Life Lessons from Iggy Pop

Iggy Pop, photographed by Wayne Maser.

Welcome to Life Lessons. This week, we revisit some admittedly out of context highlights from two interviews with the punk icon Iggy Pop: first in November 1986, then in April 1990. Grab a mic, take your shirt off—you just might learn a thing or two. 

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“I don’t think I’m lucky; I think I have a tough constitution. And I’ve been wise enough to listen to other people.”

“There are all these different meanings of ‘fool.’ A lot of times, people I really hate—like people who think they’re on top of business world, for example—you’ll see them sneer at somebody and call them a fool, and the people they call fools are generally the people I really like. But to me a real fool is somebody who throws away his life on other people’s road maps. Then there’s the happy fool—like musicians—the jester kind of fool. I’ve done a bit of that kind of work. Bringing a little entertainment value to situations. You could say it’s really foolish to do what feels good at the time. A lot of people get shit for that. But, on the other hand, if you live through it, you look back on it and you’re glad you did it. I know all the most foolish things I ever did, ones that really upset a lot of people and caused me all this grief at the time—those are all my favorite things.”

“Generally I don’t look before I leap in life, and it gets me into a lot of shit, but on the other hand I think it helps to put a little juice in the work. But I get in trouble for that. The first time I ever leapt off a stage I was opening for Frank Zappa. There were these two big buxom girls lying on the floor watching me. I thought I would just land on them and it was going to be a wonderful experience. They moved. And I hit the floor really hard and lost the tips of my teeth. They went right through my lip. If you don’t look you’re better off. In a way.”

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“Freedom was very, very important to me when I was young. When I did ‘I Got a Right,’ I had come to the conclusion that the freedoms that we were taught about in civics class didn’t actually exist, and so I was going to have to declare my own. That song was my little declaration of independence. But now I’m at a point where I can just put the top down on my convertible and feel the breeze in my face and feel pretty free.”

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“It might be because I’m older, but if a girl has particularly good sexual wares, it doesn’t exactly get her to first base if I don’t like her.”

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“People ask me what [David Bowie and I] contributed to each other, and if you want to know what I’ve contributed to him, you have to ask him. If you want to know what he’s contributed to me, it’s been professional, teaching me the necessity of hard work, organization, and, more than anything, to have a wide, wide interest in people who are doing things a lot differently than you are.”

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“I spend a lot of time in the grocery store, shopping.”

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“I’m not the kind of person who could join AA or have rules for myself or on Thursday take this vitamin pill. So, basically, I learned the hard way. I learned by trial and error, and tried to get drugs out of my work. That took about a year. If I was going to work, it was best that I be straight. And I was surprised at what came out.”

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“It’s good to have somebody taking care of you.”

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“Never once, except when I did the song ‘Bang Bang’ with Tommy Boyce on my last Arista album [Party], and never since then until this album, have I ever gone in the studio trying to get a commercial hit. I always went in with a very specific idea of the sound I wanted, and once I’d recorded I’d try and make it sell as much as I could, but I only went in thinking of a sound I wanted.”

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“Fools rush in wherever there’s a warm hole.”

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“People come to me, though, and talk about my ‘self-destructive image’ and I say, ‘What self-destructive image? I’ve been out there, giving you this really good rock ‘n’ roll, with a good beat, this unpackaged show, that comes to your town, for 18 years.’ A lot of people would bite off their own right arm to have the chance to do what I’ve been doing.”

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Read the full interviews here and here.