Iggy Pop Slams Pumpkins, Durst

06/05/09 11:08am

by Kate Harper (CHARTattack)

Iggy Pop alluded to certain bands in a promotional video for his new album, Preliminaires, in which he said he made the disc because he "got sick of listening to idiot thugs with guitars banging out crappy music." He's not explained who exactly he was referring to with that comment.

"Anyone from Smashing Pumpkins to — what's the one with Fred Durst?" he told the U.K.'s The Sun tabloid.

"Yeah, and there are a million billion of them. And people think they're gods, man."

Pop (real name James Osterberg) said when he made the promotional video, which is about an album that's based on a somewhat high-brow topic, he went to great lengths not to sound pretentious.

"These fellas asked me to do a little video announcement for the album," he said. "I took great pains not to think first because the thing I can't stand is a rock star who thinks he's got brains. They're always so damned dull!"

Preliminaires is based on French author Michel Houllebecq's novel, The Possibility Of An Island. Pop sings in French on one of its tracks and he's abandoned his trademark punk sound for... wait for it... '20s jazz. Pop said he's long been attracted to what he saw in '20s jazz and what it represents to him.

"Those singers were outside the music industry we know today," he said. "I started thinking about everything they could see, smell, touch and eat. Was the food more interesting? Yeah! Also the available sex — yeah! What about the quality of the drugs? Wow! It was ten cents a gram.

"They looked cooler, they dressed better. The architecture from that period is better, too. Of course, most people were living hard lives through terrible depression but it makes you think."