It’s a Saturday evening in Oakland, and I’m staring in awe at a naked, leather torso writhing around onstage. It belongs to none other than Iggy Pop, and without him — or his wild antics — punk rock wouldn’t be what it is today.
At 79 years old, he prowls across the stage, snarling and cursing amid a chorus of overdriven guitars, screaming brass instruments and rabid acolytes who outstretch their arms toward their crude idol. I’m at Mosswood Meltdown, and Iggy Pop is finally headlining after eclectic punk groups like the Spits, Otoboke Beaver and Mannequin Pussy took the stage. Aptly described as a music festival for people who hate music festivals, Mosswood is the anti-Coachella in the sense that it’s rugged, dirty and devoid of major corporate advertising and godforsaken “product activations.” This Saturday night, thousands of us are gathered at Mosswood Park to watch one of punk rock’s most enduring and iconoclastic figures.
Like a chain-smoking siren, Iggy pop’s gravel voice is both brutal and hypnotic. When he begins to croon the smoldering lyrics to “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” a person in front of me looks to the stranger next to them and says it’s their favorite love song of all time. Then, suddenly, Iggy vanishes from the stage, and I hear nothing but squealing and feedback from the mic. At first, I wonder if there’s some sort of technical issue, but then I realize that it’s because Iggy Pop flung himself into the audience.
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What I love most about this festival crowd that he draws is that it’s intergenerational: Some fans are gray-haired and aided by walking sticks; others wear spikes in their faces and tread through the mud in furry platform boots. But when Iggy Pop first started to make the rounds in local newspapers, he was a divisive — and even somewhat derided — cultural figure.
Born James Osterberg in 1947, Iggy Pop first emerged as the frontman of the Stooges, a primitive punk group born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the late 1960s. A 1969 article from the Cincinnati Enquirer describes the “pout mouth” singer’s voice as both tender and vicious, while others sneered at him, saying that he looked more like Grace Slick as opposed to a traditional rock ’n’ roll star. In 2011, he would go on to pose for T Magazine in a black cocktail dress and Dior bag, stating, “I’m not ashamed to dress ‘like a woman’ because I don’t think it’s shameful to be a woman.”
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“It takes a lot for me to put my feelings for Iggy into words,” a fan writes in “Real Roccer,” an obscure, typewritten newsletter that recapped one of his shows several decades ago. “On a musical level, Iggy has never been one to aim for reaching people through intellect. Rather, Iggy, as he once put it himself, looks for things to tear apart.” According to the newsletter’s author, who only goes by Jacki-o, he acted as “slimy as a snake,” flipped off the audience, spit, mooned and threw his drink to the audience’s delight.
But not everyone was as impressed by his raucous stage presence.
“Lead vocalist Iggy Pop (Do you believe that?) is trying to be … antisocial with his voice, outdoing an early Mick Jagger performance by far but undoubtedly failing to make the same sort of impact,” one critic wrote in 1970. Teenagers, they argued, will only buy the Stooges’ “ruthless” music because their frontman “makes the girls scream and faint … if they ever manage to catch him at a live performance,” they snidely remarked.
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Other music critics viewed him as a gross spectacle, a lascivious circus act that couldn’t be looked away from.
In one archived Baltimore Sun article simply titled “Iggy Pop — Watch The Freak,” the reviewer describes how the wild frontman rubbed peanut butter on his chest and then began moaning and contorting his half-naked body on the floor, transfixing the audience.
“He is very ugly and precociously sexual,” the reporter solemnly observed.
Fast-forward to 2026, and these words still ring true more than 50 years later.
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That Saturday night, Iggy Pop sang “Raw Power,” “The Passenger” and “Lust for Life,” songs that have permeated our consciousness and been included in countless films. Covered by legacy goth bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, his musical footprint is everywhere. These days, he throws his body around onstage with caution, but his style is timeless: His straight golden hair still cascades down to his shoulders, and a silver chain adorns his neck, shining bright against his deeply tanned skin.
While performing “1970,” a psychedelic dirge that spans more than five minutes, he slowly transitions to “Nightclubbing,” a rickety art-rock anthem co-written with David Bowie that sounds like the backing track to a David Lynch film. It makes sense that he’d transition to something a bit slower, I thought — after all, it must be absolutely exhausting to perform songs off “Fun House,” especially for someone who’s nearly 80 years old.
Suddenly, the screeching brass returns, hurtling us back into the brutal chaos.
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“PSYCHO! PSYCHO!” Iggy Pop yells into the mic amid blaring guitars and horn sections.
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I laugh, and practically breathe out a sigh of relief.
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At one point, in the corner of my eye, I see stagehands unveil a man-sized cage. They wheel it out, and Iggy Pop climbs inside. “Well, come on, push me up, motherf—ker!” he yells to a festival employee in all black who steers it to center stage. As he sings the lyrics to “Real Wild Child” and the show enters its final act, I can’t help but think about an interview he gave to a reporter in 1971.
“Mass recognition is not what’s important to me,” Iggy Pop told them. “ … But on the other hand, if large numbers of people can dig it, that’s attractive too. But they’re really not [as] attractive to me as the musical forest in which I live. I’m not going to come out of my musical forest for anybody.”
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