“A punch in my face”: the album that took Josh Homme two years to overcome
Nobody leaves an album without leaving a piece of themselves in between the grooves. It’s difficult for anyone to put their innermost thoughts down on paper, so having them exist in a recording for the rest of time means that everyone will be coming back to them to see what made them tick at one point in their life. While Josh Homme brought more mechanical elements into Queens of the Stone Age, there was a lot of chaos surrounding his music collection most of the time.
Although Homme had the ability to put together some of the most off-the-wall chord progressions in history, that didn’t come without being one of the true punks in the desert rock scene. He was unapologetically trying to make something outside the box, and hearing people like Ramones and The Clash made him see that a lot of what makes rock and roll work is the fact that not everything is set in stone. You can shape it how you want, and many generations before him were willing to twist it into some weird directions.
Outside of the original acts like The Beatles and The Stones, people like David Bowie had already started toying with what rock and roll could offer beyond a catchy tune, but Iggy Pop had a head start long before ‘The Starman’ crashlanded. Bowie wanted to make people think, but Pop was going to cause as much chaos as he could while he was doing it.
Despite looking like one of the biggest freaks in the world, Pop was always taking an intellectual approach to his music. It was in-your-face in some respects, but the minute that anyone decided to look deeper into The Stooges’ music, there was always a slightly tortured spirit trapped in there that no one could see when they were drawn to the man cutting himself up onstage.
“It took me two years to overcome this first big crisis of my life…”
josh homme
When Homme listened to what Pop could do in his solo career, though, he was far more interested in the pure sonics of something like The Idiot. Bowie had helped Pop find his own voice, but there was one thing different about that record that made Homme pay attention: freedom of expression. There were no rules there, and that was the kind of world that Homme wanted for himself.
He had already started work with Kyuss, but the minute Homme heard The Idiot, he knew that his entire musical world had changed, saying, “The Idiot was a revelation and a punch in my face at the same time. I disbanded Kyuss and stopped making music for a long time. Reset to zero, all open again. It took me two years to overcome this first big crisis of my life and to get ready for a new challenge.”
And listening to Queens of the Stone Age, a lot of those lessons transferred nicely to Homme’s new vision. There were a lot of similarities to what Kyuss was doing, but by this point, it wasn’t out of the question for Homme to switch out the lineup every time he made a record or tried his hand at something slightly off-the-wall, like the massive psychedelic haze going on in the middle of ‘Better Living Through Chemistry’.
It may have been a slowburn for Homme to truly realise what he was listening to, but chances are the lessons he took from The Idiot had nothing to do with the actual music. It was all about the mentality, and when he saw the results Pop got by being himself, he knew that it was much better for him to live in a world without rules.
