The genre Iggy Pop called musical “masturbation”
Music has always been meant to be the ultimate form of expression. Even though bands might like to string together a bunch of chords in the hopes that they can get on top of the charts, the best artists know how to take the basis of what they started and turn it into something beautiful, capturing the kind of emotion that can’t be articulated. While Iggy Pop occasionally went to war with the audience to express himself, he thought that jazz was closer to musical gratification for a long time.
Compared to where Pop ended up with The Stooges, he was far from the likes of John Coltrane and Miles Davis. As rock and roll started to shift to a more raw sound, Pop was firing on all cylinders the minute that he got onstage in Detroit, inhabiting his throat to create some of the most feral-sounding rock songs ever put to tape.
Whereas most parents saw The Stooges as nothing but punk kids trying to make a lot of noise, Pop always had an artistic sensibility about his songs. For all of the great pieces that the band recorded, it was more about having an epiphany go off in the listener’s head whenever they heard them or saw them live, including Pop putting his body through hell at every show.
If The Stooges were the equivalent of performance anarchy, jazz was the same thing for musical theorists. Compared to the traditional jazz tunes that were meant to go through complex chord progressions, artists like Miles Davis could be considered the “punks” of their day. While nowhere near in line with what Sex Pistols did, Davis had the same mentality of consciously subverting expectations, introducing the world to different pieces of modal jazz on albums like Kind of Blue.
When talking about the different types of music that have influenced him over the years, Pop thought that jazz tended to get overlooked when looking at hard rock. Given those long runtimes, though, Pop understood why many mistook most of the greatest jazz players as musical wankers.
Discussing his influences with Metal Evolution, Pop talked about separating the good from the bad in jazz, saying, “A lot of jazz is shit. It sounds like what it is, which is poorly-thought-out masturbation, so it has a bad reputation for that, but there are a few guys in it that can be astonishing.”
Those few standout players managed to have a far greater influence on Pop than most people realised. He wasn’t going to pick up a trumpet, and James Williamson wasn’t going to keep changing keys and making complex solos, but everything onstage was in tune with the jazz mindset of expressing oneself.
This was not music meant for the mainstream, so the best thing that both The Stooges and jazz greats could do was to make music that would please themselves as well as get all of the rage and love in their lives and transmit it through their instruments. It wasn’t exactly the most commercial thing to do, but Pop knew that beneath the musical masturbation, there was something actually worth revisiting.
