Experts say gaming will be the first real use case for blockchain, revamping the industry and making games more immersive than ever. How gaming navigates the remaining hurdles will become a case study for other industries considering mass blockchain adoption. Topic: Iggy Pop Biography, Songs, & Albums | Category: Celebrity Iggy Pop is an American musician, songwriter, and actor. He has been called the “Godfather of Punk” and the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll”.
Iggy Pop is a singer, songwriter, and musician who has been in the music industry for over fifty years. He was born in Germany and moved to the United States when he was just two years old. His songs have been covered by many well-known artists such as David Bowie, The Stooges, and Queen. Read more in detail here: iggy pop songs.
There’s a reason why Iggy Pop is regarded as punk’s godfather. The Stooges (1969), Fun House (1970), and Raw Power (1973), Pop’s explosive first three albums with the Stooges, have influenced every punk band in the past and present, consciously or unwittingly. Furthermore, years before punk artists were renowned for their hostile on-stage conduct, Pop perfected an out-of-control style to performing that put himself and his audience in risk. David Bowie revitalized Pop just as the movement he started was cresting, with albums like The Idiot and Lust for Life (both 1977), which influenced the post-punk trend. Pop’s diverse output throughout the following two decades sometimes flirted with the mainstream, with “Candy” (1990), a duet with Kate Pierson of the B-52s that stormed the pop Top 40, being the closest. The Stooges ultimately reformed and were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame between two new albums, The Weirdness (2007) and Ready to Die (2013). Iggy returned to solo work, with the Grammy-nominated Post Pop Depression (2017), a set that was reminiscent of his work with David Bowie four decades before.
James Newell Osterberg was born on April 21, 1947, in Muskegon, Michigan, and was reared by his parents in a trailer park in Ann Arbor, in nearby Ypsilanti. In the early 1960s, Osterberg started playing drums and established his first band, the Iguanas, inspired by rock & roll (as well as non-musical, repetitive, and mechanical noises like his father’s electric razor and the automotive assembly factories in and around Metro Detroit). He found the blues via the Rolling Stones, and after graduating from high school in 1965, he created the Prime Movers, a band with a similar sound. He went to Chicago to play drums among the city’s bluesmen after a short spell at the University of Michigan didn’t work out.
Osterberg’s heart, though, stayed with rock & roll, and soon after returning to Ann Arbor, he formed a rock band. He’d leave the drums at home this time and focus on being the frontman, drawing influence from the Velvet Underground’s Lou Reed and the Doors’ Jim Morrison. He looked for musicians who shared his musical vision, which was to form a band whose music was primal, sexually charged, violent, and repetitive (thinking back to his early electric razor/car plant recollections). In 1967, he reconnected with a high school friend, guitarist Ron Asheton, who brought along his brother, drummer Scott, and bassist Dave Alexander, creating the Psychedelic Stooges. Although it took a while for their sound to gel (they experimented with non-traditional instruments such as empty oil drums, vacuum cleaners, and other objects before returning to their respective instruments), the band fit in perfectly with other high-energy Detroit bands like the MC5, and became a local attraction.
Around this time, the group’s name was reduced to the Stooges, and Osterberg’s stage name was altered to Iggy Pop. Pop became a man possessed on stage after changing his identity, going into the crowd weekly to confront members of the audience and working himself into such a fury that he would be bleeding from different nicks and scratches by the end of the night. The foursome was signed to Elektra Records in 1968, and their self-titled debut was released a year later, followed by Fun House in 1970. Despite the fact that both albums failed to chart at the time of their release, they have now become rock classics and may be credited with being the official catalysts for punk rock.
Due to public indifference and the group’s increasing addictions to heavy drugs, The Stooges were dismissed from their record label in 1971. The Stooges broke up the same year as a result of the label’s decision to remove the band due to Pop’s constant death-defying actions. David Bowie, one of the band’s most famous admirers, sought down Pop and persuaded the newly sober vocalist to resume his career. After signing to David Bowie’s Mainman management company and relocating to England, Pop enlisted guitarist James Williamson (who was briefly a second guitarist for the Stooges before their breakup), and the two eventually reunited with the Asheton brothers, with Ron switching from the six-string guitar to the bass.
Signed to Columbia Records, the Stooges wrote another punk classic, the brutally explosive Raw Power, in the hopes of following in Bowie’s footsteps to a big commercial success. Pop’s vision for the Stooges’ third album was similarly ruthless: he wanted to make a record that was so strong, so musically over the top, that it physically wounded the listener as it flowed out of the speakers. Although the resultant record didn’t quite reach that level of extremity, it got close, with Bowie serving as the album’s producer. The album vanished without a trace once again. By 1974, Pop and the rest of the Stooges had relapsed into severe drug use, and the band’s fame was waning, so they called it quits for the second (and last) time.
Iggy Pop checked himself into the Neuropsychiatric Institute in Los Angeles after a short stint as a homeless man on the streets of Hollywood, during which time he attempted unsuccessfully to establish a band with former Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek. Pop attempted to write and record some new songs with Williamson while he was in the hospital, but when no labels showed interest, the two parted ways. (Completed recordings of the sessions were released on the Kill City album in 1977, and they were also included in the 2005 collection Penetration, which included a number of widely distributed Raw Power demos, outtakes, and alternative mixes.)
Another old acquaintance came to see him while he was in the hospital: David Bowie, whose career was still going strong. Bowie volunteered to accompany Pop on his tour in promotion of Station to Station, and the two became so close that they both relocated to Berlin in late 1976, where Bowie assisted Pop in landing a solo album contract with RCA. Bowie had grown fascinated in European electronic rock (Kraftwerk, Can, etc.) and subsequently acknowledged that on albums like The Idiot and Lust for Life (both released in 1977 and produced/co-written by Bowie), he utilized Pop as a musical guinea pig. Both albums did better than the singer’s earlier efforts with the Stooges (especially in the United Kingdom, where the emerging punk rock movement saw Pop as an idol), and Bowie joined Pop on his world tour as a keyboardist. Shortly after, Pop released TV Eye, a live album taken from his most recent tour (1977 Live). Around the same time, Pop broke his connections with Bowie and embarked on a solo career.
Pop reconnected with James Williamson for 1979’s New Values, an album that kicked off a series of diverse albums on which Pop attempted to recast himself as a new waver: 1980’s Soldier, 1981’s Party, and 1982’s Zombie Birdhouse. In 1982, Pop released I Need More, his autobiography, a fascinating book of rock & roll excess that covered his early years all the way up to the current day. Despite the rush of activity, Pop started to fall to his vices once again and took a lengthy break from the limelight to straighten out his life, during which time Bowie had a huge success with a version of the Pop/Bowie gem “China Girl” (recorded previously on Pop’s The Idiot). Pop didn’t reappear until 1986, when he signed a new deal with A&M and released the Bowie-produced Blah Blah Blah, which included his first (though minor) US hit song, a version of “Real Wild Child.” Pop tried his hand at hard rock/heavy metal with Instinct, which was released in 1988 and included ex-Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones. It received a Grammy nomination for “Cold Metal” in the category of Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance. Pop’s debut album with Virgin, 1990’s Brick by Brick, earned him his first gold certification in the United States and the Top 20 smash song “Candy,” a tuneful duet with Kate Pierson of the B-52s.
History repeated itself in the early ’90s with the rise of such Stooges followers from Seattle as Nirvana, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, and others, just as it did in the mid-’70s when Pop was looked up to by a host of up-and-coming punk bands. Around the same period, Slayer, Duran Duran, Guns N’ Roses, R.E.M., and Tom Jones all covered Pop and/or Stooges songs, and Pop released another excellent solo album, American Caesar, in 1993. Pop’s Naughty Little Doggie, released in 1996, tried to recreate the Stooges’ sound and attitude, and the almost 20-year-old “Lust for Life” was used heavily in the film Trainspotting. Pop also dabbled in film acting throughout the decade, appearing in supporting roles in films such as Cry Baby, Dead Man, and The Crow II: City of Angels, as well as a recurrent role on the TV program The Adventures of Pete & Pete. The 1998 film Velvet Goldmine was reportedly based on Bowie and Pop’s friendship in the early 1970s, despite the fact that he wasn’t engaged in it (Ewan McGregor’s character, Curt Wild, was clearly modeled by Stooges-era Pop).
By the late ’90s, almost every new rock band had listed the Stooges as a significant influence, and Iggy had cautiously begun looking back at the band’s history. After the long-lost original master recordings were found and Pop brought the album closer to his original idea of a complete sonic assault, he himself remixed a freshly remastered version of Raw Power in 1997. Another Pop/Stooges-related book that came out around the same time was the must-read Please Kill Me: The Oral History of Punk, which detailed the Stooges’ history (including interviews with all of the band’s surviving members). Pop had a busy year in 1999, as he was the focus of a VH1 Behind the Music program and released a new solo album, the laid-back Avenue B. But, as his following album, 2001’s in-your-face rockfest Beat Em Up, demonstrated, his more “refined” musical style was simply a diversion.
Pop finally made good on his promise in 2003, bringing Ron Asheton and Scott Asheton aboard to write and record four songs with him for his album Skull Ring, and taking the reconstituted Stooges on the road for a short but riotously received tour (with Mike Watt standing in for the late Dave Alexander on bass, and with the set dominated by tunes from The Stooges and Fun House). Iggy featured in Jim Jarmusch’s film Coffee & Cigarettes in 2004. Following the publication of Penetration in January 2005, Pop published A Million in Prizes: The Anthology, a retrospective that featured a 37-track CD, a previously unseen live DVD, and a series of articles about Pop’s legacy written by notables including David Bowie and Lou Reed. The next year, Pop published another collection, Where the Faces Shine.
In the years since, Iggy Pop has maintained his profile by appearing on an album by Praxis, singing on the Teddybears’ song “Punkrocker,” performing several Madonna songs at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, and appearing in TV commercials for the British insurance company Swiftcover. However, Asheton died of a heart attack in early 2009 in Ann Arbor, depriving Pop of his closest friend and throwing the Stooges’ career into disarray. Nonetheless, in May of same year, Pop released Preliminaires, a solo album inspired by jazz music and the writings of French writer Michel Houellebecq. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inducted Pop and the rest of the Stooges in 2010.
Throughout 2010 and into 2011, Iggy continued to tour with the Stooges (now with James Williamson on guitar), while also pursuing a few solo side projects, including singing with the Lilies and Ke$ha, as well as the 2012 album Apres, on which he sang French standards (and the Beatles’ “Michelle,” which does have a verse in French). In April of that year, Pop went all-in on the Stooges’ Williamson-fueled Raw Power period, touring and releasing the Ready to Die record. However, after the death of Stooges drummer Scott Asheton in 2014, it was generally assumed that Iggy was done with the Stooges, and his next tour of the US in 2015 was as a solo artist with a new supporting band.
Pop and Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age, Eagles of Death Metal) made a surprise revelation in January 2016 that they have created an album together with the assistance of Dean Fertita (QOTSA, the Dead Weather) and Matt Helders (Arctic Monkeys). Post Pop Depression (Loma Vista) was recorded in secret and completely self-funded, with the song “Gardenia” and a brief accompanying tour with Troy Van Leeuwen (QOTSA) and Matt Sweeney (Chavez). The album was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Alternative Music Album category, and has been likened to Pop’s first two solo albums with David Bowie. In 2018, Underworld released Teatime Dub Encounters, a four-track EP created by fellow Trainspotting soundtrack artists. Iggy’s next solo album, 2019’s Free, included a musical version of Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” and was dominated by trumpet and atmospheric guitar patters.
Iggy Pop is a singer, songwriter, and musician. He was born in Germany but later moved to the United States. He has been nominated for six Grammy Awards and received one award for Lust For Life. Reference: iggy pop genre.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Iggy Pops disability?
Iggy Pop is a famous American singer, songwriter, and actor. He was born in Germany to a German father and Polish mother.
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Iggy Pop does not have an autobiography.
Who is Iggy Pops wife?
Iggy Pop is married to Emily Jane White.
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