30 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019
PROFILES
JUST A MODERN GUY
The survival of Iggy Pop.BY AMANDA PETRUSICH
I
n late July, in a brief window be-
tween professional appointments,
Iggy Pop drove to the mouth of
Biscayne Bay, so that he could bob in
its tropical waters. In 1995, he had bought
what he described as “a very seedy condo”
in Miami, and he has had a home in
the city ever since. The extremity of the
place—it is both environmentally ten-
uous and aesthetically vulgar—seems
to suit Pop, who, in the late nineteen-six-
ties, as a member of the Stooges, helped
invent and refine punk rock, a genre of
music so menacing and physically sav-
age that it is sometimes shocking that
Pop has made it to the age of seven-
ty-two. After he moved to Miami, he
started swimming every day. “I didn’t
know anybody,” he said. “I’d go to the
beach and come home, go to the beach
and come home. I tried to build myself
back up from twenty years in harness—
New York City, the modern American
record industry, gruelling economy tour-
ing. I quit smoking here.”
From afar, Pop resembles a bronze
statuette. He is lithe, sinewy, and deeply
tanned, with a torso that, for decades,
has appeared so exquisitely and mi-
nutely muscled that an onlooker might
reasonably assume it was painted on.
In recent years, his midsection has re-
laxed a bit, but he assured me, while
patting it, that it remains quite firm.
His hair is blond, shoulder length, pin
straight, and parted in the middle, and
his eyes are an oceanic blue. Though he
has had Lasik surgery—“In Colombia,
before it was legal here”—his vision is
still imperfect, a malady he chalks up
to doing too much intravenous cocaine.
He has retained a bit of a round, Mid-
western accent from his upbringing,
outside Detroit. In conversation, he is
nearly guileless, and he listens intently
and carefully. Periodically, his face will
collapse into a benevolent grin.
He kicked a pair of striped Gucci
slides onto the sand. One shoe had been
customized with a platform sole, to cor-
rect for an inch-and-a-half difference
in the length of his legs, a condition he
attributes to arthritis combined with
an old football injury. As he waded in,
Pop told me that he’d once stayed at a
Holiday Inn in Tallahassee, missing
a Merle Haggard performance in the
hotel bar by a day. Earlier, he had sug-
gested that he didn’t know very much
about country music, but then he spoke
thoughtfully and at some length about
the careers of Doc Watson, Hank Wil-
liams, and Waylon Jennings, before put-
ting his head underwater and starting
a vigorous swim—a mixture of freestyle
and backstroke—to a buoy about fifty
yards offshore.
Pop is a voracious and enthusiastic
student of American music, from the
Ronettes and Dave Brubeck to Link
Wray and Bob Dylan. Earlier in the
day, at a small studio in Coral Gables,
Pop had recorded two episodes of “Iggy
Confidential,” the BBC Radio 6 music
program he began hosting in 2015, after
finding that he enjoyed the experience
of acting, as he put it, as “a kind of at-
mospheric bartender.” His broadcast-
ing voice is deep, slow, and pleasantly
wobbly. “Comparing my patter when
I started the thing and my patter now,
I sound nearer and nearer to my expi-
ration,” Pop said. “I sound like Shrek.”
Pop’s selections that morning in-
cluded songs from contemporary acts
such as FKA Twigs, Bill Callahan, Cate
Le Bon, and Tyler, the Creator, along
with “Hot Chile,” a single that James
Brown and his band released in 1960,
using the pseudonym Nat Kendrick and
the Swans. As a d.j., Pop is good at re-
vealing the connective tissue between
seemingly incompatible numbers. After
cueing up “Dream Baby Dream,” by theexperimental punk duo Suicide, he sat
up in his chair and adjusted his spectacles.
“Alan Vega, he had rock and R. & B.
moves,” he said. “He reminds me a lit-
tle of Bruno Mars and Sal Mineo.” Be-
tween shows, Pop emerged from the
cool, dark booth, shirtless and looking
for sunshine. “Wanna go outside and
warm up?” he asked. He discovers new
music for his show by taking the rec-
ommendations of friends and opening
acts, by reading the shortest, most ob-
scure reviews published in the Guard-
ian, or by looking through the upcoming
concert listings published each Friday
in the Times. It has kept him awake to
the moment.
In early August, the eponymous début
album from the Stooges, which Pop
helped form, in 1967, celebrated its fifti-
eth anniversary. In September, Pop will
release “Free,” his eighteenth solo album.
“Free” is his most surprising record in
decades, and one of his most collabo-
rative. “I began to recoil from guitar riffs
in favor of guitarscapes, from twangs in
favor of horns, from back beat in favor
of space, and, in large part, from the
effluent of my own mind and problems,
in favor of trying to interpret the po-
etry of others,” he writes in the liner
notes. Two of his writing partners on
the album are Leron Thomas, a jazz
trumpeter from Houston, and the com-
poser and filmmaker Sarah Lipstate,
who records as Noveller.
Thomas wrote lyrics for half of the
tracks on “Free,” including “Dirty San-
chez,” a lewd, tense meditation on con-
temporary sexuality that includes the
lines “Just because I like big tits/ Doesn’t
mean I like big dicks.” “I was thinking,
How do I explain to this guy”—Thom-
as—“that this is career suicide?” Pop
told me. “So I wrote him and said, ‘Look,
the best thing you can do is put some
horn on it.’ That’s my contribution: ‘PutStories about Pop’s misbehavior are lewd, captivating, and plentiful. In recent years, his work has grown more interior.