That phrase, ‘rock and roll,’ doesn’t mean anything to me now. As he said in an interview with Belgian TV at the time of Blah‘s release: But Pop had no illusions that his own field, rock and roll, wasn’t just as complicit. Sure, some of this was the sharp self-righteousness of a newly-sober guy living a fairly ascetic existence in New York.
Pop was a lower-middle-class kid from Michigan, who had grown up in the Fifties and Sixties, and while he and the Stooges had done their generational duty and had consumed countless hours of television (Ron Asheton was a huge Star Trek fan), Pop came to consider TV a bad narcotic and the rotten ad-man’s heart of the whole American enterprise. And on Blah-Blah-Blah, TV kept infiltrating Pop’s lyrics-“ bad TV that insults me freely” (“Cry for Love”), “ raw greed and king TV” (“Hideaway”), “ I have no time to watch TV” (“Fire Girl”)-until he made the title track a stream of rants and curses at TV: pacing around the box, hurling abuse at it. Iggy Pop had been yelling at the television for most of his life, from the Stooges’ “TV Eye” to Bowie’s “TVC-15”, inspired by a Pop dream about a TV consuming his girlfriend. It’s a very polite way of saying ‘fuck you.’ It’s a way of saying that I disrespect the things that the media and the world in general are saying to me. Interviewer: Why the title, Blah-Blah-Blah? I thought, ‘why am I in this in the first place?’…to try to create a type of music that could explode me-like a rocket!-out of the type of life that was planned for me, as an American middle-class person.
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