Iggy Pop on Chaos
[Iggy] wouldn’t tell me who he was talking about specifically, he said, but he believes that the rock business is too big, run by people who know nothing about it.
Wasn’t that always the case?
“No,” he said, decisively. “The people I met at the top in 1972 tended to be crackpots from the fringes of the lowest parts of the entertainment industry. And they tended to know their stuff. Jac Holzman” — the president of Elektra, the Stooges’ old label — “was a former record-store owner in the Village. The guy who ran the very biggest talent agency in New York had ties to the pinball industry, I guess you could say. They could really screw an artist up, but they weren’t just someone from Legal.”
He started warming to the subject: the real subject of the song, he said, was “a fairly loosely aggregated industry-slash-palace guard that has coalesced around the corpus of something called rock, and that something has grown to have something to do with units of digital information, and filling a parking lot.” He paused. “It’s impressive. It’s brutally compelling, sometimes. But it’s not enjoyable.”
From the New York Times, “We have jumped the shark” no, wait, their title is “Same Stooges. Different World. Finer Wine.”
Photo: The Lizard King, by Caroline Bonarde.