Review Summary: A victory lap that stumbles when it wants to sprint
It must be difficult to have to live with the artistic drive to create when the whole world, by-and-large, is of the opinion that the glory days are far behind. At a time in one’s career when thoughts of legacy and a fitting coda to a presence that spans decades and looms over the musical landscape like a mountain, the temptation to just rehash the glory days and try ones best to live up to them must be great. After all what could be a safer move than to court nostalgia while declaring “hey, I still got it”? And while Iggy seems to be doing just that on much of Every Loser, his success seems to depend on
which era of his long career that he’s lifting from.
There are essentially two sides to Every Loser, a revisitation of two disparate personas that made Iggy such a presence in Rock history: that of the manic, blood-and-sweat-and-broken-glass John the Forerunner of punk rock, and the narcotic-addled urban poet of the Berlin days, aided heavily by the jazzy spoken-word poetry of recent album Free. The result of trying to cram such discordant foundations into a single structure is, essentially, incoherence, an album that can’t be, and doesn’t want to be anything other than a hodgepodge of past glories. While this formula may be discouraging to those who had hopes that Iggy still had time and room for latter day artistic growth, there are places in which the backwards-looking blueprint works, and occasionally works well.
It's the cooler, moodier tracks that give Iggy a chance to show his strengths as a veteran performer, his gravel-bed, gnarled voice intoning ex-junky poetic laments, wry odes to Miami, and satires of the mental health industry with the booming authority of a latter-day American prophet. Iggy’s well-heeded the lessons of latter-day Cash: that the dusty, gravelly timbre of age lends gravitas and dignity that makes almost any pronouncement seem portentious. And it’s when Pop’s willing to show his age that Every Loser begins to approach something like authenticity and depth. And no, it’s not perfect; there are moments when Iggy’s wizened pathos verges on corny or contrived. But when Pop murmurs in that sepulchral bass that “the problem with life is that it stops”, one feels a twinge of sympathy for an aging artist trying to squeeze every possible bit of vitality out of his remaining years. An album that focused entirely on that atmosphere could very well have been the synthesis between old and new that Iggy needed to push into new artistic directions. But it’s the attempt to revitalize his sound through a retread of his wild, bloody garage days that bogs down any chance of Every Loser being a late-career classic.
The primary impression of Frenzy, and indeed of all the more aggressive tracks on the album is that Iggy’s trying very hard to show us he’s still capable of donning the mantle of the howling trash-king of the TV Eye days, his profanity-ridden, snarling declaration that he’s “In a Frenzy” propped up by vicious noise-rock guitars and gang vocals. And in the moment, one begins to feel like maybe Pop’s still got enough fire in his guts to live up to all his old protopunk fury. But on a closer listen, there’s something forced about the whole thing, the attitude, the profanity, the buzzsaw guitars all feeling like a scaffold on which a hollow parody of the Iggy of yesteryear is being propped up. The absolutely atrocious lyrics don’t help matters as Iggy, in a display of gall the likes of which we haven’t seen since Lulu, tries his damndest to make lines like “Got a dick and two balls, that’s more than you all” and “I got shit in my bucket/ I wish I could say “fuck it”” sound convincingly menacing. The latter line, from the aptly titled Modern Day Rip Off which winkingly lifts from not one but two classic Stooges tracks, is just one example of the kind of clumsy, halfhearted affectation that plagues almost half of the album. And while nobody ever expected Yeats-level poetry from Iggy Pop, he’s shown many times, on this album, no less, that he’s capable of better than “This an’t no free as a bird/ I’m gonna blow up a turd”. All the Way Down, in spite of that putrid line, ends up being one of the more graceful rockers on the album, thanks to its reined in, sneering attitude and the variety of Iggy jumping between his higher, more swaggering and lower, more profound register, aided by a searing guitar solo. That track aside however, the main saving grace of the Stooges-esque tracks is that they, at the very least, rock the fuck out but again, it’s not very convincing if you're paying attention.
Safe to say then, that this is far from being Iggy’s Blackstar. But nor does it seem like he wants it to be, at least not yet, not when there’s some fun to be had in late-life crisis glory day reminisces. Whether he’ll ever drop a late-career masterpiece remains to be seen. But Every Loser, at the very least, seems to contain the kernel of that possibility. Just be glad there’s not too much shit to sift through to find it.
