Hello, my name is Roland Wichsenberg, and I'd like to write some stuff
about last year's kickass heavy metal record by Iggy Pop. Heh? What? You
don't know who Iggy is? Not that bad, dude. Me I don't know either. Nobody
really needs to, because you can tell that from his face and his body.
His veins must be about half an inch thick, and I can't help myself but
think that the poor guy was somehow involved with drugs in his earlier
life.
The cover of his 2001 release "Beat 'em up" features him with tits.
Bizarre! Thank god it's just a painting.
As all of us know, Iggy is no professionalist. Nor appears to be anyone
of his new band. The trick is that they are all actually so mega-professional,
that they do the next hardest thing on earth: play like an amateurish garage-band!
The songwriting is on a similar level, if you can detect something next
to a song at all.
The opener for example just stomps along with a silly pseudo-metal
riff. Heat and sweat, alright, Iggy! Now on top of it, Master Pop shouts
with all his might the most generic punk-lines ever imaginable: "You're
wearing a mask!" That works pretty well with the witty atrwork, till Iggy
surprises you with the conclusion "You look better thet way!" Hah! Hey,
what happened to the good olp punkish values, Iggy? OK, so from now on
we just gotta know that this man is wise enough not to follow any "trendy"
values anymore and have some fun.
To tell you the truth I wasn't awfully concerned about the lyrics,
because the music is such a big fun, that you might even overhear some
shlock like "Ugly is ugly, dumb is bumb..." Not that Iggy doesn't get serious
for a single second. He does, and quite frankly even, without the urge
to bore you. He's no Bruce Springsteen or something. The closing spoken-word
pastiche is supposed to present you the real Iggy. Not that you'll
get James Osterberg's final confession, how many drugs he took or something.
It's still our Iggy pounding about some hilarious stuff like, how fine
it is to be famous...but I don't want to spoil the fun really. All I'll
say is, it's worth to sit it through, unlike the "Ceasar" over-indulgence
from 1993.
The music itself, aah! It's all about these nasty movements on your
FM radio in recent years: Korn, Limp Bizkit, Red Hot Chilly Peppers, the
incredible Kid Rock, the whole metal-revival, punk-revival and actually
everything that's kinda hip. All these things are taken, stuffed in the
trash, pissed and shitted on, flushed through the toilet, molested by the
rats, taken back from the canalization and recycled by Iggy and company
with a whole lot of fun! And that's where the listener is finally at when
he just pushes "play". You suddenly forget about Alanis Morisette, Jewel,
Nelly Furtado and all these other pretentious cunts out there, because
you realise the biggest and most fucked-up cunt out there is our beloved
Iggy! He'll stick to it all the way through "Go for the throat": "I'm fucked
up! I'm so fucked up!" Man, that'll shut dad AND the Linkin Park freaks
in your room, and your girlfriend will throw all her Dido records away.
When there's nothing more to say, because this just ain't the kind
of record you can actually talk about (although that Iggy guy just about
knows no taboos!) you can turn up the volume until you're L.O.S.T.!!! These
are the friggin' heaviest guitars you've ever heard. Why? Well, because
they aren't sterile and completely predictable like the Rammstein vomit-inducing
Boredom-casters. Heavy, but sloppy, you know. And the drummer is the mega-slop,
I tell ya. Hell, he doesn't even pretend to groove or something. But he's
good! Believe me, I can tell a good drummer from a put on.
If it all becomes too sloppy for your millennium-infected taste, you
can still put on Incubus.
Bye bye then!
Go home and
greet Marilyn Manson from me!
