Jarvis Cocker and Iggy Pop have an oddly large amount in
common: careers spent largely on the outside before late acceptance and
success; wildly idiosyncratic personas; and a shared tendency to provoke
consternation on stage, be it by gatecrashing
a televised Michael Jackson performance (in Cocker’s case) or repeated genital
exposure (Iggy). Jarvis already has a weekly Sunday afternoon show on BBC 6 Music, on which Iggy has
occasionally appeared as a stand-in. Now the Stooges frontman is joining the
station’s roster in his own right, with a regular
Friday-evening programme. Ahead of his debut next week, he talked to
Cocker – in a conversation that roamed from rap, to French literature, to
Iggy’s decision to make more new music.
Jarvis: How do you get to hear stuff
that you like to listen to?
Iggy: I do it through the New York Times, the
Guardian and the University of Miami (1) college radio playlists. [Those] are
my three biggies, and even some particular reviewers. And then, also, through
someone that has a record store here in Miami called Sweat
Records. It’s actually an “alternative”-type record store with real
vinyl and you can get an espresso in there, and they’re actually funded by
grants. I get the new stuff to check out that way usually, less of it by word
of mouth.
It’s really hard to play rap music on
the radio because there are too many blasphemies. But there are people you can
play – Joey Bada$$ is one, and I just like that name. I saw his video by
accident; I didn’t know him.
That’s the other place – I find a lot of things by accident on
YouTube. I’m of that generation – I’m not real fluent with the computer, so
sometimes I press one button to go to point A and I end up at point Z. I ended
up at this Joey Bada$$ video and here are these dangerous-looking
teens stomping up and down in a garbage-strewn lot in the dark New York City (2). I thought they
looked so thin, they looked thinner than the traditional uber-he-men rappers.
And then, in a typical rap cliche, they were lit by the headlights of their
SUVs, but instead of having Porsche or Ferrari or anything, their SUVs were all
Chevrolet. I thought, well, this is righteous, this is really how it is when
somebody really gets their first little bit of money in the US. That’s what you
do. You go out and buy a new Chevrolet.
I liked the grooves but I think it would
also sound really good side by side with Steve Reich or John Adams, or some of
the earlier Philip Glass stuff. There’s a connection there in the repetition
and the monotony, there really is. I worked with Philip Glass on something a
while ago (3) – a charity show – and I wanted to
adapt one of his numbers. I was listening to his
soundtrack to Mishima and
there were parts in Mishima where I thought, well, that’s just Heatwave by
Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. I’m sorry, don’t tell the museum, let it not
leak out at the Met.
I wanted to ask you about a couple of your albums. On Preliminaires, you co-wrote
something with Michel Houellebecq (4), didn’t you?
Yeah, that one was probably the best
single track on there. That was the one in which my contribution to the writing
was the least. I had the idea, but, basically, it was his text. That was called A Machine for Loving. Hal Cragin, who produced
the album, had that piece of music. I couldn’t figure out what to do with it
and I thought: well, we should do one of a scene from Michel’s book The
Possibility of an Island.
Basically, it’s an older fella who has
lived a little too long and loved not well enough. And, in a future universe,
he’s the beneficiary of a sort of a super-cloning technology that is developed
by a French cult which I think Michel modelled onthe Raëlians, who really do exist in France.
They’re strange French people with flowing white robes and a kind of a Maypole
thing they do every spring. Anyway, in the future, he lives in a guarded,
gated, germ-free, completely organised community where nobody ever dies. You’re
born at, I think 18, and you get to live till you’re 50, so you cut out the
tough bits. And I can appreciate that because I’m in the second tough bit now,
you know, where you’re losing power.
So he lives like that and his best
friend is his little white dog, Fox, and Fox gives him all the love and
companionship that exists in his whole life, this little white dog. When Fox
dies, or is about to die at certain intervals in their life together, Fox is
removed by a hidden team and a new Fox appears, with all his knowledge and
personality.
But one day the
protagonist has had enough. He has had enough of this life and he wants to go
and be really alive. He goes out into the world where people are churlish and
nasty and ill-fed and horrible and like to kill things. He takes Fox out with
him and they hunt together and they have three or four wonderful days. Then, of
course, Fox is set upon by a villain and killed. It’s moving, so I recited that
to music.
That whole record was like a ticket out of the music business
for me. It just came about because a documentary film-maker was looking for
people to contribute music to a doc about Michel and, it so happened, that
book. I subsequently got his others; he’s one of my favourite writers. He’s
witty, too, he’s funny, he’s a good read, he’s a page turner. So I started
writing music that I thought fit his character and, one by one, the other
possible participants sloughed off and they were just left with me. I said:
“Well, I’d like to write a whole album about you and your book, about scenes
that moved me, in your book.”
Houellebecq has been back in the news
recently with the latest book (5) …
He has a nose for what’s kind of going
on at any given time and he has an entertaining way of taking a reader through
the steps. He does that pretty darn well. He’s gotten wry to the point where,
in the book, the book before that, where he had himself be the victim of a
celebrity kidnapping and murder.
Last time I saw you was when you did the John Peel lecture,
which I was very impressed by. How did you find that? Is that the first time
you’d delivered a lecture?
It was, basically, yeah. I had
forgotten, I said that and then I remembered I actually did one more like an
advisory talk for a group of law students in the Cayman Islands, as a favour,
but that was just a talk about my life and how I’d ever encountered lawyers
and, “OK kids, try when you get your shingle, try not to act like a crook,
you’ll scare the client.” But this was the first big deal.
I looked at the transcript of it again
today and I took a few phrases from it: “When it comes to art, money is an
unimportant detail.” How much something costs or how much money you’ve made
from it isn’t actually a measure of the value of a piece of art, is it?
No and nor is it how much money you put
into making it or have behind it, or all that. All that crap; it’s not in any
way going to have anything to do with how good the damn thing is. But, on the
other hand, there is a money system under which we are all living, and I guess
there are people in the desert living under a barter system, and then there
were people at one point living under a Marxist system in the Bolshevik era.
That didn’t work out, although there are people that say we owe the Bolsheviks
for the long period of capitalist moderation that maybe existed in the 20th
century in what we call the western world. The idea that because there were
these other people – saying free this for everybody, equality for everybody,
healthcare for everybody – the capitalists had to cool their game a little bit.
There may be something to that.
You talked about patrons, the heads of record companies,
and you spoke about an attitude of “Pay you? We worship you!”
Yeah, basically that was a reference
really inspired by a man named Ahmet Ertegun (6).
And there are a lot of other guys like him, but not as good at bringing out
great music or as good at making the whole thing big. But there was an era
where people who had no education were taken advantage of by business guys, if
you will. They truly loved the music, but they were not above saying, “Pay you
… what? Don’t be petty, we worship you!” If you allow yourself to get into the
position of “Yeah, I’m the artist,” to be carefree – wining, dining, sleeping
wild, doping, smoking, drinking, whatever – then a lot of these guys are going
to feel like, “Right, I’m the diligent businessman with his nose in the ledgers
all the time and the pot belly who nobody wants to go to bed with and I have
every right to rip you off because you’re loose.” So there’s some of that, too.
There’s some truth to that, frankly: you
kind of deserve what you get sometimes. It never occurred to me to think: “Wow,
I could play my drum kit and become rich.” I just thought, “I can play my drum
kit and maybe if I somehow make something then that would sound pretty fucking
cool.” That was the crucial do-or-die task. Not to gain money or a piece of
real estate, or all that sort of thing. It didn’t really come into it, you
know. I don’t think that’s any more or less admirable than someone else having
other motivations. Eventually you learn the hard way: you’re going to need to
put something on the table. But I think a good place to start is to not worry
about that shit.
Generally speaking, the more money a
band has, the worse their records get …
Well, this is true.
In the Q&A at the end of the
lecture, you said one of the side issues of doing a radio show and listening to
other people’s music was that you might not do so much of your own music any
more …
It had been a creepy year, but I’ve had
a bit of a rebound. I’m going to do some [music] with a good band, it’s an
English band and the groove is wicked. They got together for the first time
last week, and I just was so happy. I’m going to do that and do some songs of
my own and of the very early Stooges that I haven’t done for a long time.
That’s one thing, and then working on new music is another thing, I’m up to
something, that’s all I can say.
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