‘Gold’: Iggy Pop’s “song for our times”
Few could have predicted the physical and creative permanence of Iggy Pop. Back in the tumult of late 1960s Detroit, wild ephemerality bristled from his every sinewy pore when fronting garage rock pioneers The Stooges. From on-stage peanut-butter abuse and bloody mutilation to Fun Hose and Raw Power‘s flash-bang volatility, it’s a surprise Pop made it to the punk he paved the path for, let alone cosying up to BBC Radio 6 Music as an adopted national musical treasure for his Iggy Confessional curated shows.
Yet, Pop soldiered on, seeing through a myriad of trends and cultural sea changes around him to endure as punk’s godfather for over half a century. Across Berlin synth gloom, New Orleans jazz, fizzing new wave, and jumps into shiny pop punk, Pop has found the time to lend his feral sage authority for a respectable acting résumé and a plethora of Hollywood singles.
Some are fantastic—Repo Man a cartoon sci-fi classic and one of the best movies of the 1980s—while Shocker and Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare are less so. Naturally, drawn to Stephen Gaghan’s 2016 crime drama starring Matthew McConaughey, Gold enticed Pop to pen its official theme song.
Loosely based on the true event of the Bre-X 1997 mining scandal, when huge gold deposits were discovered in the Indonesian jungle, Gold tells the tale of a prospector seeking to make a fast buck, joinining forces with a geologist to find the mooted gold stash before figting the very top of Wall Street and even the FBI to protect his treasure. While seeing a cool critical reception, Pop was enamoured with the tale and professed an eagerness to write an original number.
“This beautiful and unpredictable film spoke to me of violence, desire, destiny, lust and the inescapable twists of fate,” Pop revealed in a statement. “The actors and the story spun a web of excitement that left me spent and breathless, so I tried to perform the vocal with that feeling in mind… I found myself at a new level of communication, standing there in the studio with Steve Gaghan and Danger Mouse, singing ‘Gold’—a song for our times.”
Having already worked with Danger Mouse on Sparklehorse‘s ‘Pain’ from 2010’s Dark Night of the Soul, Pop was in familiar company, yet counting Gaghan as co-writer was a curious collaboration, it being the Traffic and Syriana director’s first venture into songwriting. Crafting an intriguing spaghetti-western style of balladry, Pop’s sojourn into Ennio Morricone-flavoured croon was a first following an incredibly chequered and diverse body of work.
Boasting David Bowie as a former producer, any praise for an artist bold enough to step behind the studio console is major stripes for Danger Mouse or anyone else lucky enough to feature in the ‘Godfather of Punk’s’ storied oeuvre. “In the studio, he very assiduously and energetically directed the vocal, which is what I want when you’re working with a producer, Pop told Rolling Stone. “Phrasing, intonation, vowel pronunciation—a lot of stuff like that…little by little, the thing kept getting better and more conversational and less sing-songy”.
