When charting contemporary rock’s foundational pioneers, most roads will lead to Iggy Pop.
It’s hard to imagine an alternative music world without him. Gifted with a belligerent permanence for near 60 years, Pop has soldiered through rock’s ever-shifting terrain as the venerable ‘Godfather of Punk’, clamouring at a myriad of different flavours while always able to keep his feral energy forever aflame.
From conjuring the dark clouds that bookended the 1960s counterculture fronting The Stooges, through excursions into haunted electronics in Berlin, to Lust for Life’s joyous garage rock renewal and the resulting reassertion of his punk throne for the next forty-odd years. Across New Orleans jazz to party rock with Sum 41, Pop is ever-present yet full of surprises, a feat to admire as many of his peers and the characters of his storied career creatively and physically burnt out.
Yet, even Pop had his heroes. Fundamental to realising his on-stage transgressive mania was the hypnotic violence that emanated from The Doors frontman Jim Morrison. Straddling the era’s dark slide into psychoactive fever dreams that the hippy idyll was losing itself to by the 1960s’ close, Morrison’s volatile energy would point the way as a template for Pop to follow, taking such cosmic examples and pushing the frontman duties to even wilder edges.
There was one icon of that turbulent decade that seemingly even trumped Morrison. Speaking to journalist Jon Bennett in 2002, Pop had highlighted one towering figure of the British invasion that similarly harboured an enduring refusal to meet his maker as his “all-time idol”, despite knocking on death’s door several times over.
“He’s my hero because he’s stayed consistent in the way that the real musicians, back when music wasn’t so money-infected, did,” Pop stated of Keith Richards. “You just don’t get many people who stay on that point”.
Of all the guitarists that illustrate rock’s great tapestry, none crackle with such natural alchemy as The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards. Dubbed ‘The Human Riff’, Richards’ rhythm chops didn’t just cast its spell on Pop, a vast cohort of fans as disparate as Slash, Richard Lloyd, Ted Nugent, and Patti Smith, all candidly bestowed their praise over the years. Along with his underrated songwriting knack with fellow Glimmer Twin Mick Jagger, the sex and attitude that ooze out of every pore during the Stones’ golden run owe an enormous debt to those electric weaves Richards effortlessly spun with Brian Jones and Mick Taylor.
Jagger proved consequential to the young Pop back when he was merely James Osterberg Jr, as well as taking notes from James Brown. However, it initially appears curious that Richards would warrant the “all-time idol” honour, but a romantic shroud of romantic rebelliousness that hovers over the Richards story no doubt beckoned a spiritual pathway for Pop to run towards with steadfast determination.
Such perceptions of shared immortality were met with a scoffing rejection of any comparability when put to Pop by Rolling Stone in 2017, however: “He’s way more indestructible than me! I can’t keep up with that guy anymore.”
