Iggy Pop is a changed man. But that’s old news because he has been like that for quite a while now. He’s done with drugs and insults on stage as well as making a PB and blood sandwich out of himself as a part of the act. All this eccentricity has gone down into the records of punk music history together with his infamous band Iggy and the Stooges.
Personally, I’m not the number one fan of Iggy Pop and the knowledge I have about him is quite limited. I adore his first two albums, The Idiot and Lust for Life, both from 1977, together with some songs from New Values (1978). I tried to read a biography “Open up and Bleed” by Paul Trynka from which I have learned that he was as much of an exemplary student in high school as he was an extravagant frontman for the Stooges. I also listened to some episodes of his radio show “Iggy Confidential” on BBC Radio 6 Music where he serves up a sonic cocktail consisting of different genres. What I have learned is that he’s not some old saggy-tummy grandpa still trying to stay at the peak of MDMA kick. He is James Newell Osterberg Jr., a high-brow with witty humor, well-respected old punk with kooky histories to tell. Man’s a legend, what else can I say. Now that David Bowie and Lou Reed are lost, I would like to take Iggy Pop to someplace where the mortality of human nature couldn’t lay a finger on him. Just like big scandals about his affairs with underage girls and kink for Nazi aesthetics didn’t manage to smash his career to smithereens. Oh, you’re unfamiliar with this? Well, because nobody really seems to talk about that. But even though the cancel culture didn’t point their bony fingers at Iggy and I, personally, have nothing but respect for the guy, I’m still wondering how did he manage to escape all this? Is it because of his current mature-sophisticated Iggy Pop version which has been around for almost more than a decade?
If you looked at his Spotify page, the last album marked with the “Parental Advisory” label dates back all the way to 2003. There are a lot of anthologies, re-releases of old live recordings, and compilations from yesteryears up until now. In 2016 he joined the powers with Josh Homme and Dean Fertita from the Queens of the Stone Age and Matt Helders from Arctic Monkeys in creating the album Post Pop Depression. Even though it does sound like something that one would expect from Iggy, it’s not the most Iggy Pop album. I even doubt if the album would sound anything different if Iggy was replaced by Alex Turner — that’s how much it’s not that Iggy! However, the most mentionable changes in Iggy Pop’s oeuvre are his two half-francophone albums, namely Preliminaires (2009) and Apres (2012). Not only does the old punk show his French skills in some of the songs, but also the sound of the albums invites you to pour a glass of wine and wiggle it in your hands like a true wine connoisseur instead of downing the bottle, smashing it to the wall and using parts of it to get yourself bleed.
To place his latest album, Free (2019), in a specific category of Iggy Pop’s discography is rather a challenge. Here Iggy Pop is free of the labels he has accumulated for himself throughout all the years. Instead of piling the raw energy he had during the days of punk, now he rather recites the poems by Lou Reed and Dylan Thomas, “We are the people” and “Do not go gentle into that good night” respectively. “Free” and “The Dawn” fit perfectly together as opening and closing tracks, just as much as they go perfectly along with the album cover: a silhouette of Iggy going gently into that good sea, colored by the melancholy evoking blue and the sky on the breach of dawn. However, Iggy Pop doesn’t fully shy away from the energy which, apparently, there’s still some left in him. Songs like “Loves missing” and, especially, “Dirty Sanchez” are as if the young and hidden Iggy Pop is trying to break through and say: HEY, I’m still here, and I sure as hell can make some noise! But the most noise which is being produced comes out not from the main man, but from a jazz trumpeter Leron Thomas and shoegaze-inspired guitarist Noveller.
To rate Free as “I do (or not) like it” seems like a troublesome task to do. It sure is different and more than half of it I would rather use as a lullaby before going to sleep than something to keep me awake throughout the day. But don’t take it as a bad thing. To write the album down as one of his irrelevant records just because it doesn’t please the stereotypical image of Iggy Pop throwing dance moves like Ian Curtis on a verge of his epileptic fits is an attitude of shortsightedness. Taking into account the changes that Iggy has dared to go to during the last decade of his 44 years long career, is rather applaudable. He is an example of basic human nature which slowly gets accustomed to the inevitable aging over the years. The things he has done in the past are not the only features that define who Iggy Pop is.
If you never heard before of Iggy Pop, then putting Free next to his habit of using Jewish girls (to quote one of the Ashton brothers’ from the Stooges) and having sex with Sable Starr, the underage queen of the groupie scene, would be close to impossible. Needless to say, Free doesn’t go along with Iggy Pop’s long time ago hurled racial epithets to an audience member only to provoke a fight, a concussion given to a woman by throwing watermelon at her, or showing off his little (or big, I can’t say much about that) friend countless times. And that’s only a summarized list of things he has done in the past. But Iggy Pop is still going on, and, even more so, he appeared together with Tyler, The Creator, and A$AP Rocky in a Gucci commercial (do you still remember the already mentioned racial epithets?). Is this some sort of a loophole that Iggy managed to go through unnoticeably, or is this a status of a legend that grants him the case to be closed?
One might say, “Well, the times have changed,” but it’s not like the social justice police really cares about that. However, I’m also not going to say that he should be put on the cancel culture trial. What I’m rather trying to do here is to show that the artists who the cancel culture turns into almost “unpersons” from George Orwell’s “1984”, are just as filthy as the legends which have brought punk, rock, jazz… — you name it! — to where it is now. Instead of catching the artists like the most wanted criminals, we should be aware of what we are consuming and filter out the details which don’t go along with us personally. And only then, as Iggy crooned in the opening song of the album, we can all be free.
