Iggy Pop won the Polar Music Prize on February 8, announced the Swedish jury for this prestigious award. On the classic side, it is the French group of soloists from the Ensemble intercontemporain (EIC) imagined by Pierre Boulez, which won an award. The Polar Music Prize was created in 1989 with the objective of “breaking musical boundaries“. Each winner will receive one million Swedish crowns (some 100,000 euros) at a ceremony on May 2 in Stockholm.
Iggy Pop, whose last album, Freereleased in 2019, received acclaim from the jury for “his courage, his spirit of initiative and his raw power (…) which paved the way for punk and post-punk“.”Iggy Pop is unique, there is no one else like him.” greeted the director general of the Marie Ledin prize.
In a video (below), published by the Polar Music Prize, the precursor to punkaged 74, said to himself “honored” to succeed in particular to Patti Smith, to Metallica, “a group really great“, and to “Steve Reich, who meant a lot to meBob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Chuck Berry, Pink Floyd, Björk, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Wonder are some of the other past winners of the Polar Music Prize.
In the same video, Iggy Pop, known and hailed for his stage excesses, recounts how, in his early days with the Stooges, he started by throwing projectiles into the audience, including himself. But the public had then become accustomed to coming with ammunition to throw on stage. “The first was a big guy in a biker gang, the Scorpions, and his initiation was going to our gigs and throwing eggs at me. I was in a dance tutu and he hit me in the head with one of his eggs. Very upset, I went to see him to pay for it and he sent me a straight line, boom, he knocked me out.“
“I think I was lucky enough to be interested in and respect what Bob Dylan was doing in the sixties, so I didn’t want to emulate him. It saved me from being too wordy“, recalls Iggy Pop in this same video. “I tried to use very very few words and have those words create the sketch of an image that the listener could fill in.”
Filmmakers Jim Jarmusch (with whom Iggy Pop recently shot the zombie movie The Dead Don’t Die) and John Waters praised Iggy Pop in videos released by the Polar Music Prize. Jim Jarmusch pointed out how much the Iguana (his nickname) “deserved” this price. “Iggy, you’re such a gift to rock ‘n’ roll and music history in general, so congratulations. And a big hello to Jim Osterberg (his real name Editor’s note)”, he said. For his part, John Waters estimated that the jury had made “the perfect choice“. Because for him, Iggy Pop “isn’t just a rock star, he’s a god!“.
For its part, the Ensemble intercontemporain was honored as “the world’s leading contemporary music ensemble” by the jury of the polar Music Prize. Fonded in 1976 by Pierre Boulez, this instrumental formation of soloists is dedicated solely to 20th century and contemporary music.
The musical director of the Ensemble intercontemporain, Matthias Pintscher, explained that with 31 soloists, the EIC was “notnot really a chamber orchestra“, but still the “largest contemporary music ensemble in the world“.”This allows us to create a repertoire that is truly unique and truly ours – basically tailored to the size and needs of the set.“.