Iggy Pop Analysis

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Among philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche is the most widely associated with Nihilism. According to Nietzsche the world has no order or structure besides what we give it "Every belief, every considering something-true," Nietzsche explains, "is necessarily false because there is simply no true world" . Nietzsche’s nihilism requires an essential denial of every compulsory significance and implication: "Nihilism is . . . not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one's shoulder to the plough; one destroys" . As far as Nihilism, Self-Destruction the proto punk movement and early punk culture, it seems hard to separate one from the other. From Iggy Pop’s self mutilation by rolling around on glass shards on stage, …show more content…

In 1973 the Stooges released the song “Search and Destroy”, an apocalyptic masterpiece. Within the song we can hear “cheerful nihilism” as Iggy sings “I'm a street walking cheetah, with a heart full of napalm. I'm a runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb. I am a world's forgotten boy, the one who searches and destroys…the one who's searchin' only to destroy”. Iggy Pop’s “cheerful nihilism” is a different approach as far as delivery. Compared to other front men who delivered their lyrics with aggression, Iggy advances his subject matter with what almost seems like an ironic joy. As Far as the lyrical relationship to nihilism, Iggy Pop is pulling imagery from the Vietnam War, mostly quoting the military tactic used by the US: to seek out the enemy, destroy them, and withdraw. The Vietnam War has been politically charged with the antiwar movement of the 1960s and was also the first war that “in your living room’ due to the advancement of televisions. The U.S. government has had a history of killing civilians during the war, and American citizens were constantly wondering the ethical reasoning for the actions they were witnessing for the first time on television. Nihilists believe it is a supposition that a conviction in morality, religion or philosophy can stop people from harming each other. People who hurt other people believe in one thing or another; they believe, automatically, in the rationale they use for their actions. Whether they chose a moral structure, which calls for punishing those who transgress their ideology, or their minds twist the position, in order to validate what they feel. People like Charles Manson and Adolf Hitler, rationalize their cruelty in the language of what they believe is morality. Not saying that morality leads to acts of cruelty, but it unquestionably has not stopped them. The human predisposition to embrace a moral system

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