Litterature

Iggy Pop - Préliminaires

Familiarity breeds boredom, and boredom breeds contempt. This is a short explanation as to why many acts with career longevity find themselves labeled by audiences and critics as tired or obsolete. What’s rarely considered is our part in this perception. An artist’s work is always vital, not only practically, as a living, but also existentially, as a learning experience, a chance to grow. These insights can be lost on the outsider, the casual listener, or the hardcore fan. Instances of such mutiny are well documented within the strata of popular music, from folk acolytes denouncing Bob Dylan’s “going electric” in ‘65 to David Bowie’s unfairly panned dance material of the early 80s. Inevitably, any singer or band that exhibits the audacity to continue to make records and follow their muse will be met with some skepticism or hostility. Trite as it may be, that’s how it is.

Granted, such charges are not always without merit. An extended back catalogue certainly encompasses some variation of quality. Case in point: one James “Iggy Pop” Osterberg. Depending on where you start counting and what, the Ig has upwards of 20 records under his belt, both solo and with his original cohorts the Stooges. With a discography that extensive, they can’t all be gold. Especially spotty are Iggy’s solo albums. After a strong start with Bowie-helmed masterpieces The Idiot and Lust for Life, Pop briefly courted what was called “new wave” on New Values, which felt more like a bona fide Iggy Pop album than its two predecessors. The 80s found Pop searching from record to record for a comfortable identity, leading him through a host of collaborators and a series of records that is best described as schizophrenic. A brush or two with chart success gave Pop some semblance of financial security, but never afforded him the stylistic foundation he needed to thrive. The 90s saw Pop mostly returning to the Stooges formula – loud, repetitive, instinctive, vulgar – which still didn’t offer an even keel of album-to-album consistency. Even studio reunions with his old Detroit compatriots Ron and Scott Asheton couldn’t yield Pop anything other than another notch on his belt. Albums boasted gems in scattered tracks, but nothing ever matched the record spanning cohesion of unabashed masterpieces like Funhouse or Lust for Life.

Strangely, it wasn’t music Pop needed to reinvigorate his artistic qi. It was literature. Approached to create music for a film about French novelist Michel Houellebecq, Pop instead opted to make a full album as a companion piece to Houellebecq’s book La Possibilité d'une île (The Possibility of an Island). Pop had read the novel with great fervor, discovering curious parallels between the book’s protagonist and himself. It is this understanding that informs Pop’s newest offering, Préliminaires. Iggy Pop is often regarded as a drug crazed wild man, and in his younger years he consciously fostered this image with outlandish and aberrant behavior, both off and on the stage. But to anyone who cared to look or listen with a little more attention, or caught an off interview with the guy, it was obvious that beneath all the savagery and bluster there was a keen, restless intellect. Although applied with caution and subtlety to his work, it was there to be discerned. Iggy Pop was, and is, and will always remain, a rogue scholar.

Préliminaires is his definitive statement as closet intellectual. On the surface, the album’s somber, finely nuanced ambience will likely drive away those fans that prefer him bloody and smeared in peanut butter. But to the rest of the world, the new album is a stunning revelation that Pop’s meditations run far deeper than girls, money and drugs. Préliminaires is a world-weary study of fame and mortality, the inhumanity of humanity, and life’s oft overlooked simple pleasures. It opens with a French jazz standard, "Les feuilles mortes" (“Autumn Leaves”), sung in its original language (reportedly because the rights to the English version were too expensive). Nevertheless, Pop’s sinewy baritone drawls the song out with such effect the language barrier is sidestepped, and the point is made: this is not business as usual. In one track Pop has proved himself as much more than punk rock’s answer to James Brown.

The true irony is that Iggy’s softest album is also his most defiant. While press for the album pegged it as an exercise in New Orleans jazz ala Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton, this is an impetus, not a result. This is fusion at its best, incorporating jazz (“King of the Dogs”), rock (“Nice to Be Dead), spoken word (“A Machine for Loving”) and electronica (“Party Time”) seamlessly, usually mixing touches of each into an exotic sonic blend. The music comprises every mood from whimsical to bleak, dropping them gently like fresh linen, rendering the transitions imperceptible. Sequencing is paramount, opening with "Les feuilles mortes" and reprising it at the end, and repeating "Je sais que tu sais" later on as “She’s a Business”, minus the French monologue. The circular nature of the listening experience, whether intentional or not, is an appropriate metaphor for the themes addressed.

For all its musical adventurousness, the lyrics are what truly set Préliminaires apart, both as another Iggy Pop album and an album in general. While there are flashes of Iggy’s trademark vulgarity, in the same breath he will turn from such pedestrian concerns to bare profundity. His work as a lyricist hasn’t been this consistent or brilliant since his early solo work. Delivered in a well aged, robust croon over the international miasma of the accompaniment, the closest analogue Pop’s ever crafted to this is The Idiot (Avenue B, Pop’s other “jazz album” from 1999, is basically Préliminaires retarded cousin, and is to be avoided).

This is heady stuff, likely to draw cries of lame or sell out from certain contingents of the fan community. Those craving the thrash and bash of the Stooges should just spin Raw Power again. But for those of us interested in something new and just as essential, who long for a relevant peek into the psyche of one of rock’s true legends, we need look no further than Préliminaires.

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