The iconic singer Iggy Pop called an “irritant”
Frontmen don’t come much better than Iggy Pop. The sweating, shirtless lunatic blazed a trail for countless future performers with his anarchic and unpredictable onstage persona. Many people have tried to imitate the style and energy of Pop, but few have managed to pull it off for quite as long as the 77-year-old singer. However, a revolution is not built by one man alone, and during the early years of The Stooges, Pop drew upon the influence of various lead singers from the counterculture age of the 1960s.
The world of rock and roll would look very different without the pioneering proto-punk of Iggy and The Stooges; the Detroit band completely changed the way that audiences listened to rock. Gone were the days of spaced-out hippies swaying in the breeze to ethereal acid anthems; the Stooges were fueled by amphetamines, speed and rage. Creating a stunningly abrasive sound backed up by atavistically energetic performances by Pop and the rest of the band.
However which way you spin it, without Iggy Pop, there would be no Joe Strummer, no Kurt Cobain, and no Morrissey. The frontman has left an unavoidable mark on the face of punk and alternative rock, but he did not do it alone. After all, the music scene of the 1960s was populated by a plethora of iconic lead singers and front people, so it would have been inevitable that Pop drew upon the influences of a few.
Perhaps the most obvious influence on the early days of Iggy Pop is The Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger. Although much of the band’s early material was lifted from the forgotten blues artists of years past, the Stones laid many of the foundations for modern rock and roll music. Much of their appeal, of course, was down to the pouting performance of Mick Jagger. The captivating quality of Jagger’s onstage personality managed to capture the attention of a young Iggy Pop, who found himself enamoured by The Stones.
Speaking about the impact of Jagger on his own performance, Pop once revealed to Rolling Stone, “From Mick Jagger, it would be his moving around while he performs the song. Also, the voice as an irritant. When he sang, it was the opposite of nice”. Coming from anybody else, that statement might be taken as pretty insulting to the vocal performance of Jagger, but Pop was a major part of the proto-punk scene, which favoured irritable, sleazy and abrasive performances.
Of course, The Rolling Stones, and Jagger by extension, would soon be inducted into the upper echelon of rock and roll, becoming one of the biggest bands on the face of the Earth. This position tended to place Jagger in a certain position of power, which The Stooges were keen to rebel against. Nevertheless, the importance of Jagger’s performance on the development of Iggy Pop cannot be denied.
“If I was going to work in the same direction,” Pop continued, “then I had to go farther”, and he certainly did go further than Jagger by virtually every metric. If Jagger’s vocals were “the opposite of nice” then Pop took it to a whole new level, which his various shrieks and screams on The Stooges’ records virtually unheard of by any other band during that period.
