Hey Amnesty International, Iggy Pop does not want to be your dog.
The global organization apologized to Pop for using his face — beaten and bloodied — in an anti-torture ad that suggested Pop claimed, in French, that Justin Bieber was the “future of rock and roll.” Amnesty was using the sentiment to imply that Pop had been tortured into praising Bieber, and that torture is bad and so is the Canadian pop star. Or something.
And they did it without Iggy Pop’s permission.
Today, Sir Pop tweeted out a link that shined a bit more light on the very bizarre situation.
Most of you have seen the image that had been circulating since last week. Here is more about it:
http://t.co/WDGhajjsrE
— Iggy Pop (@IggyPop) June 24, 2014
The tweet linked to a post on amnesty.be, where the group apologized for using Pop’s face without his permission. Via Pitchfork:
To generate awareness about our campaign against torture, Amnesty International Belgium French speaking section used an image of Iggy Pop without his authorization.
Even though we acted in good faith, we would like to apologise to Iggy Pop for having done so.
The overall goal of this campaign is to try to influence people’s ideas on the use of torture. According to surveys, a shocking number of people believe that “torture may sometimes be useful” ; more than 36% of people even think that torture is justified in some cases. This is unacceptable, and we illustrate this reality with the message that a man who is tortured will say anything in order to escape this awfulness, using provocative images and statements to attract public attention.
We would therefore also like to make it clear that the statement attributed to Iggy Pop that he believes Justin Bieber is the future of rock and roll does not represent Iggy Pop’s personal opinion but was part of the creative process for this campaign and was intended to be ironic.
Glad that’s all settled. But hey — now we’ve all seen the ad so we guess Amnesty wins. Here’s another look…
