The songwriter Iggy Pop said was out of everyone’s league
Iggy Pop has been called the “Godfather of Punk” for half a century now, but very few people could have envisioned his gradual evolution into a legitimately grandfatherly character—a warm and charismatic ambassador for rock ‘n’ roll history, connecting with the kids each week as the host of a long-running BBC 6 Music radio show.
Back in the days of the Stooges, most observers wouldn’t have bet on Iggy making it into his 30s, let alone still being a force at 78. Along with his reckless and self-destructive physicality on stage, Pop was also widely misunderstood intellectually.
“I think I did my job too well,” he said in a 1996 interview, looking back at the emergence of the Stooges, “because I remember a serious reviewer being convinced that I had no more than a 400-word vocabulary. . . . But I only sang what I was sure of; we only played what we were sure of. Block chords. On stage, I used my body a lot to express what we couldn’t express musically or lyrically.”
Standing in stark contrast to Iggy at that point in time was another pioneer of what would come to be known loosely as “punk.”
Lou Reed, as the frontman for the Velvet Underground, wasn’t necessarily writing chord progressions all that much more complex than what the Stooges were doing. But as a lyricist, he was quickly recognised as a unique intellect; a new sort of street poet who was willing to go down dark alleyways that Bob Dylan couldn’t or wouldn’t.
Inevitably, as both of their profiles grew in the 1970s, and their social circles began to overlap, Pop and Reed got to know each other, and a friendship, of sorts, developed. “I admired him,” Iggy told GQ in 2019. “. . . Lou tolerated me.”
Reed famously was not the type to suffer fools, and while he probably clocked that there was more to Iggy than met the eye, the juxtaposition of Reed’s greyhound-like coolness and Pop’s excited golden retriever vibes made for an unsurprisingly uneven relationship.
“There were times when [Lou] could be quite decent and gracious,” Pop said, speaking six years after Reed’s death. It’s odd to hear someone as objectively “cool” and world-weary as Iggy sounding like a schoolboy trying to speak kindly of his bully, but this was the effect Reed could have on just about anybody.
“I looked up to him as an artist, and that’s still what it is,” Pop continued. “What I really miss is that there’s nobody that can do anything like he did. And it seems to be a lost art. Tremendous artistry.”
One thing Reed and Pop did share was a similar, sometimes uncomfortable journey from the role of disruptor to establishment; at least in the sense of the rock ‘n’ roll pantheon. Both the Velvet Underground and the Stooges faced years of vicious criticism and bad sales figures before their influence became apparent and they landed into their current positions of mainstream reverence—with Stooges and Velvets t-shirts now on clothes racks in department stores in 2026.
“When the Velvet Underground came out with songs like ‘Heroin’, we were so savaged for it,” Reed told the Chicago Tribune in 1996, noting that his own reputation as a great songwriter wasn’t earned overnight. “Here it is 25 years later and I have [the lyrics] in a book, and I can do it in a reading, and people will stand up and applaud.”
