Literature is like cocaine - Iggy
May 29, 2009

Paris - "Literature's like coke and music's like heroin! Literature sharpens the mind, music stupidifies," laughs punk legend Iggy Pop, whose new album is inspired by a French novel about "death and sex".

Released this week, this latest offering from the long-haired, blue-eyed 62-year-old godfather of punk not only takes its inspiration from Michel Houellebecq's novel The Possibility of an Island but also carries a French title, Preliminaires (Preliminaries).

Why? "I felt that the whole plot of the novel is a preliminary to death," he said in an interview.

"And at my age everything you do is a preliminary to death: whether you're gonna fuck or not, work or play, chase money or freedom, ideas or cynicism... You've got the clock."

Iggy Pop - real name James Newell Osterberg - was lead singer of The Stooges, the 1960s-1970s garage rock band that influenced heavy metal and punk rock and whose live acts included Pop taking drugs, self-mutilating, verbally abusing the audience and leaping off stage.

His best-known solo numbers include "Lust for Life", "I'm Bored" and "Real Wild Child".

The idea behind this somewhat melancholy album came after he was asked to write music for a documentary about Houllebecq's novel which Pop sees as being about "death, sex, and the end of the human race".

"The book had soul and at the same time it showed great skills in just calmly illustrating some things that were inside my mind about sex, death and the opposite gender," he said.


A resident of Florida, he first read it in a French seaside resort during a typically cool European summer and enjoyed it's "mid-life sci-fi crisis".

Literature, he said, had always been important to him, with a lot of William S. Burroughs in his early works along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

Initially billed as a quieter album with jazz overtones, it mingles jazz, rock, pop and blues.

"It was great to embrace a broad variety of styles, very funny," he said. "I didn't do most of the work myself, all I did was the vocals and acoustic guitar and I shipped it out to the musicians. They sent back tracks and I could chose. Like a menu!"

Houellebecq enjoyed the song "Spanish Coast", comparing it to early Stooges numbers, and particularly liked "A Machine for Loving" because of the choice of words, the musician said.

In another surprising departure, the raw-voiced singer delivers a popular old French number on the album -- "Autumn Leaves", the song originally written by poet Jacques Prevert, with music by Joseph Kosma, that became a hit for Yves Montand decades ago.

"I really wanted to sing well, it was a challenge and I'm satisfied that I did a good job," he said. - AFP

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