Iggy Pop
Naughty Little Doggy (Virgin)
by Ryk McIntyre
If it’s true that the good die young, then how did Iggy Pop ever make it this far? On this, his 10th solo album, he proves that a good heart and an uncompromising attitude go a long way toward that end. St. Iggy continues to confront and wrestle the same angels and devils, the same winners and losers, but it’s not just games of confrontation. Although he’s been called “The Godfather of Punk,” he was “punk” a good eight years before the term was even coined. The first Iggy and The Stooges album was released in 1969, which would date their live performances even earlier – back in the days when hippies still roamed the earth. “Where have all the flowers gone?” Well, if they were up your ass you’d know about it.
And now here we are, some 25 years later. Hippies have gone the way of the dinosaur, and Iggy is almost 50 years old (nearly a dinosaur himself). He ruled then and not much has changed. Sure, he’s mellowed off the broken-glass body rubs, and only sometimes hawks back at mosh-pit spitters, but that’s about it. The band he’s led for the last few years is as good as he’s ever wanted and Naughty Little Doggy is as happily unrepentant an album as you could wish for. Unabashedly opening with “I Wanna Live,” with its easy-anthem chorus, the album slides into the giggling, Tourette’s Syndrome, cock-in-pocket swing romp of “Pussy Walk,” a song that would be unforgivable coming from some heavy metalhead, but in the hands of The Ig, it’s just plain funny. He isn’t taking this seriously and neither should we.
On this disc, Iggy lets slip some of the wizard’s curtain of his life, not necessarily in any weepy confessional mode, but rather like the verse from “Knucklehead”: “One day I went out to buy a truck/I found one that looked so huge and big/Once I got that sucker on the road/ I was looking down at everything/And I really liked that everyone obeyed me/I thought this is power/Like that religious hour/When the preacher says…” Apparently Iggy likes being called the Godfather of Punk, which sure ain’t bad work if you can get it. My two favorite tracks are the Goth girl fantasy of “Shoeshine Girl” where Iggy falls spellbound to some punkette’s cleavage (oh yeah, I’m sure that never happened to you), and the powerful (there’s a limp adjective) “Look Away,” in which Mr. Pop chronicles some of the losses of his China White days, not just Johnny Thunders’ death, but the end of their friendship that preceded it. It’s not enough to sing of kicking drugs, and Iggy lets us know that sobriety isn’t that much more glamorous than using; that everything costs; and there are no solutions, only steps you take in the direction you choose yourself. “I got lots of feelings/But I hold them down/That’s the way I cope with this shitty town.”
I’m sure if Iggy wanted to, he could show us how he puts his pants on one leg at a time, but he never gets bogged down in bummers like that. After all, he who laughs last gets to be unrepentant.
