Godfather of punk Iggy Pop looks at his legacy on his new album
Post Pop Depression, recorded with Josh Homme of Eagles of Death Metal, presents bleak reflections on life and ageing, as the rock icon heads towards the end of his seventh decade
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On what he hints will be his final album, the 68-year-old offers a bleak reflection, as he sizes up the riches of the modern world and shrugs it off. “When your love of life is an empty beach, don’t cry,” he sings on one track of Post Pop Depression, released last week.
Post Pop Depression – its title an intriguing double entendre by Pop, who was born in Michigan as James Osterberg – marks the latest bid by a music legend to create a definitive album as a final statement.
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British legend David Bowie – Pop’s friend and mentor who worked with him on Lust for Life and the American rocker’s solo debut, The Idiot – came out with an intricate reflection on his own mortality, Blackstar, released two days before his death in January from an undisclosed battle with cancer.
Pop – despite his craggy appearance and years of hard living, which famously included concerts in which he would roll about in broken glass – is not known to be ill and has scheduled a tour of mid-sized venues around North America and Europe.
But Post Pop Depression, his 22nd album if you include work with his early band The Stooges, unmistakably looks at the rocker’s legacy.
The chameleon-like Bowie introduced Pop to electronic elements but the American rocker was never as consistently experimental, preferring the raw passion of punk.
Homme also completed the Post Pop Depression in a spirit of darkness as he is a co-founder of Eagles of Death Metal, the band whose concert in Paris was the scene of a massacre by Islamic State extremists on November 13, although Homme was not present.
Pop says he reached out to Homme in the form of an unsolicited package of handwritten notes – which included graphic descriptions by Pop of his sex life – and the inter-generational pair eventually agreed to play together in secrecy.
Pop brought in other hard-charging rockers – Queens of the Stone Age bassist Dean Fertita and drummer Matt Helders of Arctic Monkeys.
Pop already had his chances to explore musical frontiers. In his most innovative work, Pop played with jazz on 2009’s Preliminaires which was inspired by a novel by provocative French writer Michel Houellebecq.
The punk icon also released an album of cover songs, mostly sung in French, in 2012 and has recorded two albums with The Stooges since they reunited a decade ago.
Yet experimental final albums can backfire. Lou Reed, who died in 2013, was universally heralded for the artistic sense he brought to rock yet was widely panned for his last album, Lulu, a collaboration with Metallica.
On Post Pop Depression, Pop looks back musically but also to the beyond. On American Valhalla, the title a reference to the paradise of Norse mythology, Pop wonders what lies next. “Death is the pill that’s hard to swallow,” he sings. “Is anybody in there? And can I bring a friend?”
Agence France-Presse
