The godfather of punk Iggy Pop is the latest critic of U2's free album, Songs of Innocence, explaining his beef with the move during his John Peel lecture in England yesterday, Oct. 13.
"The people who don't want the free U2 download are trying to say, 'Don't try to force me,' and they've got a point," Pop said at the Radio Festival, The Guardian reports. "Part of the process when you buy something from an artist, it's kind of an anointing, you are giving that person love."
The artist wasn't too hard on the Irish band, saying the members are not "bad guys."
"But now everybody is a bootlegger and not so cute as before and there are people out there just stealing stuff and saying, 'Don't try to force me to pay,' and that act of thieving will become a habit, and that's bad for everybody," he said.
Pop, the former leader of punk pioneers The Stooges, took aim at the music industry as a whole in his lecture, "Free Music in a Capitalist Society."
The singer called the industry "laughably, maybe, almost entirely pirate" and added that technology has "estranged people from their morals, making it easier to steal music than to pay for it."
The artist was the fourth musician to give the lecture at the annual event in honor of Peel, a legendary English disc jockey who died in 2004. Peel was well-known for his radio show on BBC Radio 1, and his "John Peel Sessions" helped boost the careers of many aspiring artists. Interestingly enough, it was Peel who first played The Stooges in the U.K.
Pop is set to play a serial killer in Dario Argento's upcoming movie The Sandman.
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