Iggy Pop

Had Iggy Pop quit singing after fronting the late-’60s/early-’70s proto-punk garage-blues band The Stooges, history still would’ve considered him one of music’s most charismatic, unpredictable performers. But after the legendary group broke up, the man born James Newell Osterberg Jr. in 1947 kept reinventing himself and finding new ways to command attention. In the mid-’60s, he took a low-key role in the Ann Arbor, MI, music scene, drumming for a band called The Iguanas—he derived his stage name from them, going first by Iggy Stooge and then Iggy Pop—and then a blues group called The Prime Movers. The Stooges gave him a chance to take the spotlight, which he embraced with dangerous gusto; Iggy’s antics, including writhing around shirtless onstage and cutting himself with glass, became the stuff of legend. Later, he linked up with David Bowie and collaborated on two seminal 1977 solo albums: The Idiot, which included the dark, Kraftwerkian “Nightclubbing,” and Lust For Life, featuring the galloping title track and the ominous “The Passenger.” In the ’80s and ’90s, Iggy ascended to alternative-rock royalty with the propulsive rocker “Real Wild Child (Wild One)” and the moodier “Candy,” the latter a duet with The B-52s’ Kate Pierson that became an unexpected hit single. His reputation for cool intensified when “Lust For Life” anchored the cult-classic 1996 movie Trainspotting, kicking off a vibrant new career phase. Not only did The Stooges reunite for a well-deserved victory lap in the 2000s, Iggy collaborated with Sum 41 and Peaches (2003’s Skull Ring), crooned seductively in French (2009’s Preliminaires), and teamed up with Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme (2016’s brooding Post Pop Depression).