![]() Here, Iggy’s full of hate, telling off all the pricks, dicks, and douchebags, in a frenzy for attention, waiting for people to give him “a try” and “shut up and love” him before he’s dead and gone. The lead-off track and first single, “Frenzy”, is another of Every Loser’s appealing, uptempo rockers. Iggy sings about fighting the high-and-mighty “gods in heaven” with their oil and gold, who put out “phony shit” like “foam rubber Hollywood breasts” to the rest of us, who “boil” in our changing climate and “get old”. ![]() A minute-plus coda featuring a wailing guitar solo by Watt carries the song to a satisfying conclusion. ![]() Following Stone Gossard’s fuzzy, hard-grooving guitar riff, Chad Smith’s frantic drumming carries the verses, and Watt’s muscular bass joins him in propelling the music forward on the choruses. Other parts of the song are more aspirational - to date, Iggy hasn’t ever been “triple platinum” or had “a spot on The Voice” - but he deserves those things, and they sound great coming out of his mouth.Īfter “Neo Punk”, “All the Way Down” completes a powerful one-two punch in the album’s midsection. Some of the lyrics are undoubtedly autobiographical: about driving a Rolls Royce, being a Gucci model, and getting rich off his songwriting royalties (thanks to Bowie). It’s about the genre’s godfather outlasting many of the punks and keeping pace with the much younger musicians the punk movement inspired. It’s fast and ferocious but goes down easy. Pop-punk is the topic of Every Loser’s most frenetic track, “Neo Punk”, which features Blink-182’s Travis Barker on drums. That place between raw and smooth is where pop-punk lives, and it’s no coincidence that Iggy has collaborated with Green Day and Sum 41 in the past. Both records lie somewhere between Iggy’s rawest studio albums ( Fun House and Raw Power) and his smoothest work ( Blah Blah Blah). Like Brick by Brick, Every Loser features Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses on bass and is helmed by a super-producer (Don Was in that case Andrew Watt in this one). This new album skips over his 1980s artistic slump and goes right to the Iggy of Brick by Brick. After that, Iggy revisited his Berlin period (1976-1978) with the help of Josh Homme on Post-Pop Depression. Following Ron Asheton’s death, what was left of the 1970-1974 Stooges reunited from 2009 to 2016. The remnants of the 1967-1970 Stooges came back together from 2003-2009. Since 2003, when he reunited with the Asheton brothers, Iggy has been reliving - in chronological order - the various stages of his career. He’s a member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (2010), winner of a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (2020), and a recipient of the Polar Music Prize (2022). ![]() At the same time, his records were produced by sophisticates like John Cale and David Bowie, and on his weekly BBC 6 radio show, he shows off his considerable musical erudition. ![]() He smeared himself with peanut butter, cut himself with broken glass, abused drugs, was institutionalized, and hung out with his “Dum Dum” Stooges bandmates. He grew up in a trailer park but was the brilliant valedictorian of his high school. Loser-winner and low-high dichotomies have defined Iggy throughout his career. It’s maybe even his best in more than four decades since New Values was released in 1979. This is his most consistent, fully realized album since Brick by Brick (1990). At age 75, it’s shocking that Iggy is not only still alive but also making surprisingly relevant music. He has never had an album crack the top 10 or a single in the top 20, but he’s inarguably one of the most important and influential rock artists of all time. But does it describe Iggy Pop? Maybe, if the pop charts are what measure success, but artistically, Iggy’s anything but a loser. The word “loser” - denoting someone unsuccessful in life - is in the title of Every Loser and the name of the band that plays on it. ![]()
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