Iggy Pop
The Idiot

THE REVIEW

An artist in today's rock world is like a clown.
They powder their cheeks, put on a wig, and off they go, on stage.
If the act is liked, they will receive smiles and laughs of approval from the audience; otherwise, they will only hear the sound of their own breathing, wondering "why?" something didn't work out.
Today, Iggy Pop falls into this category. A man in his sixties, exhausted, overexploited.
The more one tries to dig into those immortal facial muscles that adorn his gaze, the more one wonders if at any point in his existence he ever had the opportunity to appear less tense, less animalistic with himself and his image.
The incarnation of a neurotic balance grotesquely projected from face to face, with the progress of the iconoclastic generations we well know.

Not a human being. Not a "rock star".
A colorless image.
Made of multiple non-existences counterbalanced by its hypothetical "charisma".
A mummy. That's what.
A relic celebrated at the base of putrid Hollywood festivals where plastic (and silicone) becomes the queen of carefully muted and constructed smiles.
Morgue parties where career-driven managers, with a bottle of Crystal in hand, study new concepts on exploiting museum pieces like him, toasting to the release of autobiographies related to him, praying he does not rediscover a passion for heroin.

No, no, no. Iggy Pop is not this.
Perhaps now that he is sixty it may seem so, because he has artistically resigned, leaving everything in the hands of a son who tells him how he should dress (applies only to pants, naturally).
But there was a time when he decided to challenge himself, to take risks. At the risk of losing everything he had already lost in the Stooges. Himself.

The opportunity is called "The Idiot".

In 1977, tired of people, money, and consumerist America, Iggy heads to Europe: destination Berlin.
Awaiting him is an old friend named David Bowie, who cares deeply about Iggy.
Berlin is not New York, nor Pasadena or San Diego, and Iggy notices this from the color of the sky and the smell of snow enveloping the Brandenburg city, but the atmosphere is just what he needs. Something an ocean away from the Stooges and the damn slobbery rock & roll. Days pass, one after another, and with the snow come ideas.
Having asked for and obtained Bowie's collaboration and that of some "colleagues" of the latter, Iggy locks himself in the sparse and chilly recording "bunker" owned by the Thin White Duke, blows his bleeding nose from the cold and nicotine, and begins.
It's difficult to express how he manages to vomit it all out, all the slop dragged from America, yet his aim is achieved.
The vocal line emerges right away from its personal catacomb in "Sister Midnight", and you already begin to understand how hard it is to accept the end of something that leaves you alone, accompanied by only the "midnight sister", but even more you understand that what he is singing is Iggy Pop, not his image, just him.
The influence of Bowie in the album's production becomes clear listening to "Nightclubbing," a track that manages to be subversive and drunk with decay from the introduction, giving the voice a frightening depth, accompanied by a piano-bar more than appropriate for the title. A prelude. Indeed, the prelude to "Funtime," an electronic, disciplined, icy ballad, ending in a delirious finale where Iggy's overdubbed screams scrape against each other to show that the time for fun is dead.
From here, the discovery is singular.
I listen to "Baby" and am astonished by the surprising emphasis with which the instrumental melodies blend with the vocal ones, resulting in a seriously baffling outcome.
The next "China Girl" is designed to deceive listening. A seductive voice is propelled by a sound that shifts from oriental to glam within a minute and a half, then mutates again, with a visceralness that sends chills, into a lament destined to progressively die.
In "Dum Dum Boys," you perceive the maturity of the previous pieces, a result in perfect new wave harmony. The low tone achieved here by Mr. Pop is more than enviable, driven by notes of spiritual blues.
The Blues evolution arrives and then merges with "Tiny Girls": a pseudo-waltz where the voice clumsily alternates with a semi-baritone sax.
Here we stop.
The echo of certainty is barely perceptible at first due to the silence. The record is dying.
Track no. 8.
"Mass Production".
A painfully slow ballad celebrating unconscious self-destruction makes its way through the thousand thoughts that question its motivation. Self-annulment. Burial. Deprivation of happiness. All fragments of indecisions, struck by seraphic synthesizers, which in about eight minutes seem to remind that the cycle never ends. The journey inside a tunnel. Steps broken by the sound of shoes in the snow. A journey mortally wounded. The echo fades more and more.
The record is dead.
The metallic smell of its blood on the snow is the only thing I can still feel.

No more chances.