Iggy Pop is still all ears after all these years
On his new album, the punk legend hears the sounds of life in all its glory. And he’s still filled with energy.
Free Iggy Pop
Caroline International/Loma Vista
We’ve spent the entirety of Iggy Pop’s rock ’n’ roll life poking at his abs, trying to figure out if he’s beyond human. In the public imagination, he’s the maniac Adonis who invented punk without even trying, then celebrated his world-changing achievement by rolling around in broken glass.
He survived, and now he’s 72, which leads us to believe he’s some kind of deity, even when his own lyrics tell us he’s something else. In song, he’s been a wolf, a bear, a snake, a mosquito, a “giant American tyrannosaur,” a lizard, “a laughing hyena run out of breath,” a moose, “a bull mongrel,” “a cartoon cat,” a dog, “your dog,” the “king of the dogs,” and, of course, “a streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm.”
Self-knowledge runs heavy through that lyrical bestiary. Animals live their wildest lives doing whatever they please, but they stay alive by listening.
Iggy has always been listening, even in those deranged moments when he appeared to be flirting with death for our amusement. Each time he infamously rolled his naked torso through broken bottles or globs of Skippy peanut butter, he was just a big, sexy eardrum, totally exposed. Now, having figured out how to listen to modernity with the entirety of his body, he hears everything. It’s his secret legacy. The feral listener.
He’s proving it with Free, a new album that began with deep dives into the jazz of trumpeter of Leron Thomas and the purple hazes that guitarist Sarah Lipstate churns out under the name Noveller. When Pop heard their music, he liked it so much he asked each musician to send some tunes that he could sing along with. In the liner notes, the maestro describes the process as something that “just kind of happened to me.”
He’s still all the way inside this music, though. In 2019, his voice sounds dark and deep, like an empty gas tank. Sometimes it growls, like an empty stomach. But instead of mutating into a hungry animal, Iggy haunts these new songs like a dignified spirit — which might make Free an exposition on death, or transcendence, or both. Or maybe neither. It’s easy to get dizzy when you’re listening to Iggy Pop as closely as he’s listening to the rest of this damaged planet.
We all like to pretend there’s some kind of imaginary wall that separates our bodies from our brains, but Pop has always known better. We absorb the totality of this noisy soundworld with all of our being — which is why the noise of the Stooges, the visionary punk-before-punk band that Pop began marching around the Michigan tundra back in 1967, ended up altering so many body-brains forever.
This was a group that understood the inherent absurdity of rock ’n’ roll, yet still took its tacit mission to purge the dread, boredom and sexual frustration of an entire generation with heroic seriousness.
“I am the world’s forgotten boy,” Pop sneered in 1973, instantly making himself a champion to all contemporaneous weirdos and every iteration of punk to come.
Once the 21st century showed up, he finally began listening for the one thing everyone had been promising him for his entire career: death.
In 2001, he addressed the issue over a strip-club metal riff: “Death is the best, better than all the rest of the dutiful lies in the rock paradise/Losses and wear and the texture of age adds a truth to the heart and a light to the face.”
Eight summers later, heart still thumping, features still aglow, he imagined himself buried deep in the cool dirt. “It’s nice to be dead,” he sang in 2009. “It’s nice to be underground, free of the ugly sounds of life.”
The most extraordinary sound to escape his airways on Free comes during Page, an amorphous ballad that congeals around a vague declaration: “We’re only human, no longer human.”
Those lyrics were written by Thomas, his jazz collaborator, and on paper they read like a lament for our doomed species. But they slosh around differently at the bottom of Pop’s gas tank. His berserk vibrato sounds as if it’s quietly coming loose inside his throat, slipping out of rhythm, or even out of time itself.
The cover of Free shows Pop walking off into the sea, his back turned to us — a svelte, inky silhouette. The image would feel morbid if we didn’t know about his daily dips in Miami’s Biscayne Bay.
He says that swimming every day helps him keep fit, and looking at his time-resistant physique, it’s working. But his mind is swimming, too.
I like to think of Iggy Pop floating in that liquid immensity, happy and alive inside his own body-brain, listening for something that’s still too big to hear, even for him.
In 2019, his voice sounds dark and deep, like an empty gas tank. Sometimes it growls, like an empty stomach.