Rock legend Iggy Pop entertained attendees at this year’s Cool Out conference with tales of his days starting out in music, his take on AI and still playing live to crowds of thousands as he approaches 80.
The annual Cool Out initiative, now in its third year, is a programme of events aimed at connecting the worlds of finance, technology and the creative industries in the Cayman Islands and around the world.
This year its four-day schedule included a ‘fireside chat’ between Jeff Liebenson, president of the International Association of Entertainment Lawyers, and industry icon and Grammy award-winner Iggy Pop, also known as the ‘Godfather of Punk’, at the newly opened Endless Sea Studio recording space located on the waterfront on North Church Street in George Town.
Early influences
Sporting an All Blacks rugby top, Pop discussed his early influences and his journey from dropping out of the University of Michigan to becoming a confrontational performer.
“My father was an English teacher,” he recalled. “We were from very modest backgrounds. My parents were educated and serious and they didn’t want to see me ruin my life on this dream.”
However after watching The Doors play a tense gig at a mainly football crowd, where Jim Morrison was “singing in falsetto, with pre-Raphaelite curls, dressed in a ruffled shirt and some very tacky leatherette pants”, Pop was inspired to drop out and follow the dream for himself, working at a record store and performing at small venues and building his unique ‘confrontational style’ as a way of standing out.
Pop and his band The Stooges signed up with a record label called Electra, and, he said, are still selling as well as they ever did, more than five decades later.
“The music did connect, and a lot of it connected with a very delayed effect,” he said.
As well as seeing consistent album sales, Pop said that he gets a lot of requests for his music to be used in licensing for films and games.
“Licensing used to be for a song that sounded a particular way to bolster the emotions in the scenes of a film, but now … they take one of my songs and they mix it in with battle cries and weaponry and bombs going off and there I am in ‘World of Warcraft’.”
Live performances
Pop is still playing live gigs, such as this year’s Coachella festival in April, which will be attended by 200,000 music fans. He says that technology is a big part of that.
“Technology has been good for me in a couple of prosaic, self-centered, greedy ways,” he said. “I don’t know how long this will go on, but within the music world, it’s elevated the importance of the live gig. People really want to go out. They don’t want to just see you. They want to mix with their peers, too.”
He added, “The other way that is good is that the streaming services, although everybody disses them, provide a more level playing field for stuff that is good, which should be heard and people would like.”
About still being relevant to a whole new generation, Pop said, “We made some dynamite stuff and just to see people still recognising it and enjoying it, it’s the thrill of my life.”
With a career spanning more than 50 years, Pop said, “I’m evolving on the inside as an artist, but I have a lot of trouble getting that over in recordings. Usually, my best work since the turn of the century, is when I do self-released, private albums, so I did one called ‘Après’, which was a mix of French chanson and Sinatra ballads, because I love the two forms.”
A ballad on his album ‘Préliminaires’, ‘I want to go to the Beach’ was, he said, “just about wanting to go to the beach like the way sometimes a whale is washed up and just wants to die … it’s a good number. Usually, if I’m angry or miserable, those are my better numbers lately; it’s just the way it is. I’m not convincing as a happy guy [but] I am happy. I like to go swimming or drink a very fine red wine … I can be happy for a couple of hours.”
After doing a big gig, he said, “I get a big endorphin out of that for a couple hours after, yeah, everything’s cool. And then, usually about five in the morning I wake up and go, ‘ouch’, because I’m almost 80.”
Pop has experimented with AI and got a laugh from the audience with his view on the future.
“I think a lot about the future of things, and you hear about AI replacing entertainers, deleting the human race,” he said. “I think what’s going to happen is that AI will just want to use some of us as entertainers or pets. Look at it this way, if [AI chatbot] Grok has free rein, is he going to want to hang out with Elon Musk or Sabrina Carpenter?”
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