A Radical Bond: Iggy Pop & Michel Houellebecq – Préliminaires (2009)

All societies have their points of least resistance, their wounds. Put your finger on the wound, and press down hard.

Michel Houellebecq, To Stay Alive

The adolescent years are crucial for the development of your spiritual and intellectual lineage, and your future track along it. You are and will always remain what you read and heard in your youth, because it is impossible to step out of the magnetic force field of the concepts of love and ideals of your youth- the rest is only variation and development. But with all necessary eclecticism which serves as quick reward, it is coherence that results in the highest mental performances in becoming and creating. Running against this gravity condemns you to inauthenticity: the breeding ground for a lifelong tendency towards confusion and deception.

I was basically done for when I read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer as a young girl.

Music in the ideal case is not just a singular listening experience, but like every good art intertwined with other forms and referencing other artist’s great works. Like Jim Morrisson opening gates to Huxley and Rimbaud, or Bowie introducing his fans to German Expressionism and international fascism. The life of an immersive art and philosophy lover is a never ending discovery trip with infinite ramifications when equipped with a coherent, hungry brain; with the lifelong search for the mental bloodline being the core definition of the path as the goal. And the relationships and symbioses between your valued artists are a pleasure and a science for themselves. This article deals with the strong symbiose of my modern heroes Iggy Pop and controversial French author Michel Houllebecq, whom I both see in the direct line of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as radical and tender conservative artists.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a fan of Iggy Pop, who for me is both, Nietzsche’s Übermensch and Schopenhauer’s definition of the ‘sublime’ as a groundbreaking demarcation from the charming, attractive, or disgusting.
Whereas I entered Houellebecq’s island of spiritual radicalism rather late in life, which is now an inexplicable fact to me, an unfortunate delay. It was not his critical reception as being racist, anti-feminist, anti-liberal and pornographic that prevented me from reading him- I believe that there are no groundbreaking thoughts or pieces of art without the radical thought, wherever it may be manifested. And after finally reading him, I realized: here I am dealing with the best writer and clearest thinker of our times, who is often prophetic, always wild, and with tenderness and love pervading his perverse and pessimistic words. I am in love and addicted to his divine detachment, and his radicality coming from the position (of the western male’s) absolute defeat, and resulting in a painful dissection of the modern world.

Houellebecq’s The Possibility Of An Island (2005) is the best book I have read in the last 15 years. Embedded in a wild plot, its topics are: The dangers and natural excesses of democracy according to Tocqueville. Critisism on the sexual liberation of women and feminism, ultimately connecting it to the unsubstantial contemporary ‘fun!’generation of eternal kids as a direct consequence of the lived modern matriarchy. The flipside of a society based largely on freedom, individuality & equality, the loss of love and affectionate sex, with a degenerate entertainment and pornography overload invading personal relationships. And ultimately: the birth of the transhuman that Houellebecq already picked up on in his 1998 classic Elementary Particles (or ‘Atomised‘). Genderless chosen ones on a plant-based diet, who lonely and listlessly watch the sporadical life behind their guarded fences: the few remaining of the human race, which after the extensive nuclear destruction of the world has turned into a horde of savages again. Like every good dystopian, Houellebecq picks up on tendencies already implemented within modern societies, combining those barely visible seedlings with the rampant outgrowths.

Equally impressed with the reading, Iggy Pop recorded Préliminaires (2009), his widely overlooked solo album that was inspired by The Possibility of an Island. Crooning on jazzy european pop, it is an exciting concept album partly sung in french, with lyrics either co-written or inspired by Houellebecq. Iggy Pop’s trademark nihilism and ennui acts as a congenial mouthpiece for Houellebecq’s literary anti-serotonin, even more so since it is no longer energized by the search for new values, but sounds beaten.

In this highly interesting musical interpretation, Iggy singles out individual images, locations, and topics from the book and reinforces them for the reader with an additional sensory input, sound. ‘Party Time‘ is the felt and lived pastiche of Houellebecq’s voice, reflecting scenes in which the book’s protagonist Daniel watches his young girlfriend from the ‘Generation Porn’ having numb group-sex to techno sounds: “It’s party time and I smell slime / You stupid people make me evil / Dicks and asses, cocktail glasses / Parlor games, exchange of fluids / ‘Cause it’s party time, it’s party time / It’s party time, I got the slime / Here’s a brute, isn’t he cute? / He needs a hole to bury his soul in” .

Préliminaires is not the only output of this artistic bond that makes absolute sense, and it is not the most personal one. The Dutch documentary film To Stay Alive: A Method. (2016) is based on Houellebecq’s instructional essay Rester Vivant (1991) about the necessary struggle of the true artist, the role of the poet, and the closeness of insanity and art. It is a manifesto which in many passages reads like a summary of the artistic essence and life of Iggy Pop: “The goal of the society where you live is to destroy you. You have the same goal with regard to society. The weapon that it will use is indifference. You cannot allow yourself to have the same attitude. Attack!”
Houellebecq himself appears in the film as depressed and tortured artist among others, with the most prominent being the one reading from Houellebecq’s essay with a grave voice and a weathered face throughout the film: Iggy Pop.

Make no mistake and don’t try to water this exceptional bond down, granting unwanted and therefore cruel apologies born out of indifference, by declaring it an unlikely coalition held together by superordinate instinctive and primitive drives- Iggy and Houellebecq agree in content and method, and their radicality derives from the conservative tradition, in one line with the philosophies of a Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.

Iggy Pop and Michel Houellebecq have done their parts supplying clarity and brute force in order to ‘radix‘; both walking the spiral architecture of brutal and effective poetry. When one day they are dead, they will be considered as part of the resistance, while you will be wondering what you did and how you lived- if your incarnate algorithm and standardized individuality allows it. Both artist have contributed to preserve the untamed, uncontrolled, and truth-seeking in art, discourse, and to that effect in humanity. It was a lonely fight in the midst of desert landscapes of uniformity and egalitarianism, two lifes as luminous battle-cries in the pre-transhuman wasteland and boredom.

by Saliha Enzenauer

As you approach the truth, your solitude will increase. The edifice is splendid, but deserted. You are walking through empty halls, which send back to you the echo of your footsteps. The atmosphere is limpid and invariable; the objects seem turned to statues. At times you begin to weep, so cruel is the clarity of your vision. You would love to turn back, into the fog of ignorance, but ultimately you know that it is already too late.

Continue. Have no fear. The worst is already past.

Michel Houellebecq, To Stay Alive