The hippie anthem Iggy Pop called “the worst song ever written”
As any passing listeners of his radio show will be all too aware, punk godfather and anti-shirt advocate Iggy Pop boasts a particularly broad music taste, and one which he has always made an effort to keep up-to-date on. On the flip side of that, though, there has never been a shortage of tunes that the former Stooges frontman utterly despises.
It should perhaps come as no surprise that Pop has been critical of a few artists and anthems over his many decades as a rock and roll icon. After all, if the music scene of the 1960s had been entirely without sin, then there would have been no need for The Stooges to form in the first place. Emerging from the blossoming garage rock scene in Detroit, the Pop-fronted band offered a searing, amphetamine-fueled alternative to the ‘peace and love’ hippiedom populating the rock scene of the era.
While many of his songwriting contemporaries were preaching the virtues of dropping acid and holding hands, Iggy and the Stooges offered a much more direct, confrontational approach to music. Not only did the group carve out what would soon become known as proto-punk, with their arsenal of guitar abrasion and Pop’s instantly identifiable, guttural vocal performances, but Pop’s stagecraft was distinctly more aggressive than anybody on the bill at Woodstock, too.
There were, undoubtedly, a select few artists of the counterculture age that did earn the appreciation of Iggy Pop – even the most contrarian of punk heroes could not deny the genius of Dylan or Hendrix, for instance – but, by and large, the frontman either detested the hippie scene or was simply too out of his head to take any of it in.
He was, however, conscious enough to listen to and utterly despise one of the defining anthems of the hippie generation: Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s ‘Marrakesh Express’. Once recalling the reason why The Stooges were such an essential alternative to the prevailing rock sounds of the day, Pop told Rolling Stone, “I mean, ‘Marrakesh Express?’ It may be the worst song ever written.”
While, on first glance, Iggy Pop could be accused of being a little harsh on the CSN classic, it is worth remembering that the song was initially rejected by The Hollies when Graham Nash first wrote it – it is, incidentally, also worth remembering that The Hollies recorded some absolute dross during their years of pop domination.
Iggy Pop did not expand upon his specific reasoning for citing the group’s sole UK hit as being particularly offensive, but the likelihood seems to be that the track was one of a multitude of middle-of-the-road pop-centric tracks that typified the hippie age. Whereas, in contrast, the music that The Stooges were striking upon at the very same time was much more rebellious and directly confrontational.
There was a sense of complacency about songs like ‘Marrakesh Express’, which took on new significance after its stand-out performance at Woodstock Festival – a place that couldn’t have been much further away from the harsh industrialism of The Stooges and their Detroit home.
‘Marrakesh Express’ might not truly be the worst song ever written, but you can certainly understand why Iggy Pop might cite it as such, given that he occupied the opposite end of the rock spectrum at that time.
