728x90

Friday, April 3, 2015

Jarvis Cocker meets Iggy Pop: 'The more money a band has, the worse their records get'



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.

No comments:

Post a Comment