Iggy, Rock's Everymaniac, Barely Pulls It Off on Beat Em Up
Strident, abrasive, disaffected, vituperative, yes, even incendiary. Iggy Pop's new album, Beat Em Up, is all that and more. Which raises the question?just exactly how excited are we supposed to get about this record? It's 2001, for crying out loud?seven years after Cobain, 15 years after Black Flag, 23 years after the Sex Pistols and 31 years after James Osterberg first showed them all how it's done. Even without the current crop of flaccid pretenders to Iggy's legacy?Limp Bizkit, et al.?rock has vituperative up its disaffected tushes.
Iggy Pop has always been rock's everymaniac?the loon out there on the high wire for all of us?flouting the border between sanity and mania with an air of appropriateness that could make the most reasonable soul wonder whether he, too, should be smearing himself with peanut butter. But it was apparent, at least by the time Iggy made Lust for Life, that he'd be hard pressed to carry on with his Underground Man-gone-boffo shtick without self-destructing or turning into a cartoon of himself. Now, at 54, he makes one of his most caustic albums to date and expects the world to take him seriously.
It seems to me that we're left with two options here. Either dismiss Iggy as a geriatric oddity who doesn't know when to quit (the Jack Lalane of rock), or admit that pop has defined a sustainable voice, a subgenre of deliberate dementia, vitriol as art form. That is, instead of being the one-shot-flameout-joyride-to-hell it appeared to be all these years. Has he done this? The proof, as they say, is in the pounding.
Track one, "Mask," is a one-chord car wreck of a groove?a jackhammer to the skull while Iggy shreds his larynx directly into your psyche. "Irony in place of balls/Balls in place of brains/Brains in place of soul/Where is the soul!?/Where is the love!?/Where am I!!!?" It's a brilliant start?proto-punk stripped down to its skivvies; punishing, obvious and teeth-grindingly effective.
It's brilliant also because the rest of the record suffers from a goofy macho earnestness that would sound completely ridiculous if "Mask"'s inspired, unself-conscious rant hadn't established Iggy's authority early on. "L.O.S.T." lumbers along like the dinosaur of a Metallica riff that it is. Iggy sounds here like "Mask" took the wind out of him. The flat notes sound tired rather than pissed off. "Howl" descends even farther down the hard rock food chain with chunka-chunka heavy metal wanking that evokes a sloppy "Crazy Train." All of this could be effective as a sendup of 80s hair metal on, say, a Ween comeback album. But Iggy let us know how he feels about irony on the first track, so we're forced to conclude that he actually means all this stuff, and that's unfortunate.
The only listenable track after "Mask" is the hilarious spoken-word "V.I.P.," a mid-tempo monologue on the guilty pleasures of fame. The rest overstate their points, and would be brutalizing if they weren't just silly. Titles like "Ugliness," "The Jerk" and "It's All Shit" tell you all you need to know. Beat Em Up simply can't keep it up. Iggy flexes nicely on the opening track, then wheezes for the next hour or so, proving that after 30 years, he can still pull it off?but pacing is everything.