A playlist of Iggy Pop’s favourite songs
The image of rock and roll doesn’t get much more vivid than the site of Iggy Pop standing topless, shrieking over a frantically devoted audience. The proto-punk vocalist first rose to fame in the late 1960s, fronting The Stooges, a group characterised by their raw and primitive rock sound.
The Stooges’ live performances became a thing of legend, notorious for wild antics, including indecent exposure, self-mutilation, destruction of property, assault, and on a couple of occasions, the wearing of Nazi uniforms. Iggy would soon be derailed by the all-too-familiar hedonistic tendencies of the rock scene before joining David Bowie in Berlin for pastures new over the late 1970s. These solo endeavours reinvented Iggy as a comparatively clean rocker with more refined music to match.
Heavy or soft, Iggy’s voice has always carried a distinct quality. Whether wailing at the top of his lungs or delivering a salacious croon, his voice is recognisable for its soul-piercing low-frequency vibrato. When considering Iggy’s eclectic canon, it’s intriguing to return to his musical roots.
At a young age, Iggy became infatuated with 1950s rock and roll, but vocally, it all started with his father’s love for Frank Sinatra. In a 2010 conversation with ABC’s Nightline, Iggy revealed Sinatra’s ‘Young at Heart’ as one the most important songs in his life. “I was in the backseat, and Frank Sinatra had the hit ‘Young at Heart’, and my father would sing along,” Iggy recalled. “When people would ask me after that what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, ‘Well, maybe a singer?!’ I didn’t know why exactly. It wasn’t that I liked the song that much, but I think because it made such an impression on my father.”
Iggy Pop grew up in Michigan, where a vibrant music scene spawned bands like The Four Tops and MC5. Of the latter, with whom the Stooges once formed a supergroup, Pop once told ABC: “The MC5 had a certain ethic about what was good and real and righteous. A certain politics that was tough to live up to but had its place. The song ‘Kick out the Jams’ is perhaps the most sincere expression of that they had.”
Long before his emphatic rise to “raw power” with The Stooges, Iggy had begun his foray into the musical world as the drummer for his High School covers band, The Iguanas. Having found local success, Iggy managed to secure gigs as a session player for touring acts.
After selecting The Shangri-Las’ ‘Remember (Walking In The Sand)’ as another of the most inspirational tracks in his life with ABC’s Nightlife, Iggy recalled: “I got to play drums behind The Shangrilas, The Crystals, The Four Tops. Learned a lot. Mary, the lead singer of the Shangri-Las, had a really beautiful head of hair… and I just remember being very happy in the back, you know, playing ‘ts, ts, ts,’ while she was going, ‘remember, walking in the sand.'”
Today, we’re diving into Iggy’s eclectic taste in music, as revealed across various features and radio shows, spanning from classic jazz-pop to folk-rock. We’ve also included Iggy’s favourite Stooges track from 1973’s Raw Power for good measure. He picked his preference during a conversation with Uncut in January 2023.
“‘Search and Destroy’ [had] become very popular,” Iggy said while discussing the classic album on its 50th anniversary. “My personal favourite, though, is ‘Shake Appeal,’ because that was the only three minutes of my life when I was ever going to approximate Little Richard. It’s practically impossible for me to hit a sustained high tone like that and scream that sort of hyped-up, crazy hillbilly rock thing that I always liked.”
See our list of Iggy Pop’s favourite songs below. If you like what you see, give our Spotify playlist a whirl.
Iggy Pop’s favourite songs:
- MC5 – ‘Kick out the Jams’
- Frank Sinatra – ‘Young at Heart’
- The Ronettes – ‘Be My Baby’
- The Shangri-Las – ‘Remember (Walking In The Sand)’
- Muddy Waters – ‘Rolling Stone’
- Link Wray – ‘Rumble’
- Bob Dylan – ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’
- Them – ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’
- Bob Dylan – ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’
- David Bowie – ‘Wild is the Wind’
- David Bowie – ‘Stay’
- David Bowie – ‘Sound and Vision’
- Marty Robbins – ‘El Paso’
- Jimi Hendrix – ‘Purple Haze’
- The Stooges – ‘Shake Appeal’
- The Rolling Stones – ‘Good Times, Bad Times’
- The Rolling Stones – ‘Congratulations’
