Born in a log cabin by the Detroit river in 1862, Iggy Pop, the punk pioneer, cleared the land, killed the snakes and bears, and forever changed the sound of American music. Once called by David Bowie, ‘The most underrated serious lyricist,’ Iggy Pop is to punk rock what James Brown is to soul. American Caesar, his latest album in a career spanning over 20 years is a testament to Mr. Pop’s unyielding aesthetic.
He spoke with Joshua Berger from London in August.
Plazm often features original works by featured artists. Following an interview with Joshua Berger in 1995, Iggy faxed in the page above. We printed Iggy’s rant exactly as it arrived in the pages of Plazm issue #5. The interview below appeared alongside, with illustration by Joe Sorren.
In this era where much art, expression are controlled as commodities by financial interests that go well beyond the artist themselves, I want to ask you, how does somebody with uncompromising integrity survive?
Clint Eastwood projects that. You look at him you don’t get the impression that he’s kissed butt. Even though you know that he’s obviously in the game where he’s had to say the lines like anybody else. The fella that sings lead in Metallica, Hetfield, he projects that uncompromising quality. I don’t know what I project, that’s not my specialty to know what I look like to people. But there are parts of me where I don’t compromise and there are parts of me where I’ve sort of been thrown from one thing into another very willingly and have probably compromised. But I think that I have grown and I have got something to offer. I guess what you do is just keep going. It’s hard to remember sometimes, but they’re people too, the guys in the corporations. Sometimes they even know something that I don’t. Basically what I do is try to avoid getting too close to it, just keep going. You know something, a better answer than all that is you create your own corporation. That’s what you really do. That’s what has gotten me through, that’s what has currently led to my renaissance. I feel I’m having one. I feel I’m doing much better work now that I did ten years ago. It’s sharper and stronger and it’s because I got together a machine and primed it and worked on it, put all the effort in to get it working and now it runs well for me. I have my own organization and…
