Suicide and a sold-out show: How a dark rumour about Iggy Pop gripped New York
Everyone’s so media-trained these days. All our biggest modern stars are sanitised creatures who know exactly what to say, how much to say and when to say it. No one ever really oversteps or lays everything out. They’re careful, ensuring their message is clear and considered, as the aim of the game is never to impact their reputation. For many of them, their reputation is sanitised too, presented to the world as a nice, fun image—something light, bright and aspirational. All of this means that nowadays, someone like Iggy Pop could never happen, and here, I present this story as evidence.
Rumours in music are interesting. They tend to split into two camps. First, you have the rumours an artist is desperately trying to get away from. They call up crisis PR firms and have a team of people on hand to try and bury something in case a story of an indiscretion, an affair, or a controversy of some sort has come out. Those rumours are something to kill and kill quickly.
The others are controlled by that same group of people—an artist and a bunch of suits surrounding them—but in this case, they’re the gardeners. By now, everyone knows the social and cultural weight of gossip. Gossip makes the entertainment world go round, so they’ve learnt to lean into it. Planting whispers and carefully spreading potentially false or exaggerated information is a marketing ploy now.
Maybe it always was, but in the case of the 1970s rumour surrounding Iggy Pop, the story was so crazy that no management team or label advisor would dare to get this dark. No, this is something that would only happen then, in the heyday of early punk and gossiping, when Andy Warhol was king, and Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon made rumours high art.
In that golden moment, right as The Stooges were about to combust at the height of their power in 1973, a truly insane whisper was heard: Iggy Pop has been paid one million dollars to kill himself live on stage at Madison Square Garden—and he was going to do it.
Wait, no. According to Andy Warhol, it was actually that the musician was going to do it at New York’s Academy of Music’s special New Year’s Eve show. He claimed that Iggy Pop said that, and I’m writing it here cause some other music biography noted that Andy Warhol said it. A true Chinese whisper of a salacious story, as all good rumours should be. Yet, given his reputation for crazy antics or dangerous outbursts, this genuinely didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility. But, alas, Iggy Pop is still alive.
Morbidly, though, the crowd gathered. Whether it was all a marketing ploy, fans scrambled for tickets for the chance to potentially see the punk idol’s gruesome, live-on-stage end. But as they filtered into the venue, and as he emerged wearing tiny boxer shorts and nothing else, there was no suicide, only a sold-out show and a night that lives in infamy as the kind of night orchestrated exactly by an artist that could never happen again.
