I take no pleasure in this, waiting to review Skull Ring. Lust for Life is on its third spin, I'm biting my nails, looking at Iggy's outstretched tongue in the liners to his latest, and wondering what happened to the guy. To forestall the inevitable, I figure I ought to at least get my good friend Lou on the phone, get his opinion on the elder Mr. Pop; very few people know Ig better, after all. I hit the speed-dial and wait; eventually the ringing stops, and with no word of greeting, only the icy breath coming through the receiver tells me he's on the line.
"Just wondering if maybe you had a chance to listen to Iggy's latest album. He probably sent you an advance, right?"
"Have you listened to Beat 'Em Up?" Clever guy, that Lou. "Naw, man, if he's still hangin' on, I guess I didn't get a copy of Mood Ring, but I struggled through his last couple, and I'll say again what I told Bangs about Iggy: If he'd listened to David [Bowie] or Me, if he'd asked questions every once in a while... I'd say, 'Man, just make a one-five change, and I'll put it together for you, and you can take all the credit. It's so simple, but the way you're doin' it now you're just makin' a fool out of yourself. And it's just gonna get worse and worse...' And this was in 1975. Stop calling." Lou walked away from the receiver; his contempt hung it up.
1975: still two years prior to The Idiot and Lust for Life; Lou sure had that call wrong. Of course, Bowie was still working with Iggy in Berlin for those, and if Lou was predicting a messy post-Stooges, post-Bowie end for the guy, he wasn't too far off. Still, I don't think he expected it would be dragged out across a handful of decades. Having listened to him languish since the release of the canned, thinly veiled jock jams of his 1990 "comeback" Brick by Brick (and even further back than that, if you ask me, though at least that one had "Candy") hasn't been easy for his fans, but after being sent to the mat hard-- twice in a row-- with the misplaced world-rock of 1999's Avenue B and the hard rock of 2001's Beat 'Em Up, you keep hoping he'll stay down, for chrissakes. At least on Avenue B, he failed while making a concerted effort to branch out away from the so-very-tired power chord cliches he'd been riding for years; Beat 'Em Up showed him crawling back, making his old-school rock "xFC" again, and failing at that, too. If he can't even pull off "tough" anymore, what's left?
If the recent Peaches collaboration on her Fatherfucker doesn't prove that Ig's grasping at straws to attach himself to someone who approximates the controversy-driven "nothing's sacred" attitude he used to be known for, her contributions to Skull Ring ought to drive the point home. I don't care about any mutual admiration, or who asked who; this is simply embarrassing. The hypno-robotic buzz of "Motor Inn" might get the adrenaline flowing, but Iggy's desperate attempts at innuendo ("Her booty's got a rise/ Soon my hands will be/ Where I'm putting my eyes") make it hard to take seriously. Similarly, Pop's cover of Peaches' "Rock Show"-- especially the core "rap"-- sounds stilted and forced, even with her conviction backing him up. His cool-by-association dalliance with the newest icon of image-over-talent is too hard to swallow given his recent falterings; a third trip to the canvas should be a T.K.O.
But one look at Pop's grizzled, life-wracked frame proves he's resilient and ready to go down swinging. In fact, his perseverance in the face of self-created adversity is one of his most endearing qualities; it's hard to listen to "Dum Dum Boys" without a sympathetic ear to the various excesses of his time with The Stooges. Speaking of: You've probably already heard that Ron and Scotty Asheton contribute to a few songs on this record, making it as close to an official Stooges reunion as anyone's likely to see. And you know, they might've lost some of the breakneck tempo they once possessed, but the thin, treble-heavy grind of Ron's strings is still nearly as vicious now as it was then. Compared to the over-compensatory grandstanding of the other bands backing up Iggy here-- The Trolls, Green Day (!), and perhaps by the hand of Satan himself, Sum 41-- The Stooges get by with nothing but rattling, smoldering vitriol. Green Day (!) turn in a few notably driving riffs on "Private Hell", but the rest falls flat as overproduced, under-written, swaggering nonsense, as basic as rubbing three chords together.
Of course, the one truth that's remained unchanged since 1977 is that The Stooges ain't nothin' without the Pop, and as misfortune would have it, he's nowhere to be found on Skull Ring. Sure, there's a guy singing who calls himself Iggy, but the similarities end at the name; like the drowned rat that he is, Iggy's fled this sinking ship and left a cantankerous shell to captain the wreckage. I believe Iggy himself is back walking the mean streets of Detroit, living on the edge of the night in a never-ending replay of his psychotic days hanging with the MC5, trading his body heroin for blood, and spraying the exchange on the walls; his replacement for now and ever more is James Osterberg, an aging approximation of one of history's greatest all-time rock stars.
As recently as last album, Pop at least turned in a righteous snarl or two; here Osterberg sounds distant and lost. He nearly rips off his very own "Search and Destroy" with the line, "I'm the kid that no one knows/ I live a life I never chose," and in doing so sounds utterly defeated. Iggy had a heart full of napalm; Osterberg is just cranky. People can moan about how it's unfair to hold artists up to the magnitude of past accomplishments, and they're right. But Stooges or not, this is a dismal, unengaging rock record by any standards-- one that absolutely wilts in the light of such past brilliance. It might not be fair, but you know what, Iggy? I still miss you.
