Chrissie Hynde — Coolest Of Them All

Iggy Pop was asked a few years back to describe the rock star life. How was it to be young, free, talented, admired and influential? You must have done some amazing things, said the interviewer. Iggy did a quick scan over a career that made him one of the most famous names in rock ‘n’ roll and he said yeah, absolutely. Iggy then proceeded to recall the night he stayed up all night and drank a bottle of Jack Daniel’s with Chrissie Hynde before they headed over to the Empire State Building at 6 am.

You get to stay up all night with Chrissie Hynde, that’s just something you remember. Hynde is the greatest, toughest and coolest of all the surviving female rock stars. Hynde’s got a new album out, Stockholm–it’s shockingly her first solo effort. There has never been another band like the hard charging and subtle Pretenders, where she made her name. And there is no singer on the scene who fires such jagged arrows at listeners’s hungry hearts. Hynde is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, of course. And she stands up for the shit she believes in, getting arrested for protesting leather sales at the GAP a few years back. Chrissie Hynde is the real, real thing. To paraphrase Shakespeare, we won’t be seeing her like again any time soon. That leather could have been, you know, Chinese plastic: