References in Popular Culture

This is a list of mostly bizarre/strange references to John in popular culture.

Iggy Pop’s song “Trollin'”

Trollin’, the first song off Iggy Pop’s 2007 album Weirdness is, according to an interview with MTV, in some way dedicated to John. Pop was irritated when he read Q Magazine’s May 2006 cover feature on the Red Hot Chili Peppers; where John claimed that he would be monk once he stops making music and that Anthony Kiedis would be 60 and chasing girls around Hollywood, as Pop was supposedly doing at the time.

The lines

“You can’t tell me this is not a suave thing to do
You can’t tell me ’cause I know you’d do it too”

are referring to this interview bit:

Fanatical as ever, he has embraced new things: health food, prayer, meditation. He plans to throw himself into the latter when the RHCP finally disband. “I’m different to Anthony. I don’t want to be Iggy Pop. Iggy’s a god but I don’t want to be 60 and chasing women round L.A. I want to be prepared for after this. I want to explore myself through meditation. I’ll be a monk. I want to learn Hebrew. I think learning a scared language based on numbers would be good for my perception of existence. (source)

And the album’s lead-off track, “Trollin’ ” is about how he “picked up” his girlfriend, and the words to the song were inadvertently inspired by the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ John Frusciante.

“He gave an interview to Q magazine, and he was ragging on Anthony [Kiedis, the Peppers’ frontman], and said, ‘Well, I don’t want to be Iggy Pop, I don’t want to be some 60-year-old guy running around L.A. trying to pick up chicks,’ ” Pop recalled. “He said he wanted to read the Kabbalah and be a scholar, and I’m thinking, ‘Sh–.’ I was really pissed off at first, and then I thought, ‘Yeah, but he’s right. I’m a 60-year-old guy riding around L.A., looking for chicks.’ But then I was like, ‘Wait a minute! I haven’t done that since I was 53!’

“I wanted to write a letter to the editor because I was really mad,” he concluded. “But I saved it up for this song instead.”
Pop, in an interview for MTV)

Ichigo Machimaro

In the anime [Japanese animated series] Ichigo Mashimaro (Strawberry Marshmallow), filled with numerous references to music, one of the lead characters is Ana Coppola, a British girl living in Japan. She has a dog named Frusciante. He’s fluffy and white, most resembling an ungroomed Pekingese, Pomeranian or Puli.

Crayon Shin Chan

In the anime Crayon Shin Chan, at some point, this appears:

Rebecca Black

The (in)famous 2011 viral sensation, then-13-year-old Rebecca Black’s music video for the song “Friday” contains a reference to one of the songs off Shadows Collide With People, Wednesday’s Song.