lost for life

Sunday Herald, The, Jun 17, 2001 by David Keenan

Rock Iggy pop Beat em Up (Virgin) HHH"I'M a street-walking cheetah with a hide full of napalm, I'm a runaway son of the nuclear age, Bam!" So Iggy Pop announced himself on Search & Destroy, the centre point of The Stooges still blistering third album, 1972's succinctly titled Raw Power.

Since then he has undoubtedly become the byword for high-energy rock'n'roll, for teenage neuroses made grandiose via a killer cocktail of testosterone and amphetamine. Stooges live shows were brutal rituals of self-abasement where he would routinely slash his torso with broken glass, smear himself in peanut butter and goad audience members to violence - all to a pulverising two-chord soundtrack.

However, they weren't built to last, and since imploding sometime in the early 1970s, Pop has enjoyed a schizophrenic solo career that's taken him from the metallic austerity of his collaborations with David Bowie, The Idiot and Lust For Life, through to 1999's Avenue B, a beat classic that pitted his spoken-word reminiscences against some subtly noir-styled soundtracks.

Yet looking back at his post-Stooges career some worrying patterns emerge. With every great leap forward - 1977's Lust For Life, 1982's Zombie Birdhouse - comes the inevitable retraction, such as 1979's New Values from Blah, Blah, Blah from 1986. Iggy Pop seems to constantly pull back just when he's on the verge of breaking into some new, creatively rewarding territory; it's almost like he can't decide which balcony he should be playing to. And so we get Beat Em Up, the inevitably messy follow-up to Avenue B, a wreck of a record that attempts to placate all of his various audiences, from the college rock of Jerk through a title track that sounds like Limp Bizkit and even a couple of Stooges soundalikes.

Lyrically he's primarily fuelled by misanthropic rage and as a result he's often hilariously funny, especially during the opening Mask where he attempts to rhyme off every sub-cultural group that he despises and eventually gives up in frustration, simply damning everybody in LA for licking ass. Yet Avenue B worked precisely because it felt like Pop had found some kind of still place to reflect, like he was no longer charging through every day at 100mph in the fear that it would be his last. Here he seems in danger of becoming a caricature, the emotionally-mangled rock survivor with a body like a chewed kebab, still spitting venom. The introspection is kept to a minimum and even then it feels clumsily token, no more so than in Football where he painfully extends a "life is like a football game" metaphor through countless verses of tenuous, Forrest Gump-like wisdom, in the process rendering one of the album's musical highlights totally unlistenable. While it would be wrong to demand some hackneyed notion of maturity from an artist like Iggy Pop - that's never been what he's about - what is missing is some kind of focused vision, the kind that only comes with age and self-belief. As it is it feels more like he's blindly casting a net in the hope that he'll rein in some - any! - stray demographic. We may no longer demand blood but we do expect heart, soul and balls.

David Keenan