Creativity Quote by Siobhan Fahey

Calling the Stooges "pop" is a deliberate act of category sabotage. Siobhan Fahey - whose own career moved through glossy, hook-forward worlds with Bananarama and the art-pop noir of Shakespears Sister - isn’t mislabeling Iggy and company out of ignorance. She’s reclaiming them. The line insists that what people cordon off as "punk", "proto-punk", or "dangerous noise" is also, at its core, a form of mass-songcraft: repetition, immediacy, a chorus you feel in your teeth. Pop, here, isn’t a synonym for polished. It’s a synonym for direct.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to rock criticism’s old gatekeeping: the idea that credibility requires grit and that pop is a lesser, feminine-coded space. Fahey flips that hierarchy. By dragging the Stooges into pop’s orbit, she exposes how arbitrary those borders are - and how often they’re enforced to keep certain kinds of pleasure and certain kinds of performers in their place. If the Stooges are pop, then pop can be abrasive, sexual, and confrontational. If the Stooges are pop, then "accessibility" isn’t the enemy of art; it’s a delivery system.

There’s also a personal, musician-to-musician recognition embedded in the claim: the Stooges weren’t just a scene; they were a sound that traveled. Fahey’s framing treats their influence less like a rock museum relic and more like a living template for impact: a three-minute riot that still behaves like a hit.