“Eerie, scary, and sometimes ironic”: The two jazz albums that turned Iggy Pop into a punk icon
Iggy Pop likely knows more about the world of excess than anybody. However, this isn’t merely in the sense of substance, despite him knowing a lot about that, too. In Pop’s world, excess also covers any boundary-pushing thing that can spark inspiration, whether a book, a painting, a piece of music, or an overheard conversation of the unsuspecting passerby.
That said, Pop’s ability to lean into and rinse any possible artistic avenue stems from his ability to know just how far to go to make it worthwhile. For instance, he once recognised his ability to know just the right level of push and pull, unlike many of his peers who keep going no matter what, entering the realm of self-distruction when they should have disentangled themselves a long while ago.
For Pop, this is called knowing where the edge lies. “My psychiatrist told me that in the 1970s,” he once said. “You go to a certain place, you know when to pull back.” While this may seem debatable from the outsider’s perspective, Pop’s conversativism has always primed every step taken, infiltrating his artistic grandeur in ways that consistently enable reinvention.
And while his period in Berlin obviously benefited this journey in self-discovery and cleanliness, it also enabled the ‘Iggy Pop’ persona to thrive on refreshed purpose in a city that felt perfectly separated from the world around. In other words, it was a sanctuary for artistic productivity in unimaginable ways. Or, as Pop put it, “There was a wall that kept all the assholes out.”
And because of the thousands of anecdotes neatly stored inside his own mind—tales of excess and solemn reflection alike—and the mystique that keeps people hooked on someone so culturally significant and infinitely impactful, he became a conduit for endless fan discovery, not just regarding his own wealth of material but the influences between the surface; the ones that shaped him into his own brand of legend.
Considering the obvious favourites, it might come as a surprise to some that Pop enjoys his share of jazz classics, including John Coltrane’s The Heavyweight Champion and Louis Armstrong’s The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings, Vol. 1. However, looking at the innate ability of jazz greats like Coltrane and Armstrong to reinvent sonic structures and sound dynamics, this seems entirely fitting.
“Probably more than any other single artist, I listen to him,” Pop once said about Coltrane, praising Armstrong’s “eerie, scary, and sometimes ironic” performances. On the surface, this endearment may seem to be about mere enjoyment, but as a punk icon, it also reveals the musician’s value of resilience, defiance, and rebellion, and how these traits translate into raw and authentic musical art.
After all, while there are countless defiant musicians whose ethos reflected punk’s attitudes that Pop also took a liking to, like Bob Dylan, the nature of jazz and particularly Coltrane embodied the kind of transcendence of limitation that Pop always seemed to search for. These figures never held back and continued to use music as explosive tools of endless discovery, a trait Pop imitated not only in his music but also in his life and attitude.
