Legend has it that Jim Morrison’s performance in 1967 at the University of Michigan made one hell of an impression on a young-ish Iggy Pop. Fittingly, he looked more like a Lizard King than Morrison at his most malnourished ever did. While he reinvented punk rock with The Stooges, I am of the opinion that Iggy never sounded better than he did on his solo albums. Ever his debut The Idiot in 1977, Iggy Pop has consistently released solo albums that have defied the artistic consciousness of their respective generations.
For instance, as the rock fraternity celebrated the Glam and Synth wave during the early Eighties, he dropped a bucketload of mid-tempo garage noise anthems through Party, Zombie Birdhouse and Blah Blah Blah – three albums that quietly refused to conform to the tune that everyone else were dancing to. During the early to mid Nineties when everyone and their mothers were listening to radio-friendly alternative rock and squeaky-clean polished grunge, the Godfather of Punk released the frenzied and crude throwback to Seventies – American Caesar and subsequently, Naughty Little Doggie.
I am not entirely sure what genre of music the current generation is salivating over, but I sure as hell know that it has nothing to do with jazz or bossanova. Needles to say, Iggy Pop’s 15th solo album – Préliminaires – is a collection of just that. Inspired by the French novel The Possibility Of An Island (Michel Houellebecq), Préliminaires, I hear, has Iggy in a jazz-like trance with a sea of delicate Dixieland-flavoured rhythm sections for him to drown himself into. Also included is a fantastic cover (hearsay) of the 1940s French classic Les Feuilles Mortes.
“King Of The Dogs” is fucking splendid. One of his finest tracks, I think. It starts off with a swinging-as-Tarzan-on-crack cabaret beat that leads to Iggy telling us, “I’ve got a smelly rear, I’ve got a dirty nose, I don’t want no shoes, and I don’t want no clothes…I’m living like a king of the dogs”. I swear, if Frank Sinatra was cryogenically frozen and then unleashed at a Tom Waits concert, he’d sound just like this.
So that’s Iggy Pop for you. The deranged disco remix of what one would expect of an elder statesman of popular culture. The antithesis of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Conformist. The shaman of artistic hedonism. A crazy, lean, old man who won’t stop till the audience can conceptualize just how crazy he really is.
Iggy Pop – I Wanna Be Your Dog (Live)
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