Concert Review: Pop Goes the Rock Star

Over at Avalon, the creepy/yuppie club on Lansdowne St., the mindless, clamorous techno beats on. Aging rocker wannabes in the audience and their girlfriends hide sagging bellies with leather jackets and thinning hair with attitude. Punks look around nervously for their mothers and try to scam some beer. Others pretend to dance to the woompwoomp, and laugh. Yuppies sup, and eye each another. More waiting, more techno. Woompwoomp. Thickening, moist air. Finally: stringy guy with no body fat--like, none at all--and long hair walks out. Rockers, punks, yuppies, et cetera ecstatic. And Iggy Pop begins to play. Acoustic. What--as they say--the hell?

Yeah, so Iggy Pop proceeds to do a spoken word jive. He's all about "I'm so worried about turning 50" and so forth. Tosses in "shit" here and there, for credibility, I suppose. And I was worried about bringing earplugs. Gets worse, though: Iggy starts--there's no other word for it--starts crooning, he does. This somewhat mortifying circumstance is alleviated a bit by the fact that the song he is singing is called, ahem, "Nazi Girlfriend." The lyrics, though: "Her French is perfect/So is her butt." The ageing rocker wannabes, perhaps more mortified than most--both by the low, low volume of their evening of youth recaptured and by their own girlfriends' imperfect French and butt--begin yelling. And yelling quite audibly, since Iggy is after all singing acoustic. "Play some music" and "Please don't suck" and so on. So if there's one constant in Iggy Pop a.k.a. James Newell Osterberg's career, it's that he pisses off his audience. Bit more interesting when he did by stabbing himself with glass, though. Or rolling in peanut butter.

Hard to tell how to take what happens next: Iggy rocks out, albeit with a new song. Whilst Iggy was crooning all acoustic like and you were paying attention to the audience, his band members ambled out sans subtlety and picked up their instruments, so that when the next song is loud and fast, it's neither surprising nor especially heartening. Is Iggy, y'know, disavowing this soft and earnest crap he was just feeding us? Makes it worse if even he doesn't have his heart in it. This new song: "Ya yo hablo espaol" goes the refrain ("Espaol" goes the title). As they will for just about every song, the band plays hard and thrashy, like they're a Metallica tribute band--but the kind of Metallica tribute band that really likes Master of Puppets and other early albums and never got around to cutting their hair and so they can still do that flipping-long-hair-back-after-a-ripping-solo thing, although no one solos tonight. But to be fair, this song at least rocks electrically, if perfunctorily.

Even harder to tell how to take what happens next: Iggy and his flunkies play "Raw Power," letting loose enthusiasm genuine and copious. Hard to criticize Iggy performing one of his great songs, and performing it pretty well. And there's the problem, I think. When Iggy was in the Stooges--before they became VH-1 "Behind the Music" material--the Stooges meant something. Sure they were a buncha high school drop-out glue-sniffing losers who made a hellacious garage noise with instruments they could barely play, but they had something to say. Basically: "screw you, I am human and alive and can hurt myself more than you can ever hurt me so do what you want." Which is pretty much which most great art says, if you think about it. Rock and roll demands attention because it is made by losers who never got any before; pop is made by pretty boys and jocks and all the kids at Archie's Riverdale High, who have, y'know, problems and all, but never feel compelled to open up and bleed--actual plasma all pouring out over your chest as you scream incoherently--on stage, pace Iggy. Or just listen to "Search and Destroy" on the Stooge's Raw Power album: this is one of the most earnest and moving performances recorded. And so it's a total pleasure when Iggy follows up "Raw Power" with "Search and Destroy" tonight.

But can Iggy mean it, anymore? You go listen to a Stooges album now; it's violent and misogynist and abrasive; it's the sound of people desperate to feel anything, be it pain or hate or love or happiness, but willing to settle for anger and self-loathing. Because it's better than feeling nothing, than living in '70s suburban Michigan and not meaning shit to anybody, even yourself. That was Iggy 30 years ago; Iggy now is "Behind the Music." So now Iggy's on stage and 50 and performing the same songs he was then. Sure, the band's lousy and thrusts every single great song they perform through a meat grinder which turns'em into generic hard rock, but still: "Raw Power," "Search and Destroy," "I Wanna Be Your Dog," "No Fun," "T.V. Eye," "Lust for Life," "The Passenger," "I Got a Right"--I'd watch him play these songs dead, they're so good.

I'm not so thrilled to have to sit through this new stuff, and neither is anyone else. Iggy's new album (Avenue B) is a collaboration with Medeski, Martin and Wood of all people --and they're a terrible combination. Iggy crooning these songs is boring and bad; he's misogynist and even homophobic and makes stupid asides. He seems embarrassed to be doing this. There's no Iggy here. No point dwelling. Which is not to say j'excuse, but that these are uninteresting and common faults. He turns in a great cover of Jerry Lee Lewis' "Wild One" and encores with unnecessary covers of "Johnny B. Goode" and "Louie Louie." He flails, paracletic. His "ow"s better anyone's. He looks and acts like Iggy. We have had a good time and Iggy has put on a good show. But the Stooges weren't just a show. It was an earnest expression of his messed-up self; and for his audience, it was an authentic encounter with another; it was art . As the great Lester Bangs put it waaay back in 1970, the Stooges facilitated mass psychic liberation from the conditions of our own messed up lives. If they couldn't play their instruments, that was because anyone should be, could be on-stage and that was a/the point. And now he's a performer with an act and we're his consumer. Anyone who climbs on stage gets thrown off by security, which uses a really scary looking behind-the-head grip that must hurt like hell. Growing old? Avalon, it ain't.