THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019 37
living novelist. Pop is very nimble with
other people’s material, able to land in-
stantly on the emotional center of a
lyric or a melody. “When Americans
bothered to review those two albums,
they said ‘hilariously bad crooning,’”
Pop said. “I can’t sing like Michael
Bublé—I know that! But Bob Dylan
does those standards great, and he can’t
sing like Michael Bublé, either.” (In an
interview Dylan did for his own Web
site, in 2017, he said of “Après,” “That’s
a good record.”)
Pop has also collaborated with the
composer Jamie Saft, the producer Dan-
ger Mouse, and the experimental mu-
sician Oneohtrix Point Never, who
worked with him on “The Pure and the
Damned,” a song for the 2017 film “Good
Time,” directed by Josh and Benny Saf-
die. Josh Homme, the front man of
Queens of the Stone Age, co-wrote and
produced Pop’s most recent album, “Post
Pop Depression,” from 2016; it was Pop’s
first record ever to chart in the Top
Twenty in the United States. “He has
been so ahead of his time, for so long,”
Homme said. “That’s lonely. Part of the
nature of a good idea is that no one
around you gets it.” He continued, “Can
you name another band that’s taken lon-
ger to be understood than the Stooges?
“When ‘Post Pop Depression’ got
good reviews, across the board, he got
emotional, because that had never oc-
curred before,” Homme said. “He was
a pariah at times in his life. The con-
stant doubt of others might have been
a springboard for him sometimes being
self-destructive.”
I asked Pop about a collaboration he
did with Cat Power, the Miami-based
singer and songwriter, in 2012. “I read
an article that said she tried to get David
Bowie and couldn’t,” he said. “There’s
always someone they weren’t able to get.
Houellebecq couldn’t get Neil Young.
Somebody else, you know—‘We can’t
get Tom Waits.’ The Safdie brothers
said, ‘We couldn’t get Britney Spears.’”
The Stooges are an accepted part of
the canon now, which makes it easy to
forget how poorly the band’s records
sold, and how deeply reviled they were
by both critics and listeners. “It’s not a
personal lack of confidence so much as
an imposed one,” Pop told me. “For a
long time, I wasn’t doing that well on
the industry side of things. There weren’t
that many people coming to shows—
sometimes there were very few people.”
He paused. “I’m more cat than dog
when it comes to how comfortable I
allow myself to get, let’s put it that way.
The phone rings; I get offered work.
And, you know, there’s always my Apple
stock,” he said, and laughed. “I have
taken pains to diversify outside of the
music industry.”
In 2003, the Stooges reunited, with
Ron Asheton on guitar and Mike Watt,
of the Minutemen, on bass. At the time,
this seemed like a dicey idea—most of
these guys were in their fifties, and so
much of the Stooges’ power had to do
with a kind of lunatic vitality—but
somehow the band sounded as exhila-
rating as it did in 1969. The reunion
magnified the Stooges’ significance, par-
ticularly when they were booked along-
side younger rock bands. In a review in
the Times of the band’s set at Coachella,
in 2003, Neil Strauss wrote, “As Mr. Pop
yowled through a fierce, rumbling ver-
sion of ‘TV Eye,’ it was more than clear
that in the 33 years since the song was
recorded, the genre has largely been
variations on a theme. And the first two
Stooges albums are the theme.”
In 2010, the band was inducted into
the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Pop
opened his acceptance speech by blast-
ing two middle fingers at the crowd,
and then reading from a stack of index
cards, declaring who and what he be-
lieved was cool: his wife, his bandmates.
“All the poor people who actually started
rock-and-roll music are cool,” he said.
The Stooges played their last show
in 2013. Ron Asheton had died in Ann
Arbor in 2009, of a suspected heart at-
tack, and was replaced by James Wil-
liamson. Scott died the same way, in- The Stooges are now functionally
kaput—of the original lineup, only Pop
is left. That’s a lot of loss, I told him.
“It begins to make an impression,” he
said. “So you start to think, Well, O.K.,
what are my probabilities? And how
would I feel if I was going to die to-
morrow, and I looked at what I was
doing with my life today?” He added,
“My only thing is, to spite those who
don’t like me, I want to make eighty.”
He is not currently considering re-
tirement: “I always wonder, if I stopped
doing music, would I really start drink-
ing tea instead of coffee, and, you know,
brush my teeth more, and all that? Or
would I become, like, an alcoholic de-
pressive?” Though his recent work might
suggest that he is entering a more con-
templative period, he is confident that
whatever wildness exists inside him is
intact. “Don’t tell me that I can’t strip
off my shirt and go make a big primi-
tive noise,” he said.T
o prepare for the release of “Free,”
Pop agreed to shoot some promo-
tional videos at Sweat Records, an in-
dependent record shop in Miami’s Lit-
tle Haiti neighborhood. He was shirtless,
and wearing tailored gray pants and a
pair of black loafers. A wardrobe rack
contained pieces from Gucci, Versace,
and Saint Laurent. Pop is energetic and
amenable while working, but he is also
firm and precise. When the director
asked if he could repeat a gesture—
shaking his head in such a way that his
hair whipped back and forth—he said,
“I’ll do that two more times for forty
seconds each.”
The penultimate track on “Free” is
Pop reading Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do
Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,”
over moody peals of guitar, synthesizer,
and horn. He got the idea to do it after
an advertising agency asked him to read
the poem for a commercial voice-over.
“I think there’s some sort of betting pool
out there on when I’m gonna croak,” he
said. He paused. “It’s alive!” He agreed
to read the poem into an iPhone, and
sent it off. “At first, I resisted—I’m not
in junior high,” he said. But he eventu-
ally decided that he liked it, re-recorded
the vocal, and asked Leron Thomas and
Noveller to improvise around it.
Now it was time to shoot a video.
It’s true that the poem has grown in-
creasingly meaningless over time, hav-
ing been repeated and adapted to so
many inane circumstances. Yet if you
can shake off its familiarity the central
idea—that a person should live vigor-
ously, unapologetically—remains ger-
mane. Thomas wrote the poem in 1947,
when he was thirty-three; he died six
years later. Pop gathered himself in
front of the camera. “Wild men who
caught and sang the sun in flight/ And
learn too late they grieved it on its
way/ Do not go gentle into that good
night,” he said. The words sounded
thick and textured in his mouth.