Maybe it’s because he finally gave up smoking pot, but Iggy Pop has definitively entered his elder-statesman phase, even if he does maintain his lifelong aversion to shirts. In interviews, the 71-year-old Stooges frontman, an icon of the louche life since the late 1960s, today touts the pleasures of sobriety and qigong. But the great thing about Iggy as wizened sage is that his nuggets of wisdom are often just as unpredictable, irrepressible, or straight-up wacky as they’ve always been. Take “Bells & Circles,” a new collaboration with UK rave veterans Underworld. (A full EP from the two outfits—sort of a four-track clash of the titans—drops July 23.) Over chugging breaks and buzzing synths, Iggy begins in a contemplative mode—“If I had wings, I wouldn’t do anything beautiful and transcendent”—but before long he’s ranting, “I remember smoking on the airplane!” and reminiscing about doing lines of coke off his tray table.
If Iggy Pop’s early career was predicated on risk, then it’s his amicability and peculiar relatability that make him something of a national treasure these days. Those empathetic qualities are also the secret to an underappreciated side of his discography: his vast catalog of cameos and collaborations.
It makes sense that he’d work with plenty of other rock legends, whether chopping it up with Slash, dusting off Cole Porter’s “Well, Did You Evah!” alongside Debbie Harry, or helping out Sonic Youth with a cover of his own “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” But that’s barely scratching the surface. He’s chanted a ribald sea shanty with A Hawk and a Hacksaw and courted death with the Balkan composer Goran Bregovic, fronted a storied jazz trio, sung standards with the French yé-yé icon Francoise Hardy, and even stepped out with Joe Jackson to the tune of Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing (Without That Swing).” He is generously accommodating of the artists who ape him: He’s sung backup for the Cult and sat in with Aussie rockers Jet—whose “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” was noted for a striking resemblance to Iggy’s own “Lust for Life.” Perhaps most bizarrely, Iggy has gotten free-associative with Ke$ha: His verse on the album version of her song “Dirty Love” is surely the highest-charting song ever to reference Afghan rug merchants and Rick Santorum, all in the space of four bars.
That drawl, those wiry pecs, those puppy-dog eyes and Pantene-smooth locks—they all round out one of the greatest character actors that rock’n’roll has ever known. (For further proof, see his self-deprecating turn opposite Tom Waits in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes.) The fact that Iggy used to roll around in broken glass only adds to the mystique. Today, the only thing glinting is the sparkle in his eye as he feeds off the energy of his peers.
Here are nine of Iggy’s most notable team-ups over the years.
Underworld & Iggy Pop: Teatime Dub Encounters (2018)
It may sound sacrilegious to point out, but one occasional stumbling block with Underworld is that Karl Hyde’s stream-of-consciousness ranting can, at least for some listeners, lean a little too far toward slam poetry. But gravitas cut with ridiculousness is Iggy Pop’s métier, and here on this new four-song collaborative EP, his elastic bellow turns out to be the perfect foil for the group’s heady breakbeat trance-outs. On “Get Your Shirt,” Iggy indulges his comic side, reeling off cheerfully half-assed assonant rhymes (“jerk,” “flirt,” “clerk,” “shirt”) in what seems like a slyly self-aware stab at his own torso-baring tendencies. On “I’ll See Big,” he drawls a thoughtful meditation on friendship, self-worth, and mortality. And “Bells & Circles,” the best of the three tracks released so far, is a wryly nostalgic look back at youthful bad judgment. (Something about his cheerfully jaded perspective gives it the feel of the anti-“Losing My Edge,” but in place of “I hear you and your band have sold your guitars,” he’s reeling off bon mots like “It’s over for the liberal democracies!”) One almost wishes they could just have him record new vocals for the band’s entire catalog.
Oneohtrix Point Never and Iggy Pop: “The Pure and the Damned” (2017)
As though answering Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker”—a late-career staring contest with the void, sung by one of the only performers with even deeper voice than his own—Iggy faces the Big Questions on this unlikely collab with Oneohtrix Point Never for the Good Time soundtrack. Over an eerie, contemplative backdrop of piano and scraped strings, he ponders love, death, redemption, and, why not, the docility of crocodiles. The video’s CGI renders our hero as both the stuff of nightmares and a figure of great pathos, but it’s the weary fatalism of his mid-song soliloquy that makes his performance so arresting.
Songhoy Blues: “Sahara” (2017)
The Stooges were, at heart, a blues band, so it’s not that strange to find Iggy Pop turning up alongside a Malian guitar quartet. Songhoy Blues, as you might guess from the name, are rooted in so-called “desert blues” (think Ali Farka Touré), which they twist into slinky, livewire funk; “Sahara” pays tribute to their home turf. The cameo is not, to be honest, Iggy’s strongest turn. “It’s got a bad reputation/In the developed nations/’Cause it’s big and empty/And it seems unfriendly,” he sings, and it’s safe to say that postcolonial struggles have been phrased more eloquently. But he also puts geopolitics into terms that any average American lunkhead could understand (“There ain’t no condos/There ain’t no pizza/It’s a genuine culture/No Kentucky Fried Chicken”), which, in the era of Trump, is saying something.
Iggy Pop / Tarwater / Alva Noto: Leaves of Grass (2016)
Iggy Pop could make reading the White Pages sound thrilling, so just imagine what he could do with an actual work of literature. German post-rockers Tarwater and their minimal-techno compatriot Alva Noto did just that, sticking a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in Iggy’s leathery hands. It’s an inspired piece of casting: a deeply American artist grappling with a deeply American text, both of them obsessed with fundamental questions of body, mind, and spirit, plus a fuck-ton of sex. This, combined with his memorable reading of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” makes you wonder if Iggy doesn’t have a gig recording audiobooks in his future.
Cat Power: “Nothin But Time” (2012)
Cat Power’s “Nothin But Time” doesn’t try to hide its fondness for Berlin-period Bowie—particularly “Heroes,” whose two-chord vamping draws up the dramatic blueprint for the Cat Power song’s wistfully thrumming pulse. So it’s fitting that she recruited Iggy Pop, Bowie’s faithful companion during the milk-and-peppers years, to sing doleful backup. His tremulous baritone isn’t just the song’s sonic and spiritual anchor; it’s a link to the living past, a flesh-and-blood relic with actual superpowers.
Peaches: “Kick It” [ft. Iggy Pop] (2003)
One of the great things about being the living embodiment of cool is that you don’t have to be afraid of looking a little ridiculous. Iggy Pop knows it, Peaches sure as hell knows it, and together, they make for an absurdist dynamic duo with self-awareness to spare. In between dance-battle moves and beating back attacking zombies, they trade referential barbs (Iggy: “Ah, go fuck your pain away”; Peaches: “Like you said, search and destroy”) and almost manage to keep a straight face. A goofy reminder of much simpler days.
Death in Vegas: “Aisha” (1999)
There’s something almost quaint about the big-beat antics of Death in Vegas’ 1999 banger “Aisha,” which pairs heavy breakbeats with wailing guitar feedback—acid house meets acid rock, basically—and then adds a spooky voiceover from Iggy Pop as a serial killer in the middle of a psychotic break. (The scopophilia of the bait-and-switch video is less cute, but that’s a topic for another time.) As far as rave-rock collisions go, it’s way more successful than the Judgment Night soundtrack, which set the tone for similar cross-genre mashups earlier in the decade.
Ryuichi Sakamoto: “Risky” [ft. Iggy Pop] (1987)
Few songs better convey a certain type of late-’80s aesthetic than Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Risky.” It’s got the digital synths, gated reverb, flanged guitars; everything about it sounds expensive. And, just like the cinema of the era—think Die Hard or, a few years later, Michael Mann’s Heat—there’s a melancholy ambivalence about the imposing proportions and gleaming architecture. Iggy Pop’s baritone cameo, alternately booming and murmuring, goes to the heart of that fearful desire, trading off slick, vaguely erotic imagery with ominously whispered warnings about careerism and corporate dungeons. In retrospect, the idea that Iggy Pop would have had any firsthand experience with neckties and HR departments is pretty laughable, but when it comes to the noir mystique of the era’s hypercapitalism, he gets the tone just right.
Iggy Pop: “Repo Man” (1984)
One of Iggy Pop’s greatest talents has always been the ability to fucking sell it. Doesn’t matter what the product is—he makes you believe. So here, in the theme song to one of the greatest films of the 1980s, one of the truest portraits of punk rock and suburban ennui ever to hit the big screen, he conjures a psychedelic complement that hangs like a holographic overlay atop Alex Cox’s low-budget sci-fi shlock comedy. Even though Iggy doesn’t actually appear in Repo Man, his theme is so central to the film’s legacy that it counts as a kind of cameo.
“Pissing in the desert sands/When the desert whispered to me,” Iggy plays a shaman of the Southern California wastelands, a former “teenage dinosaur/Stoned and obsolete.” The slashing minor-key guitar chug make a sinister addition to the film’s cynical, amoral universe, and Iggy’s faux-deep bon mots—“Infinity throws you a curve/Dumps you in shit you don’t deserve”—are perfectly attuned to a world where mystical signs are revealed in plates of shrimp.
