Mogwai, Iggy Pop and "Punk Rock"...

My friend Christie used to loan me her copy of Mogwai's "Come On Die Young," when we worked together as fraud investigators at Amazon.com (weird job, not as exciting as it sounds). It had been a long time since I heard it and so I snapped it up today and have been getting reacquainted with it.

What strikes you immediately when listening this album is the opening song. It's a meta-statement about the album's purpose - slow guitars playing over what I've now discovered was an Iggy Pop interview on the CBC. This is what he said:

I'll tell you about punk rock: punk rock is a word used by dilettantes and, uh... and, uh... heartless manipulators, about music... that takes up the energies, and the bodies, and the hearts and the souls and the time and the minds, of young men, who give what they have to it, and give everything they have to it. And it's a... it's a term that's based on contempt; it's a term that's based on fashion, style, elitism, satanism, and, everything that's rotten about rock 'n' roll.

I don't know Johnny Rotten... but I'm sure, I'm sure he puts as much blood and sweat into what he does as Sigmund Freud did. You see, what, what sounds to you like a big load of trashy old noise... is in fact... the brilliant music of a genius... myself. And that music is so powerful, that it's quite beyond my control. And, ah... when I'm in the grips of it, I don't feel pleasure and I don't feel pain, either physically or emotionally. Do you understand what I'm talking about? Have you ever, have you ever felt like that? When you just, when you just, you couldn't feel anything, and you didn't want to either. You know, like that? Do you understand what I'm saying, sir?

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IggyPop, Mogwai, PunkRock