Iggy Pop Metro, April 16
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Iggy is still with us, having done away with the peanut butter and raw meat, but leaving much of the rest of his act intact, if somewhat more disciplined and structured. The times have caught up with him, and he who once seemed so unutterably bizarre is now smack in the center of mainstream pop-music culture. He’s accepted as one of the avatars of punk rock, Fun House is acknowledged as an enduring classic, and the stage-diving he invented has become an “alternative rock” cliche. And although Iggy has succeeded in transforming himself from the wild, druggy-eyed King of the Slag Heap of the late 60s to a sober, responsible homebody with offstage enthusiasms for Chaucer and vacuuming his apartment, that just makes him seem more interesting, not less.
But in the two or three years since Caesar some door seems to have sprung open in Iggy’s brain and allowed fresh air to pour in. His new Naughty Little Doggie is a focused piece of work, a powerful return to form that makes hackwork like Caesar easy to forgive and forget. The songs on Doggie sound like he worked a lot harder on them; what might otherwise have become long rambling jams and vamps are focused into tightly constructed pop tunes, ten in all, that unapologetically betray Iggy’s enduring connection to the 1960s. “Knucklehead” is his powerhouse rewrite of the Rolling Stones’ “Get Off of My Cloud,” and one section of his “To Belong” sounds remarkably like the “I can’t hide” bridge in the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” I wouldn’t suggest that Iggy appropriated these bits consciously, though it’s possible he did, and at any rate they’re well enough integrated into his compositions that one doesn’t notice until after hearing each song several times. There’s also “Pussy Walk,” in which Iggy revels in the wonderfulness of having a healthy sex drive, and “I Wanna Live,” which lays down the album’s central theme just as nakedly and catchily as you could wish. The band rages and screams, Iggy snarls and croons, and the album clocks out at a concise 40:26, little more than half a CD’s capacity and about the length of a 1960s vinyl LP. It all suggests that Iggy’s concerned less with being “modern” than with sticking to what he knows and does best. Call it cautiously conservative if you like, but I’d rather think that the album’s concision and classicism bespeak the artist’s renewed confidence in a tradition he helped create, a kind of assurance that may be a bit more difficult to maintain when you’re pushing 50.
Does all this life-affirmation stuff mean we should infer that Iggy thinks it’s foolish to commit suicide like, say, Kurt Cobain? Well, not quite. Check what he told the crowd before singing “Look Away,” his new song about the dissipated life and stupid death of the infamous Johnny Thunders: “Sooner or later, everyone has to grow up or die. But I don’t really blame the ones who die, because either way you get fuckin’ nicked up for sure.”
