Iggy’s apartment bursts with signs of wild life. Through the open windows he can hear one of his favorite street sounds–a primal drumbeat from nearby Tompkins Square Park. He’s surrounded by works of Haitian folk art, recently purchased at Sotheby’s. What he likes are the dark themes: tradition-al Christian imagery filtered through an African subconscious. ““That’s called ‘First Communion’,’’ he says, pointing to a large painting of a young girl in a garden. ““She’s getting attacked by a snake and doesn’t particularly like it. ‘Ecch, creepy!’ ’’ He giggles happily. Next he gestures toward a large, colorful portrait of a naked woman. ““She’s Erzulie, the Haitian goddess of love. She corresponds to the Virgin Mary, but she’s not a virgin–she’s promiscuous and jealous and greedy. If you treat her right, she’ll give you love.’’

Translation: he may be genteel, but he hasn’t gone soft. For all his controlled demeanor, Iggy Pop still has his savage side, and he still unleashes it, especially onstage. It’s why he’s still such a model to young punks today. He graced several of this year’s Gen-X-est movies: His soundtrack contributions lent a jagged authenticity to ““Trainspotting.’’ He calls the movie ““the James Bond-ization of the drug culture. They made it exciting with the chases and the music and a little sex. I thought it was a romp.’’ He also acted in ““The Crow: City of Angels’’ and played a backwoods cross-dresser in Jim Jarmusch’s acclaimed ““Dead Man.’’ He’s currently working on the score to ““The Brave,’’ directed by Johnny Depp. But Iggy can’t think of himself as anyone’s hero. ““That icon legend s–t,’’ he says with a shrug, ““that’s creepy.''

What he’s out to prove–to himself, more than anyone else–is that he’s still relevant, that he still has something to say. Like Mick Jagger, he won’t grow old without a fight. But unlike Jagger, he’s managed to keep his primal side intact. His three albums of the ’90s–““Brick by Brick,’’ ““American Caesar’’ and this year’s ““Naughty Little Doggie’’–all have fiery moments; ““Caesar’’ is a brusque and poetic epic, his most ambitious and consistent album since the ’70s. But because he works so much, he’s easy to take for granted. And his clunkers tend to be as loud and attention-grabbing as his successes. ““Naughty Little Doggie’’ has a tune called ““Pussy Walk,’’ an object lesson in, well, objectification. ““I knew as soon as I recorded it: oh, God, here we go,’’ he says. ““But it had to stay on, because it was from a true feeling. It was not articulated in an attractive way, but that was the way it came out. To me, a song is not a speech.''

Iggy’s refusal to self-censor is, in fact, the heart of his esthetic. Born James Osterberg, he grew up in a trailer in Ann Arbor, Mich., an extremely bright, all-American kid with a severe misfit complex. In his late teens he joined up with Michigan’s psychedelic scene, hanging out with self-taught radicals like MC5 manager John Sinclair’s White Panther Party. ““It’s the ’60s in this Midwestern college town, and he’s handing out pamphlets that said, ‘ROCK AND ROLL, DOPE AND F—ING IN THE STREETS’,’’ Iggy recalls with a chuckle. He formed the Stooges with some similarly minded rebel pals, and their sound still influences bands today: a bawdy, gargantuan roar of distorted guitars and tribal beats. ““It made a hell of a lot of sense in Detroit,’’ Iggy says. ““Those were still the days of the big cars. You heard a lot of whoosh, whoosh in Detroit.’'

Signed to Elektra, Iggy devised one of rock’s most visceral and theatrical stage personas. He’d stop at nothing onstage, whether that meant jabbing himself with drumsticks, cutting himself with broken bottles or baring his bloody, naked self. In New York he hooked up with Warhol’s Factory scene, and he happily blows holes in its mystique: ““I thought, ‘None of these people have a future, but he does’,’’ he says. ““Having said that, there were several of them I was really relaxed with. In Michigan I always had to pretend to be more dumb and macho than I was. In New York I could relax.’'

Iggy’s career continuously rose and fell. After the Stooges broke up, he was rescued by David Bowie, who produced two rejuvenating albums in 1977, ““The Idiot’’ and ““Lust for Life.’’ By the early ’80s, he was exhausted from drug abuse. Without a major label contract, he took it upon himself to straighten out. ““The only thing I ever thought might kill me off was clean living. I thought, ‘How am I going to listen to that horrible noise I make without a gram of coke and a couple of double Jack Daniels?’ ’’ With the help of Bowie on another comeback album, 1986’s ““Blah-Blah-Blah,’’ he found a new, young audience.

These days, they keep flocking to him. In the world of prefabbed MTV stars and radio conglomerates, Iggy is the most valuable commodity of all: a free thinker, a loyalist to his own ideas. He keeps that devouring side under wraps when he goes about his daily life, but when it comes time to make music it’s there for him. ““The reality of life is that for an act or a person to prosper, society’s going to demand a primal sacrifice,’’ he says. ““You have to give them something. You can do it onstage, you can do it behind people’s backs. You can do it legal; you can do it against the law. But there’s got to be a string pulled. There has to be something primal, because the world is just not gonna beat a path to your door to give you everything you’ve dreamed of.’’ Iggy’s made the sacrifice, and he’s getting the good life in return.