Pop scene

Sixty-one years ago this week, a child was born in Muskegon, Mich. His parents called him James Newell Osterberg Jr., which is a perfectly respectable name for a boy and therefore wouldn&Rsquo;t do, for it was his destiny to rouse an entire generation with abrasive showmanship. As an adolescent, he would rename himself by alluding to a reptile, and then invent punk-rock music and give it everything he had. He would disrobe for and barf on and otherwise antagonize his audiences in astonishing ways. He would drive them wild. His appearance, suggesting a reanimated human cadaver, would become iconic. “This is a person who feels profoundly unalive, or, conversely, so rawly alive, and so imprisoned by it, that all feeling is perceived as pain,” a famous rock critic would write of him. Later still, someone would decide to make a movie about his life and cast in the lead role a young man most famous for playing a Hobbit, which sounds like a catastrophe waiting to happen but also sort of makes sense. Finally, this coming Monday at 8 p.m. at Old Ironsides, 1901 10th at S Street, some Sacramento bands will convene to celebrate his birthday. It doesn&Rsquo;t matter who they are. He is Iggy Pop.