Iggy Pop
Blah-Blah-Blah

THE REVIEW

It breaks my heart to criticize an Iguana record, but this time I feel the duty to do it, this review has been stuck in my throat for a while.

It was 1986 and Iggy was going through one of his many troubled periods, he surely couldn’t figure out which way to turn. As in many other occasions, his lifelong friend David Bowie stepped in to try to pull him out of a situation where Iggy was completely lost. Thus, the attempt to transform one of the most instinctive rock 'n' roll animals into just another almost easy-listening singer for the charts. Economically, the attempt was successful because Iggy Pop had with this album one of the few true sales successes of his career.

Artistically, however, the record is a disaster. It was practically as if Iggy Pop was trying to imitate David Bowie who was trying to be Iggy Pop. In short, a mess from which the only song truly worth saving is a thrilling cover of Jerry Lee Lewis, "Real wild child (I'm the wild one)", strategically placed at the beginning of the album. The rest are all compositions by both, but the White Duke's hand is TOO prominent for it to seem like an Iguana record. An utterly colossal mistake, because Iggy has always been great only when he could be nothing else but himself and not a (poorly achieved, by the way) clone of someone else.

Yes, here and there one can, with effort, hear something that somewhat recalls the past fury and those that, fortunately, will return soon enough, but here Iggy's performance is extremely forced and, objectively, doesn’t make him look good. In certain tracks, you can even hear heavy electronics (the title-track), in others ("Isolation", "Shades") Iggy even reaches an almost kitsch vocality, and that is not the best from him. As the album plays on, one becomes disheartened by a big missed opportunity, indeed in other instances the help of David Bowie had proven to be very beneficial even artistically (see “The Idiot” and “Lust For Life”), but this time it's absolutely not the case.

The thought of Iggy Pop trying to transform himself into a tender crooner almost suitable for a suit and tie gives me chills. It’s an absolute paradox, and fortunately, after this, he never tried it again. No offense, Iggy.