Review of Iggy Pop’s new album

Punk, after all, like all popular music, is obsessed with the cult of youth. Punk music defined by generational protest against conservative orders and adolescent energy. Therefore, the question of age is perhaps more sensitive for punk legends than for anyone else.

The American singer Iggy Pop, who with his band The Stooges is one of the pioneers of the genre, probably did not even guess that he would live to be seventy-five years old today. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was notorious for self-destructive gigs where he would roll around in shreds, send beer bottles flying through the air, and add the right punch to rollicking guitar riffs (as recorded on Metallic KO live from The Stooges’ last show in 1974). . He was also able to survive by going far beyond punk.

Just last year, he played over 40 concerts, most of them half-full, singing The Stooges’ hits as well as songs from his solo albums Lust for Life or The Idiot with unceasing vigour, but according to his own words, today he tries to forgive jumping into the audience, even if sometimes he can’t resist .

When talking about Iggy Pop, whose real name is James Newell Osterberg, Jr., there is usually awe at his physical abilities: How can he do that at his age? preference. Much more remarkable are the various musical transformations and positions he has gone through on his solo records in recent years.

Whether he sang French chansons in the style of the famous Jacques Brel, collaborated with electronic producer Oneohtrix Point Never on the title track for the film Good Time by the Safdie brothers, sang covers of the late Leonard Cohen, set Dylan Thomas’s poems to music as on the last solo record Free in 2019 or recorded a melancholic EP with Belgian violinist and composer Catherine Graindorge.

Therefore, his new album Every Loser, which in a way musically sums up Pop’s varied career, is also an event. At the same time, it is not interesting when the singer imitates his youthful energy, as in the opening single Frenzy, but when he honestly talks about aging.

But Iggy Pop’s music was never straightforward. His band, The Stooges, came together in the late 1960s in the bohemian town of Ann Arbor, just 25 miles from automotive Detroit, home to the University of Michigan and home to anti-war protests. The Stooges’ 1969 debut album was produced by John Cale of the Velvet Underground, who combined their bone-sharp rock with avant-garde noise and breathed a heroin-like, repetitive groove into it.

The Stooges often toured with the funk band Parliament, with whom they competed to play louder. Iggy Pop’s solo debut The Idiot was released in 1977 and was heavily influenced by his friendship with David Bowie. He never rebuilt his career as radically as Scott Walker, and he didn’t fully embark on the avant-garde, but he was close to it. Pop’s show Confidential on BBC Radio 6 Music, where he has been broadcasting regularly since 2015, again shows his musical eclecticism, with which he lets the singer FKA Twigs, the rapper Tyler, The Creator or the London jazz experiment Sons of Kemet on the air.

On the new album, he teamed up with producer Andrew Watt, who has a lot of variance, but is not one of the musical visionaries, but rather a reliable craftsman – he participated in the albums of the pop singer Dua Lipa or the last records of Ozzy Osbourne. Watt has more of a sense for the marbleization of rock stars, so he convinced Pop to try to transfer a piece of his past, or concert energy, to the album. For this, he hired Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan or drummer Chad Smith from the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

What makes Pop’s shows unique is his crowd work – you could say he manipulates the audience as if they were his musical instrument. Only on stage does the strength of his personality become apparent – and there is something superhuman about it. On record, it works with embarrassing results, as on the marching-beat Neo Punk track, which verges on self-parody without being entirely clear on its intent.

However, Every Loser is a diverse record and musically jumps between punk and new wave rock, where Pop is now more believable – as in the nervously danceable “dispatch” warehouse The Comments, where it glosses over celebrity and social media culture with humor and insight.

Pop is at his truest when he drops his mask and the music fades. Morning Show’s autobiographical ballad about an elderly radio host is among the most personal songs he ever composed. It is accompanied by a warm steel guitar melody, the so-called hawaiian, and makes his narrative voice stand out.

“The clown you loved is dead,” he announces, and his vocals have the depth and vulnerability of the aforementioned Cohen – and the vocals are only subtly colored by the backing chorus.

“Time is like a skin, it opens and reveals itself.” This song alone makes the Ever Loser album worth listening to – you’ll hear Iggy Pop coming to terms with the passage of time and accepting whatever fate has in store for him.