Metallic KO

Iggy Pop's new values

by Carly Carioli

So I guess the quickest way to the point is to inform you that Iggy Pop has made a heavy-metal album called Beat 'Em Up (Virgin, due in stores this Tuesday). You guys remember Iggy, right? Last album was fulla ballads? Did a duet a few years back with frog-pop chanteuse Françoise Hardy? Anyway, we could argue about it, but Beat 'Em Up is Iggy's first metal album, though there are people who would call the Stooges' albums metal, or maybe say New Values was metal. Nope nope nope.

We know this is a metal album because of the second song, "L.O.S.T." You can barely hear Ig on it, but the guitars are HUGE. There must be 30 or 40 of them, all playing the same stereo-shuddering staccato-metronome jackhammer rhythm-guitar crunch, maybe the coolest-sounding Godzilla-fretting-subway-rails kerchunck-kachunk since Metallica cut their hair. Metal kids will hear it and know that it's indisputably metal. And then they'll wonder, like the rest of us, what the hell is it doing on an Iggy Pop album.

There are several possible answers. One is that Beat 'Em Up is a comedy album. Two of the three persons I've played it for have cracked up at some point during "L.O.S.T." -- me too, though whether I was laughing with Iggy or at him, or just from sheer nervous amazement, I couldn't tell you. It's probably got something to do with knowing that Iggy is, has always been, a sissy -- even at his most feral, rolling around in glass, even sinewy and pumped up the way he's gotten in his old age, he's a total poof. Ever seen him on stage miming that he's gonna punch someone? Looks like a five-year-old girl! So here's the title track: Iggy's thin, reedy threat ("Ya gotta beat 'em, beat 'em beat 'em up") is overwhelmed by a Biohazard-style hooligan shout-along ("BEAT 'EM UP!"). Nobody listening to the song, not even your grandmother, is gonna be too worried about the old man throwing haymakers, but you may be worried about what his new friends could do to you.

Machismo is one of Iggy's longest-running gags -- remember New Values' "Five Foot One"? -- and Beat 'Em Up has plenty of laughs whenever Coach Pop works up a sermon for his new team. Like on the power ballad "Football": "I'm a football, baby/Rollin' round the field/I've been passed and fumbled/Till I don't know what I feel/Everybody's the same/Little footballs, too/Settin' up the play/And tryin' to score." It's even better when Ig gets all somber and maudlin. "We're kicking each other, baby," he moans, "Right where it hurts." Later on he tries to boost club morale with a ditty called "Go for the Throat," but he ends up screaming hysterically, like an enraged soccer mom whose daughter just got yellow-carded.

Which isn't to say that he can't still muster up something hideous and primal. We're floating along toward the end of Beat 'Em Up and he's having an infantile violent outburst. We know that's what he's doing because that's what he's yelling: "INFANTILE! VIOLENT! OUTBURST!" Then he lets loose a banshee wail more unnerving than any he's uttered since the opening moments of the Stooges' "TV Eye," in 1970. He follows it up by howling the name of the song -- which might also be the mantra of the album it appears on -- over and over and over: "DRINK NEW BLOOD! DRINK NEW BLOOD! DRINK NEW BLOOD!"

Surely this is where Iggy belongs: playing the Stooge, the Idiot, to the hilt, blurring the lines between satire and self-righteousness, genius and folly. In the face of such a calling, it hardly seems worth mentioning that most of Beat 'Em Up's 72 minutes has all the excitement of a fiftysomething trying to get himself kicked out of Wal-Mart.

And yet -- and yet. You listen to the opening track, the most Stooges-like thing he's done since the Stooges, and you can't help being moved. The bass is cranked up and throbbing beyond reason, the guitars are so tinny you'd think Bowie was back there screwing everything up, there's maybe two chords, and Iggy reminds us, once again, that life is but a flimsy masquerade, a series of baffling disguises with no purpose other than to obscure a truth too horrible to reveal. Yet in the middle he gives us a glimpse behind the façade: "Complicated crushed-up disappointed squirming angry thrusting stabbing regretting starving greedy human alien beings, struggling down the street, up the alley, in the elevator, through the party to the office, in the bedroom . . . " And more: "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?!"