With this month's release of , Iggy Pop has entered his 34th year of recording music. Still heroin-thin with ghostly silver hair and knotted veins stretched over bone, Iggy is a barely covered skeleton. And he has been recording music that sounds like he looks for over three decades.
For years the punk rock faithful turned their shows into Iggy Pop's acts of onstage masochism, without the honesty the Stooges played with. But it wasn't just the show that bands kept appropriating, it was the drunken disorder of Iggy's sound. Brash and lewd, disorganized and raunchy, The Stooges' self-titled debut put raw emotions over looming, swaggering chords. The beauty wasn't technical skill or sophistication; was a classic by conveying feeling without skill, sophistication or sobriety.
Iggy Pop was knighted Godfather of punk, a title his work with The Stooges clearly earned him. Punk, too, was a drunken barrage of chords. But, on this side of the shark, creating punk undermines him. Iggy never got credit for creating the alternative scene-for the grunge culture he was patriarch of. With the soft verse/loud chorus dynamic of \Lust for Life,"" the base sound of ""I Want to be Your Dog,"" it is no wonder that Kurt Cobain's unreleased and unrecorded songs were handed to his hero, Iggy.
He became a hero of a lead singer without the ability to write a song-the stigma of Eric Clapton's guitar. Iggy was best with The Stooges creativity, and later with David Bowie's songwriting. Bowie used Iggy Pop as a proving ground, handing him songs he saw as too experimental: the rambling ""Passenger"" and the late blooming ""Lust for Life,"" recorded 20 years before it hit the charts. His solo work without guidance is largely uninspired, and a recent album written with pseudo-Stooges, The Trolls, could only anger his fan base.
So it was with great enthusiasm that critics, musicians and fans, many younger than Iggy Pop's career, awaited , with its five promised tracks with the surviving Stooges and collaborations with modern-day followers like the pop punk Green Day and the indie-electronica Peaches who showcased Iggy on their last album. Saccharin punk band Sum 41 also appears. But where are the grunge and alternative and Stooges throwback musicians who owe Iggy, the Chris Cornells and the Scott Weilands and the Jack Whites? Where is David Bowie? Iggy deserves more than cheap punk exploiters, last year's pop-punks and returned favors. Where is all this industry owes him?
The album itself is a success, the best Iggy Pop has produced in over a decade. The Ashton brothers-the remaining Stooges-lead four out of five of their collaborations with Iggy Pop into classic Stooge style. ""Skull Ring"" sounds as though it came off of . Sum 41's song, unfortunately sounds like a Sum 41 song. The album's stand out is the Green Day effort, a sloppy and vaguely dissonant ""Superbabe,"" which shows more potential in Green Day than the Top 40 albums they manufacture. Although the tracks which involve Iggy & The Trolls are not quite there, they are a marked improvement over last years floundering .
is an album of drunken swagger and poorly affixed notes. And it will reunite his fans with the Iggy pop we love.
jhuchill@students.wisc.edu
