The only rock star Kurt Cobain “admired”
Not every musician is necessarily in love with the notion of being a rock star. It’s one thing to have people respect what you do and be able to sing along to your songs, but the type of adulation that comes with that is presumably something that half of the biggest stars in the world could do without. Kurt Cobain hardly even tried to play along with the glamorous side of the music industry, but he did admit that he felt starstruck when meeting Iggy Pop for the first time.
Because out of all the rock stars to come from the late 1960s, Pop was far from the most user-friendly. Whereas most people thought The Velvet Underground was the most dangerous band they had ever heard, Pop sounded like he was at war with everyone whenever he had the microphone in front of his mouth, almost using every word as a weapon to get his point across.
Although The Stooges weren’t setting the world on fire in the same way The Beatles and The Stones had done, everyone listening knew they were hearing the future. Since Pop was all about rebelling against the conventional rock and roll approach, there are traces of every subsequent heavy genre that came afterwards, from goth to metal to punk, and yes, even to grunge.
If anything, grunge might be the genre that Pop contributed the most. Punk had its place as a form of mindless rebellion, but while a lot of groups wore that kind of fashion like a costume, nothing that Pop did was contrived. He wasn’t looking to dress up whenever he went onstage, and him rocking no shirt or dishevelled clothes wasn’t all that different from the flannel shirts in Seattle.
By the time Nirvana started to break through, Cobain had already had enough of any frontman posturing. That was for the glam rock bands that he helped stomp out, and he was more inclined to pick up his guitar and unleash hell whenever he played, whether that meant diving into the audience or habitually destroying every piece of equipment that Nirvana had at the end of the night.
Despite his distaste for rockstars, Cobain still had a strong respect for what Pop stood for, saying, “[Meeting people] is kind of a positive side of being a rock and roll star. But actually I met Iggy Pop before we were rock and roll stars, and he is pretty much the only person that I’ve met that I really, really admire and like.”
Pop was just as amazed as Cobain was when he met the grunge icon, thinking that Nirvana were one of the few groups that revolutionised how rock and roll sounded. There were even rumblings that the two could have made music together before Cobain’s tragic passing, but neither of them could get their schedules to work.
If anything, Nirvana and The Stooges both feel like mirror images of each other half the time. They never claimed to be the most proficient musicians in their field or anything, but their ability to cause absolute mayhem onstage and carve out their own path helped both their generations wake up from the avalanche of bubblegum music happening around the same time.
