Iggy Pop News

Iggy Pop is on his knees, prostrating himself to a Texas audience illuminated by the pale glow of cell phones and digital cameras. A microphone cord is braced between his teeth like a bone, and his hands hang limply, palms down, beneath his chin, like he's begging. Camera flashes are rippling across his face and down a bare torso which still looks like a tangled mass of muscle and chewed wire — a battleground between the inevitabilities of age and the restorative powers of fitness. With the wire in his mouth, it almost looks as if he's being electrocuted. But Stooges fans know this pose: Iggy wants to be someone's dog.

In a way, he is.

Thrty-nine years ago, in March of 1968, The Psychedelic Stooges played their first show at Detroit's Grande Ballroom. Iggy Pop showed up in white makeup, a maternity smock, golf shoes and a home-fashioned aluminum afro wig, with his buttonless pants falling off and his eyebrows shaved, so that sweat ran directly into his eyes and quickly began to swell them shut. By contrast, the first U.S. show of this new, reincarnated Stooges tour marks the end of South by Southwest, Austin's annual melange of rock critics, credentialed indie bands, and industry insiders. This is either ironic or entirely appropriate, because most of the songs on their new album are about how Iggy Pop despises these interest groups.

Held in the open-air venue behind Stubb's Barbeque, the show is open to the public, but it's largely packed with laminated music types who've shown for a private party sponsored by Esquire magazine. Most of these VIPs hang over a wooden balcony above the stage, sipping drinks as if they're watching a tiger prowl a subterranean pit at the zoo. To their great delight, Iggy will spend equal time waving at and flipping them off. Which reminds me: The latest Stooges album is called "The Weirdness." Like all of The Stooges album titles, it's a good one, simple and true to its origins. The Stooges aren't a particularly great band anymore, but they're an overwhelmingly relevant one, and while the album is lousy, it's one of the most interesting things they've ever made. These are complicated things to explain. But then again, so is Iggy Pop.

Rationally speaking, in fact, Iggy Pop doesn't quite add up. He's articulate and self-aware, but he's also a borderline psychotic who has carved his chest with glass and smeared himself with peanut butter. He's bracingly honest, but almost everything he says is a lie. He is a (perhaps unwitting) racist by any sensible standards — couching his adoration of "black" music in socialized notions of "primitivism" and "natural ability" — but his longtime girlfriend is Nigerian and all his heroes are either bluesman or jazz musicians. He's 60, but he's also in his phallic stage — who else could sing a line like "my ---- is turning into a tree" at this point in their life? He's Iggy Pop, and he's also James Osterburg. He's Iggy, but he's also Pop. Iggy Pop is an enigma wrapped in a riddle, but the only universally accepted observation about his music is that its power lies in its simplicity.

If you ran any of this by him, he'd probably just laugh at you.

"Once we decided that we were gonna make money dominating the world, first thing we did was throw away the good American music, the blues and hillbilly music," Pop says over the phone a few weeks after his show. "We gave it away. We pitched it to the Europeans and they came back and totally destroyed our music industry with it. Even Elvis tried to make a last stand for it, and they laughed at him. That was the big reaction in the urban community, urban in the old sense — Madison Avenue, Fifth Avenue — they laughed him off and basically since then it's been trivialized and codified. It's supposed to be a guy singing about his troubles in a nice suit in a bar with $15 drinks, somewhere for oldies acts. But as a form and attitude it's still the only one with any real balls to it. When (The Stooges) got back together, I noticed Ron and Scott had picked up over the years a tremendous authority in their playing. I said, 'Jeez, some of these grooves you're getting, you sound like a couple of old black guys. I mean that in a complimentary way.' They'd say, 'Yeah, we're living like a couple of old black guys too.' That suggested to some possibilities here along those lines — like with "She Took My Money." That's archetypal — it happens. I'm not gonna get all boo-hoo, ya know? It happens with relationships between men and their women, unless the guy is a better pimp than I am."

Generally, that's really how Iggy Pop talks. Everything he says seems completely insightful and completely insane.

Musically, though, those contradictions have helped Pop relentlessly position himself as being "outside" of everything — as "the world's forgotten boy" — a middle-class white kid who couldn't fit in with the "fraternity men" of America, and who, like all the great minstrels of rock 'n' roll, projected those troubled suburban fantasies of escape onto the rhythms, forms, and feelings of a black music tradition he could only ultimately mime across a fracture of social incomprehension. The synthesis of those two irreconcilable worlds became Iggy Pop, a being whose timeless appeal, like the Blues, was founded in the feeling of not belonging anywhere.

Mainly, though, Pop used the blues as a template for conveying large emotions with simple words. The music itself, with its crunchy, surgically precise guitar strut and metronomic drumming, made crudeness, volume, repetition, and energy into a religion, and it spoke to private experiences whose universality lay in their intimacy: lust, anger, loneliness, inertia, and, above all, boredom. He could load a line as simple as "I'm so messed up, I want you here" with immense feeling, but now and again he could also floor you with a perfect rock couplet: "I'm a streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm," he sang on "Search and Destroy." "I'm the runaway son of a nuclear A-bomb."

Thus, the first three Stooges albums contain some of the most genetically perfect rock songs ever made. More than anything else, The Stooges music was beautifully, impossibly, viscerally mindless in a way that's all but impossible to capture in the Information age — a time in which those private experiences are obliterated by connectivity and information, and where it's virtually impossible for an artist to create something without being paralytically conscious of what type of artist he is and what type of art he's making.

And that's just for the people who aren't famous.

"The Weirdness" deals with The Stooges being subjected to those same postmodern conditions, and its overarching theme — if not money — is that Iggy Pop doesn't make any sense as a postmodern artist. He's too smart to write with the primitivism that made his music great, he's too self-aware of his symbolic importance to not respond to it in his art, and like all rock legends, fame has necessarily narrowed the lens and the privacy of his experiences. "A little knowledge," Lester Bangs wrote in his 1973 essay "Of Pop Pies, and Fun," "can be a dangerous thing." It isn't a question of vanity, really. Iggy still writes plainly and simply about his life. But there's nothing private or intimate or universal about being Iggy Pop at age 60, which seems to be exactly what frustrates him. For Iggy, things are mostly just surreal.

So "The Weirdness" is still music made from the outside, but Iggy's new interior landscape is that space where iconic fame and accelerated culture intersect: a world of "ATM"s and "Greedy Awful People," of "critics" and "TV rock stars," where the ghosts of Frank Zappa and Chuck Berry mill among Dr. Phil's. "I'm so sad and lonely, baby," Iggy moans, "cause I can't live among my class." (But whose class?) When he sings, "I can't tell whether I'm dead or having fun," from "ATM," it's probably the most honest moment of the album.

Even songs which ostensibly deal with more classic Stooges subject matter — picking up women, women who take your money, and, um, women who run off with a "Mexican Guy" — are riddled with images of Iggy the artist: his career, his legacy, and his judgments of modern rock music. "I've played with rockers and I've played with mods" Iggy yowls in "Trollin," a song about picking up chicks. "Rock critics wouldn't like us at all." "The leaders of rock don't rock," he opines in "ATM." "This bothers me quite a lot." Actually, the best evidence of this album's postmodernity may be the sheer number of times it uses the word "rock." Even the guitar parts seem to be trying to keep up with the speed, forswearing that old crisp swagger for speed and density. Given how aware he is of what his band is supposed to mean, it's no wonder that the album's stabs at real provocation, the old Stooges mystique, mostly come off as self-parody. When Iggy tells us his "idea of fun is killing everyone" (in a chorus, no less, with his voice straining to keep up with the Ashetons' brawling instruments) it's really more sad and funny than disturbing. Other times, they'll just lean on race-and-religion baiting. "When it's a black girl you can't resist," Iggy sings, "it's the end of Christianity." Uh, what?

"My general take on American music since 1969," Pop says, "is that it's just getting stiffer and people are getting more uptight — audience, performance and palace guard. It's all, 'What does it all mean? Do we do this or that?' I'll get e-mails or proposals from a charity that wants help, and they now have professional people pitch it to you: 'I'm sure you're aware of the marketing potential. CMP is huge in today's world, as I'm sure you're aware of.' That's sad. The west is not gonna save itself through marketing potential any more than the east did through collective farming. These are sad things. They upset me."

By any standards, The Stooges are playing a great show tonight in Austin. Both the songs and Iggy's voice sound stronger live than they do on the album — as if the band needs other beings to provoke to sound vital. Insanely, every now and again Iggy will still dive head first off the lip of the stage into the middle of his audience, and when he does, though you can only hear his voice, you can track his movements through the crowd by displaced energy, the way one might follow an animal through tall grass. It's always been a thrilling part of the show, but watching a 60-year-old man do it lends a horrible new degree of suspense and relief.

This is presumably the type of thing critics are talking about when they call the Stooges career a tale "of lies, legends, half-truths, drug fueled lunacy, and wax-museum amounts of after-the-fact nostalgia." But it's easy to idealize Iggy Pop: He may be the last remaining rock 'n' roll idiot, a symbol of that prelapsarian moment when lies, legends and half-truths were what made rock fun — when it was still too wonderfully silly and stupid and mindless to even consider the psychotic notion that playing a character would threaten one's artistic "integrity" or "authenticity." There's Iggy Pop, screaming a single line from the end of "L.A. Blues" — three words that only appear once in the recording, but which he's now repeating over and over. "I AM YOU," he's yelling, like a mantra. "I AM YOU."

It could also be a plea.

"When punk began to be a genre, people were going to go out and try to mine it," Pop says. "All of the better groups, like the Ramones and The Sex Pistols, were very artificial. These were highly artificial groups. The Sex Pistols, these guys took pains to tell people that it was all a con: That was the thing: 'Don't listen to us.'"

"The top rockers," Bangs wrote, "have a mythic aura around them, 'the superstar,' and that's a basically unhealthy state of things. In fact, it's the very virus that's (messing) up rock, a subspecies of the virus which infects our culture from pop stars to politics, and which The Stooges uncategorically oppose as an advance platoon in a nearing war ... What we need are more rock stars willing to make fools of themselves, to absolutely jump off the deep end and make the audience embarrassed for them if necessary, so long as they have not one shred of dignity or mythic corona left ... It takes courage to say, 'See, this is all a sham, this whole show and all its floodlit drug-jacked realer-than-life trappings, and the fact that you are out there and I'm up here means not the slightest thing.'"

Maybe that's the silver lining of "The Weirdness," if you're looking for it: However pathetic Iggy can sound, perhaps this is the last flaky scale of mythic corona or dignity drifting heroically to the floor. But if this album describes a tragedy, it's that Iggy can't make an idiot of himself anymore, as hard as he might try. However desperately he may try to meet his audience on their own terms, to rid himself of that baggage, he's now up against a supersonic structure which may eternally, inevitably preserve him as a rock icon — a structure which requires new methods of madness.

"No fun to be alone," Iggy Pop is singing in Austin. But the crowd, pawing at his arms and screaming into his microphone, has long since rushed the stage.