James Newell Osterberg Jr. (born April 21, 1947), known professionally as Iggy Pop, is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and actor who was the lead vocalist of the proto-punk band the Stooges. Regarded as the "Godfather of Punk", he is noted for his outrageous and unpredictable stage antics, poetic lyrics, and unique voice. He was named one of the 50 Great Voices by NPR, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Stooges in 2010, and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020 for his solo career.
He had a long collaborative relationship and friendship with David Bowie over the course of his career, beginning with the Stooges' album Raw Power in 1973. Both musicians went to West Berlin to wean themselves off their respective drug addictions and Pop began his solo career by collaborating with Bowie on the 1977 albums The Idiot and Lust for Life, Pop usually contributing the lyrics.
Initially playing a raw, primitive style of rock and roll (progressing later towards more experimental and aggressive rock), the Stooges sold few records in their original incarnation and gained a reputation for their confrontational performances, which sometimes involved acts of self-mutilation by Pop. He was one of the first performers to do a stage-dive and popularized the activity. Pop, who typically performs bare-chested, also performed such stage theatrics as rolling around in broken glass and exposing himself to the crowd.
Though his popularity has fluctuated, many of Pop's songs have become well known, including "Search and Destroy" and "I Wanna Be Your Dog" by the Stooges, and his solo hits "Lust for Life", "The Passenger" and "Real Wild Child (Wild One)". In 1990, he recorded his only Top 40 U.S. hit, "Candy", a duet with the B-52s' singer Kate Pierson. Pop's song "China Girl" became more widely known when it was re-recorded by co-writer Bowie, who released it as the second single from his most commercially successful album, Let's Dance (1983). Bowie re-recorded and performed many of Pop's songs throughout his career.
Although Pop has had limited commercial success, he has remained a cultural icon and a significant influence on a wide range of musicians in numerous genres. His music has encompassed a number of styles over the course of his career, including garage rock, punk rock, hard rock, heavy metal, art rock, new wave, grunge, jazz, blues and electronic. His vocal stylings ranged from "baritone croons [to] unhinged shrieks". The Stooges' album Raw Power has proved an influence on artists such as Sex Pistols, the Smiths, and Nirvana. His solo album The Idiot has been cited as a major influence on a number of post-punk, electronic and industrial artists including Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails and Joy Division, and was described by Siouxsie Sioux as a "re-affirmation that our suspicions were true: the man is a genius."
James Newell Osterberg Jr. was born in Muskegon, Michigan, on April 21, 1947, the son of Louella (née Christensen; 1917–1996) and James Newell Osterberg (1921–2007), an English teacher and baseball coach at Fordson High School in Dearborn, Michigan. He is of English, German, and Irish descent on his father's side, and Danish and Norwegian ancestry on his mother's side. His father was adopted by a Swedish-American nurse surnamed Osterberg. The family lived in a trailer park in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
As a child, Osterberg was interested in the industrial noises emanating from Michigan's manufacturing plants; he cites a visit to Ford's River Rouge Plant when he was nine as a particular inspiration for his musical development. Osterberg began to play drums in the fifth grade, first starting with rubber pads glued to plywood, before his parents bought him a drum set. In a 2007 Rolling Stone interview, he explained his relationship with his parents and their contribution to his music:
Once I hit junior high in Ann Arbor, I began going to school with the son of the president of Ford Motor Company, with kids of wealth and distinction. But I had a wealth that beat them all. I had the tremendous investment my parents made in me. I got a lot of care. They helped me explore anything I was interested in. This culminated in their evacuation from the master bedroom in the trailer, because that was the only room big enough for my drum kit. They gave me their bedroom.
He attended Tappan Junior High School, now Tappan Middle School. Ron Asheton later described him as having been a conventional teenager: "He hung out with the popular kids that wore chinos, cashmere sweaters, and penny loafers. Iggy didn't smoke cigarettes, didn't get high, didn't drink."
Osterberg began his music career as a drummer in various high school bands in Ann Arbor, Michigan, including the Iguanas, who covered several records such as Bo Diddley's "Mona" in 1965. He then began exploring local blues-style bands such as the Prime Movers (with brothers Dan and Michael Erlewine), which he joined at 18 years old. The Prime Movers gave him the nickname "Iggy" for having played in the Iguanas. According to biographer Jim Ambrose, the two years he spent in the band made him aware of "art, politics, and experimentation".
Osterberg eventually dropped out of the University of Michigan and moved to Chicago to learn more about blues. While in Chicago, he played drums in blues clubs, helped by Sam Lay (formerly of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band) who shared his connections with Pop. Inspired by Chicago blues as well as bands like the Sonics, MC5 and the Doors, he formed the Psychedelic Stooges. The band was composed of Osterberg on vocals, Ron Asheton on guitar, Asheton's brother Scott on drums, and Dave Alexander on bass. Their first show was played at a Halloween party at a house in Detroit, Michigan. Members of the MC5 were also in attendance. Osterberg became interested in Ron Asheton after seeing him perform in the Chosen Few (a covers band), believing "I've never met a convincing musician that didn't look kind of ill and kind of dirty, and Ron had those two things covered!" The three nicknamed Osterberg "Pop" after a local character named Jim Popp, who he was said to have resembled after shaving his eyebrows.
The seeds of Pop's stage persona were sown when he saw the Doors perform in 1967 at the University of Michigan and was amazed by the stage antics and antagonism displayed by singer Jim Morrison. Morrison's extreme behavior, while performing in a popular band, inspired the young Pop to push the boundaries of stage performance. Other influences on Pop's vocals and persona were Mick Jagger and James Brown:
I attended two concerts by the Doors. The first one I attended was early on and they had not gotten their shit together yet. That show was a big, big, big influence on me. They had just had their big hit, "Light My Fire" and the album had taken off. ... So, here's this guy, out of his head on acid, dressed in leather with his hair all oiled and curled. The stage was tiny and it was really low. It got confrontational. I found it really interesting. I loved the performance ... Part of me was like, "Wow, this is great. He's really pissing people off and he's lurching around making these guys angry." People were rushing the stage and Morrison's going "Fuck you. You blank, blank, blank." You can fill in your sexual comments yourself. The other half of it was that I thought, "If they've got a hit record out and they can get away with this, then I have no fucking excuse not to get out on stage with my band." It was sort of the case of, "Hey, I can do that." There really was some of that in there.
In addition to Jim Morrison and the Doors' influence on the band, Pop also attributes the Stooges getting jump-started after seeing an all-girl rock band from Princeton, New Jersey, called the Untouchable. In a 1995 interview with Bust, he relates:
And the other thing was we went to New York. We had gone to New York a couple of months before that just to check out the scene, and we had never been to a place like New York ... we went down around Eighth Street there where all the young tourists hang out, and we met these girls from New Jersey, from Princeton, they had a band called The Untouchable, and we're like, "Oh, you've got a band, sure, ha ha ha," and they said "Well, come to our house and see us play." And we didn't have anywhere to crash, and they played for us, and they completely rocked, and we were really ashamed.