IGGY POP – FREE (2019)

The opening paragraph of Pitchfork’s review of Iggy Pop‘s latest album Free (2019) points to the sad mental problems and painfully insufficient intellectual capacities of our time’s people. We are still waiting in vain for the last hopeful twists of the West on its way to decline, while brains and imagination have already collectively been parked on clouds and from there unintentionally declare the cultural bankruptcy with their ramblings:

„Years ago, the world tacitly accepted there was a line separating Jim Osterberg and his feral creation Iggy Pop. Osterberg devised the street-walking cheetah persona of Iggy Pop as a way to tap into his primal urges, but the idea that he was playing a role only came into focus when he managed to survive to tell tales about his hedonism. At this point, decades after his image softened enough so he could score a Top 40 hit and sell travel tickets on TV, the split personality is so accepted it nearly seems like a cliché: Whether he’s on or off stage, he plays the part that’s expected.“

We are witnessing Stephen Thomas Erlewine’s struggle to combine remnants of the age of irony with the New Objectivity, a restrictive technique with which lifeless zombies shield off every possible passion, radicality, and danger in thinking and writing. The Iggy Pop / Jim Osterberg distinction has been a bit overstretched by now, and people referring to Iggy Pop as Mr. Osterberg are very likely the same people who generally drop the ‘Rolling’ in Stones to signal a superior familiarity in a repulsingly jovial manner. Needless to mention that they often know nothing beyond their encyclopedic knowledge and lack both, instinct and feeling: it is quite an achievement in delusion to state that the ever authentic Iggy Pop is playing a role or exercising in bowie-esque schizophrenia. It is a lack of capacity to accept an existence like Iggy who combines it all since 1969: charm, meanness, intellect, primitivity, worldliness, hyper-sexuality, vulnerability, wildness, violence, and playfulness.

But back to Free, Iggy Pop’s 18^th album and his first after his supposedly last, 2016’s highly successful Post Pop Depression. Yet, it is not his first sign of activity since then- that was last year’s collaboration with Underworld when Iggy contributed the vocals to the electronic music duo’s Teatime Dub Encounters (2018). Therefore his new album Free comes as no big surprise for fans, since he’s doing the same here: lending his voice to other artists’ songs , in this case those of the ambient guitarist Noveller and jazz trumpeter Leron Thomas.

„If I had wings, I wouldn’t do anything beautiful and transcendent“ was the brilliant first line on Teatime Dub Encounters, a classical, irresistible Iggy- „You dog!“ you wanna shout at him with a smirk while surrendering to him completely. But since there were no wings spotted on Iggy during his summer festival circuit, there’s still hope for beauty and transcendence, and truly, Free provides some of that.

The opener ‘Free‘ needs just a few seconds to transport you into an ethereal and mellow state. There’s imperfection and self-imposed vulnerability on it that carries through about half of the album. Songs to tame bubbling, grand emotions and have a relaxed look at the sky in nocturnal solitude, with the connotation of all language and searching being distilled into the only four words Iggy is singing: „I wanna be free.“ It is wonderful. Unlike most critics I do not think that Leron Thomas’ trumpet sounds like Miles Davis, but the mood resembles that of Chet Baker in Ballads For Two (1979, with Wolfgang Lackerschmid). Like the best moments on Free, Ballads For Two is a wonderful record that is not guiding you towards a certain mood or feeling, but purely inwards.

What reveals itself after the opener is not flawless or consistent, and unfortunately the album is being marketed with a bad single choice as concession to our shallow times: James Bond is weak and silly, a cheap thrill unworthy of the American legend from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Nothing to come alive here, it just makes no sense that Iggy Pop sings about a woman that instead of wanting to be your dawg „wants to be your James Bond / she might stand in your way / but she’ll still save your day“. Nico is turning in her grave and one thinks wistfully of the times when Iggy sang about fucking his sophisticated German Nazi Girlfriend among his books of ancient lore. He seems lost on James Bond, which unintentionally reveals the new beguiling emptiness in today’s female promises of excitement, which in the end are staged outbursts of controlled and cute ‘bad-assery’. A scam. A total turn-off. Give us back the European perversion.

On Free, good songs are followed by rather bad ones, whereby songs like Sonali, Glow In The Dark, and Page stand out. Like most of the lyrics they are not written by Iggy, but it is his gentle yet powerful interpretation which makes them rise from the sheets they were written on. He grabs you with his performance of words and at the same time makes those sound rudimentary, not in a sense of half-complete, but essentially stripped down like a focused stream-of-conciousness curated by Iggy’s own experience and wisdom, by his very own voice.

Iggy’s curation is one of an existential critique and fatigue wisdom, determined and unagitated „Stay in your lane… servants wills serve and kings will rule… we’re only human, no longer human“ are fragments that will touch you deeply if listened in the right way: late at night, alone, exhausted by life and hypnotized by your ceiling.

Page lives from a contemplative and conciliatory mood, a song by the knower addressing anemic searchers and the loudness of an age of indignation. Every line bears munition that will never be shot, since the truth has revealed itself to Iggy: it is senseless, the forces we are struggling with or fighting against are stronger. And more than being senseless: Iggy has done his part to fight them, with the pure nature of his existence, and he is defiant to take the assignments of guilt by a dis-rooted and visionless generation that is unable to act:

And I’m to you just an artifact,
and still you blame me for the Soundtrack
All I can do is sigh, all you can do is cry
Cause wolves and sheep do rest
not side by side still they rest

Eight songs into the album its finest moment comes, ready to kill you in a tender embracement.

„We are the people without right
We are the people who have known only lies and desperation
We are the people without a country, a voice, or a mirror
We are the crystal gaze returned through the density and immensity of a berzerk nation“

We Are The People is a masterpiece in cosmic insight and despair. Accompanied only by nocturnal trumpet and piano, Iggy delivers Lou Reed’s pure and undistracted inventory of the human state in a calm and determined way. He is the vulnerability machine that doesn’t lie to you and gives you no illusions, and for about three minutes there is no escape from the truth hitting you like a hammer. The song doesn’t tear your eyes up gently, no, it makes you sob in a sudden rush, muscles and bones relaxing in terror, leading to a complete collapse of every day composure and illusions.

If it doesn’t make you be still for a moment and stare at the ceiling, paralyzed by the unexpected touch of a forgotten and buried part… if you cannot resist to occupy those lines for your personal rage and agenda, then this song is not for you- we are the people who are desperate beyond emotion because it defies thought- because this song cannot be occupied: it is the universal blues, intangible and almost unspeakable, but ready to be carried across the world by the wind like it used to carry old wisdom. But how does the wind carry the songs in a modern world where nothing naturally reverberates anymore? – „We are the victims of the untold manifesto of the lack of depth of full and heavy emptiness“

Free is an album where Iggy lends his voice to other artists’ music and lyrics, and he does it in the classic tradition of a crooner like Sinatra, by whom he is admittedly inspired*. It is a testament of a fact most of the people overlook about the wild child: that he has a wonderful voice and baritone that ages exquisitely. It is an underrating that he shares with David Bowie, with both artists various noble and wild fascinations distracting most listeners from their basic gift: their goddamned beautiful voices. And it is this voice that gives Free sense, with Iggy ennobling other artists works and making them truly come alive for the first time with his innate instrument and interpretation. And he is not walking old paths that have been walked a million times before by singing standards, but defining the modern crooner who’s existence is an instant dilemma once he is born: while he is modern and a beginning, he is also an end, because there will only be one: Iggy.

by Saliha Enzenauer

*Read Iggy Pop’s review of a Frank Sinatra album this Thursday on Vinylwriters.com