The singer Iggy Pop called the last rock star: “Touched the world”
It’s impossible to see music changing in real time whenever a new movement happens. There are often signs that whatever style that’s happening is going to be a passing fad, but the difference between something that becomes the flavour of the month for a week and something that completely changes how we all think about music is incredibly difficult to find out in the wild. But for someone who has been a part of rock and roll for as long as Iggy Pop has, he knew when an artist wasn’t in it for the money and fancy cars.
After all, Pop’s entire persona was about being one of the finest performance artists of his time. Not everything he did was meant to be easily digestible, but whenever he stripped off his shirt in the middle of a show and started songs like ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’, it was clear that he was doing something bigger than rock and roll. This was someone at war with himself onstage, and it was up to everyone else to duck for cover or get the hell out of the way whenever he came in their direction.
That didn’t always mean that he would come back in one piece, though. Many of The Stooges’ greatest shows were when Pop turned into a feral animal onstage, and while it might have been easy for him to hurl himself around, cutting himself open and having blood dripping down his abdomen was merely an inconvenience for him half the time.
And while that kind of performance art had no place on the same channels playing hair metal videos, things started to change drastically once Nirvana came into the limelight. For most casual rock and roll fans, this was the closest thing to punk that had ever reached the mainstream at the time, and while everyone could sing along to the tunes, Pop was laser-focused on what Kurt Cobain had been doing behind the scenes.
Cobain might have come from a nowhere town and had the kind of down-to-Earth mentality off the stage, but it was clear he was channelling Pop in some way when he played. He knew better than to cater to the jocks in his audience, so when he made his appearances at festivals, he made sure to unleash hell whenever he could, including those iconic shots where he spits into the camera lens onstage and dresses up in hospital scrubs when playing Reading.
Pop may have been more visceral in some respects, but he had to acknowledge the legacy that Cobain left on the world, saying, “He was the last example that I can think of within rock & roll where a poor kid with no family backup from a small, rural area effected a serious emotional explosion in a significant sector of world youth. It was not made in Hollywood. There were no chrome parts. It was very down-home at its root. Somebody who is truly nobody from nowhere reached out and touched the world.”
Granted, it’s not like other people haven’t come out since then. Artists as diverse as Billie Joe Armstrong, Alex Turner, and even Grian Chatten have subverted people’s expectations from time to time, but given where rock and roll was in the 1990s, there’s never going to be a bigger cultural shock than watching everyone and their mother realise that music doesn’t have to be glossy and neon-coloured anymore.
As Cobain himself so eloquently put it, fans were now free to come as they are, and while Pop had his simplistic rules to live by, even he never managed to be that blunt about what rock and roll was all about. The Stooges got their point across with aggression, but all Cobain needed was a decent melody to have the world’s ears.
