Iggy Pop is not stupid and he’s not poor and he’s not not-famous. So, I’m still not sure why I had to be confronted with this advertisement at Gatwick Airport a few weeks ago. I mean: COME ON, GUY! At least when Bob Dylan did the ad for Victoria’s Secret it was left-field enough for me to accept it as some surreal take on modern commodity culture. Or when Mikhail Gorbachev or Sean Connery pose with a Louis Vuitton bag, at least the photography is classy. And also those guys didn’t help invent punk rock. But something as pedestrian as car insurance boggles the mind. You might guess that no corporation has ever asked Iggy to advertise something for them and when the first one did he said, “Yeah sure, I’d be delighted. Where do I sign?” As a joke. But then they didn’t understand it as a joke and showed up at his door with some suits and a clipboard. And he was so coked out he signed it, laughing, rubbing his nose, thinking, man, those were the strangest Jehovah’s Witnesses ever.
Not that Iggy has ever been a class warrior or an overtly political guy, but he does stand for something. Or did. And, I would come to find out, this is not even the most heinous part of the ad campaign, which comes in the form of a terrifyingly bad tv commercial that I refuse to even link to here. (But Gawker does a decent job with it, if you wanna find it.) The appropriate German word for this (and a rather new one) is fremdschämen, the verb for being embarrassed for someone else. Now, I’ll go back to listening to the “Complete Funhouse Sessions” and pretend that this never happened.
Stumble it!
Actually, the worst part of all of this is that Swiftcover routinely denies automobile insurance to musicians. First-chair violin of the Philharmonic, bass-player with scum-rock band, doesn’t matter: they’re considered too unstable, too risky for this insurance company. It’s well-documented, apparently, although I sure don’t have a link to where I read this. Sorry.
That is some rich, painful irony alright.
yep, the tv ad’s pretty woeful, literally stopped me in my tracks as it came on last time i was in london. then again, i do recall iggy proclaiming in a mag feature once about being open to lucrative product endorsements, if only they’d have him… clearly swiftcover heard that lament!