In May 2016 Iggy Pop accompanied director Jim Jarmusch to the Cannes Film Festival. The two men had been invited for the premiere of Gimme Danger, a passionate documentary on the chaotic history of the singer and the protopunk group that he helped cofound at the end of the 1960s, alongside brothers Ron and Scott Asheton and Dave Alexander: the Stooges. Unsurprisingly, during the press conference, the rocker was asked to give his opinion on the current state of the music industry. Sullen, he responded: ‘It's different, now. You can push a button and get rich quick. And I think also that there's an argument to be made about the human races [sic] approach[ing] to the point where the technology gets to the point [sic] where it's going to grip everybody by the shoulders and shake us and then throw us down and get rid of us.’ Then, parodying a techno rhythm and beating on the table: ‘WHOA! You know? Why don't I just die now?’ This critique, fearing that a cold and dehumanising technology would come to replace the warm and authentic expression of an artist, is hardly new. At the turn of the twentieth century, the American composer and conductor John Philip Sousa could not find words strong enough to condemn the ‘infernal machines’ of phonography: ‘The time is coming when no one will be ready to submit himself to the ennobling discipline of learning music … Everyone will have their ready made or ready pirated music in their cupboards.’ More fundamentally, perhaps, these somewhat alarmist discourses remind one of a certain reactionary press which, well before the age of mechanical reproduction, castigated the ‘almost scientific precision’ of the realist novel: