Iggy Pop likes French people, I mean, didn’t he record the album ‘Préliminaires’ in 2009, inspired by the novel of French author Michel Houellebecq, ‘The Possibility of an Island’? That was a bold move, but Iggy continues on his French inspiration as he has announced a new album of covers, entitled ‘Après’ (‘After’ in French) to be released May 9 via vente-privee.com.
Among the 10 tracks, many songs will be famous French standards, like Joe Dassin’s ‘Si tu n’existais pas’, Serge Gainsbourg's 'La Javanaise', Edith Piaf’s ‘La Vie En Rose’, Georges Brassens’ ‘Les Passantes’, and Henri Salvador’s ‘Syracuse’, but he has also chosen to cover Harry Nilsson’s ‘Everybody’s Talkin’, Yoko Ono’s 'I'm Going Away Smiling', Cole Porter’s ‘What Is This Thing Called Love?’, The Beatles’ ‘Michelle’, and Frank Sinatra’s 'Only The Lonely'.
I can tell Iggy Pop is pretty savy about French culture, and this is what he wrote on his facebook page last Monday:
‘All popular music forms of today get their strength from the beat. Rap, hip-hop, metal, pop, and rock producers will tell you that the beats they use imitate the human heartbeat and that is where the power lies. The feeling of listening to any of these forms is always some variation on excitement, but before the birth of the blues there was another form of popular song, in which the timing comes from the human breath and the feelings are much more about emotion. These older ways of expression were known variously as bel canto, chanson, plainsong or just folk music. I’ve always loved this other feeling, one that is intimate, sometimes a little sad, and does not try to beat me on the head. So I wanted to sing some of these songs myself, hoping to bring the feeling I felt as a listener to my listeners through my voice. Many of these songs are in French, probably because it is French culture which has most stubbornly resisted the mortal attacks of the Anglo-American music machine.’
Yeah, French are really stubborn, something that obviously pleases the rebel he is, but oh my god, he is fully dressed on the cover!