Words matter. These are the best Iggy Pop Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
What did Christ really do? He hung out with hard-drinking fishermen.
Basically, I’m a musical vocalist, but I do voiceover stuff as a sideline, like plumbing or something.
When punk began to be a genre, people were going to go out and try to mine it. Some of the better groups, like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, were very artificial.
I have no idea why a guy would bring a jar of peanut butter to a concert.
I was who I was in high school in accordance with the rules of conduct for a normal person, like obeying your mom and dad. Then I got out of high school and moved out of the house, and I just started, for lack of a better term, running free.
I have a hot memory, but I know I’ve forgotten many things, too, just squashed things in favor of survival.
If you give a good performance, something that gets some feeling across to people, that’s such a rare gift. It’s underestimated at this point in history, when the music biz is inevitably turning into a kind of politics.
‘Punk rock’ is a word used by dilettantes and heartless manipulators about music that takes up the energies, the bodies, the hearts, the souls, the time and the minds of young men who give everything they have to it.
The people who were learning from me tended to be more commercial performers who were gonna rip off the salient idea to do it in a way that will sell, but they weren’t going for the music.
I was a pretty nice kid. Kind of quiet, but quiet in terms I wasn’t going out and setting fire to anything. I had a big mouth and I was creative type, you know.
I’m a travel enthusiast.
What some people would call antics, I would just call a good show.
At university, I had been obsessed with reading about the lives of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and I was steeped in the crazy poets, and I came to view my early subjects through that prism.
I’m a little bit damaged in about 15 different ways, and it’s been nice that no particular damaged area has become a major issue. I’m a more than moderately healthy 65-year-old male who has gotten away with a lot of stuff.
Something I like to do a lot is just sit by water when there’s a current and just stare into the water. I don’t fish, I don’t hunt, I don’t scuba, I don’t spear, don’t boat, don’t play basketball or football – I excel at staring into space. I’m really good at that.
The more walking-around money I have, the less I walk around.
Stages are getting higher and higher, and I’m getting older and older.
It’s fair to say that I have a side that is prudent and a side that is not.
Studios are like hospitals. A lot of people check in, and they don’t check out.
I became Iggy because I had a sadistic boss at a record store. I’d been in a band called the Iguanas. And when this boss wanted to embarrass and demean me, he’d say, ‘Iggy, get me a coffee, light.’
My general take on American music since 1969 is that it’s just getting stiffer and people are getting more uptight – audience, performance, and palace guard.
I like music that’s more offensive. I like it to sound like nails on a blackboard, get me wild.
In 1965, when great young white artists in the English-speaking world were successfully re-channeling hillbilly and black music – you know Bob Dylan, Ray Davies, Pete Townsend, Keith Richards – they didn’t get any money at first. They were all broke.
Miami is nothing like me, and that’s why I need to be here – it’s the opposite. I’m practical, where this place is moody, I’m stolid in my interior, where this place has a certain flair, and I’m materialistic in a sense that this place is fundamentally spiritual – there’s a quicksilver quality about this place.
The most successful stuff is sold to you as indispensable social information. The message in the music is, ‘We are terribly, terribly slick and suave, and if you listen to us, you can probably get a leg up in society, too.’
