocker
image so often pasted upon him. It is Pop’s hometown of Detroit
and his politically aware parents that shaped his outlook. These
two influences helped Pop channel his energies into some of the
most memorable lyrical inquiries into American society in the history
of rock and roll, two echoes in the Pop psyche which make Brick
by Brick one of the year’s best albums.
Politics played a key role in Pop’s
life from early childhood. Pop’s parents encouraged "a
lot of discussion around the table about that sort of thing,"
and at a young age, Pop fostered serious political aspirations of
his own. "By the time I was eleven I always said that I either
want to be President or I want to be Frank Sinatra, one of the two,"
Pop reveals.
Pop’s interest in music was
stirred by the ‘50’s "greaser bands" that played
in Detroit. "They had a sense of authority in that music and
a sense of community within the band," Pop recalls with admiration.
"They were truly out of society, these guys. They had no future,
in reality, and I admired them."
By his mid-teens, Pop began his
own displacement from mainstream society, which spawned his long
affair with rock and roll. "I was politically interested until
I was about fourteen or fifteen," Pop remembers. "I worked
for Kennedy in 1960: door-to-door, pamphlets, voter registration,
that sort of stuff… and he got shot and I got in bands."
Iggy Pop and his legendary Stooges
were part of a group of Detroit bands that played free in parks
on weekends and in a church basement on Wednesday nights to benefit
Trans-Love Energies, "the acid face" of the White Panther
group.
"The White Panthers was really
a hokum," defuses Pop. "It was just a bunch of guys posturing
to be like the Black Panthers. What it amounted to was a couple
of communal houses: one guy in the house was bigger than anybody
else and he slept with the dope," he laughs.
Despite his disdain for the insincerity
of the White Panthers, Pop acknowledges the importance of the radical
questioning spawned by such a unique environment. "Because
that movement was going on, it created an open thoughtfulness to
the questions of ‘What is music? What kind of music is cool?
Where should we be playing this music? Should people have to pay?
Should we make ‘em clap? Should we make ‘em do something?
What kind of chicks are cool?’" Pop says. "All this
sort of thing you were thinking, and that really opened doors for
me, musically.
"What they did do that was
really important was they… took the music out of the grasp
of established club owners, out of the grasp of established record
companies," he adds. "I never would have had such an interesting
band as I did had it not been for the atmosphere that was set up
by that. Sometimes out of something very heinous and bullshitty
can come something really good."
Even now in his forties, Pop is
as compelling a songwriter and performer as ever and he just gets
busier all the time. His collaborative projects during the last
couple of years include numerous benefit concerts, playing guitar
on a track from the Cult’s Sonic Temple album and having
carte blanche to write and sing his own lyrics to "Risky,"
a Ryuichi Sakamoto instrumental. "Sakamoto wanted an English-speaking
singer to get him airplay in the West and they couldn’t get
Peter Gabriel," confesses Pop. He cracks a wide grin and jokes,
"Luckily for him they got me instead."
In September, Pop will appear as
DJ Angry Bob in Richard Stanley’s cyberpunk futuristic film
called Hardware, following up his silver screen breakthrough
in John Waters’ film Crybaby. The experience of
filmmaking and Waters’ peculiar narrative ability were great
influences on Pop, and he credits them with clarifying his writing
style. Pop actually began writing the lyrics of Brick by Brick
in his trailer when not on the Crybaby set. "Film
has to have a strong story to keep you going and it has to have
enough focus to get clear information that anyone can understand
across in a sequential way and yet make it interesting," notes
Pop. "It helped me as a songwriter because I was thinking in
those terms. I thought the lyrics got more concise on this record
than ever before."
Brick by Brick, in a sense,
tells a story much as a film does. Pop says, "It’s about
a guy who’s been through a lot of shit, is very unhappy in
the world in which he lives, but is nonetheless determined to be
happy as a policy.
"Basically on the album I
bitch a lot," laughs Pop, "and also speak about what I
would hope that I could achieve, which would be an adulthood and
eventual old age with dignity and peace."
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