Mon
4/29 |
Iggy and The Stooges
Album, Ready to Die
@Iggy_Stooges
Musical guests Iggy and the Stooges perform "Job" off the brand-new album "Ready to Die."
{There are probably relevant videos out there, but youtube is crashing my browser today. I'm tentatively blaming a recent video driver update, so enjoy...}
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COS review:
In life there are rules, but flailing, kicking, and panting devilishly outside of those rules is Iggy Pop. The rest of us age; he doesn’t. We get fatter; he still looks like a rock ’n’ roll terminator draped in tight leather. Other musicians dull their edges as they grow older; Pop is still driven by his most primal of instincts.
...Time hasn’t simply been good to The Stooges, it’s almost been a complete non-factor, standing still as if nonexistent.
Now almost seven years into Pop’s fruitful reunion with his old gang of droogs, we have Ready to Die, The Stooges’ fifth record and a welcome return to the band’s gnarly aggression and spirited “fuck you” petulance...
Ready to Die is another torrid tour de force from a band built for speed, not comfort. Roughly half a lifetime after the band’s legendary 1967 debut, The Stooges still sound thrillingly vital, no small feat for a bunch of hardened rock vets jockeying for position against scores of up and comers roughly a third their age. But the band continues to earn its keep and then some...
pitchfork review:
“We could’ve been the American Stones,” Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton told MOJO magazine back in 1996. “We fucked up, man.” But for all the tales of bloodletting violence and self-destructive substance abuse that defined their initial 1967-1973 run, the Stooges’ biggest fuck-up wouldn’t come until 2007, with the release of their disastrous reunion album The Weirdness. And, ironically, with that, the Stooges finally achieved their elusive American Stones status-- in that, as with the Stones, expressing one’s enthusiasm for the Stooges now requires a qualifying remark along the lines of, “Well, I like their older stuff.”
...That's not to say Ready to Die matches the live-wire abandon of its 1973 antecedent-- not even close. And the tame, contained nature of even its most petulant tracks is all the more disappointing given that this band can still absolutely slay onstage...But, unlike The Weirdness, the palpable lack of menace feels intentional, and more true to a band that, in the wake of Asheton’s death and their own advancing ages, has good reason to question its own mortality....there’s a cheeky nonchalance to his voice here that acknowledges the absurdity of such idle threats coming from a reasonably content 66 year old. Forty years removed from the kamikaze death-trip fantasies of Raw Power, Ready to Die is the sound of Iggy admitting, “I’m too old for this shit.” And he’s come armed with not one, but three acoustic ballads to prove it...
In light of these numbskull regressions, Ready to Die’s most raucous song, “Job” seems less like a blue-collar working-man complaint (chorus: “I got a job/ but it don’t pay shit/ I got a job/ and I’m sick of it”) than a comment on the slog of being a Stooge...So it comes as a great relief when Iggy starts waving the white flag on “Beat That Guy”, a surprisingly radiant, Petty-esque elegy that sounds less like an Iggy Pop song than a James Osterberg one, as he tries to lay his wild-child persona to rest by ruefully admitting, “I’m running out of space/ I’ve run out of time.” The knockout blow is delivered by “The Departed”, a hushed acoustic lullaby that effectively serves as a requiem for both Asheton and the Stooges as an entity...The song shares its name with Martin Scorsese’s recent Oscar winner, but it’s more reminiscent of that final shot in Goodfellas where Ray Liotta’s reformed gangster retrieves the morning paper from his doorstep: it's the sound of a notorious bad-ass leaving his unsavoury past behind, resigned to living the rest of his life as a schnook.
Iggy and the Stooges Show Their Raw Power During New York City Club Show
DigitalSpy.co.uk review:
Only two things will survive a nuclear holocaust: cockroaches and Iggy Pop. You just can't keep a good Stooge down. Having rewritten the rock blueprint thrice in the 1970s, he flopped about in the '80s and '90s before reuniting his old band for some incredible live shows and middling album The Weirdness back in 2007.
Before The Stooges could build on that though, bassist/guitarist Ron Asheton sadly passed away. Crisitunity! As James Williamson - in exile as an engineering graduate and Sony veep - returned and the band tore us a new one by playing Raw Power, Kill City and other disgusting filth live.
So why chance another album? "A real f*king group, when they're an older group they also make fking records," Iggy explains. "They don't just go and twiddle around on stage to make a bunch of f*king money." "YOU GO GIRL!" we screamed back, and for all its flaws, Ready To Die is worth the entry price for the opening song and title track alone...
metacritic 18 reviews, 69/100
Guardian.co.uk review, Kitty Empire:
The cover finds proto-punk icon and advertiser of insurance Iggy Pop, 66, wearing a belt of dynamite, lined up in a gunman's crosshairs. The album is called Ready to Die. Even allowing for the Stooges' historical reputation as some of the most unwholesome reprobates around whom electric guitars have ever been slung, one assumes they must have at least briefly considered withdrawing this album's artwork, given the events in Boston the week before last.
The first song, Burn, cleaves close to this idea of the Stooges as drongoid harbingers of badness, being "about scary shit like flaming assholes of the world, and death", according to Iggy at the recent SXSW music festival. There is also a song here called DD's, in praise of massive breasts. Forty years on from Raw Power, a classic of nihilist ramalama Iggy remains a guy with "no belief" and "no gratitude" (cf Job).
But bear with Iggy. He told Rolling Stone recently that the album's title came from a line in a song he wrote about pensioners sitting in a Georgia waffle house, plotting to blow up government offices. The waitress informed the authorities. Iggy found the episode poignant, a meditation on the hollowness of modern life. The title also, perhaps, salutes the band's advancing years, and declining headcount, with one finger...
Guardian.co.uk review, Alexis Petridis:
Promoting the new Iggy and the Stooges album, Iggy Pop has struck a combative note. Among the serried ranks of classic bands that have reformed over the last decade, Iggy and the Stooges, he recently announced, are "a real fucking group", not a collection of musicians gathered together under a lucrative musical flag of convenience – "this is not the Smashing Pumpkins where it's like: 'We've got the bald guy and whoever.'" Ready to Die is the result of "a pig-headed fucking thing I have that a real fucking group when they're an older group make fucking records. They don't just go twiddle around on stage to make a bunch of fucking money and then go: 'Oh, it wouldn't be as good.'"
But if Iggy Pop isn't prepared to worry about the effect their continuing to make music in the 21st century might have on their legacy, plenty of other people are. The last Stooges album, 2007's The Weirdness – a Steve Albini-produced attempt to translate the power of their astonishing reunion shows into new material – received some of the worst reviews of Iggy Pop's career, which, as he wryly pointed out, rather brought things full circle. It's a nice conceit, but the difference was that, in the late 60s and early 70s, when the Stooges were critically reviled, it was by those who failed to understand what they were trying to do. Forty years on, the people complaining understood only too well: the music they were making simply didn't live up to the standards they had set.
However impressed you are by Pop's stoicism, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the same problem bedevils Ready to Die. The issue isn't really the sound of the album...The issue is the songs...
The greatness of the reformed Stooges' live performances notwithstanding, the Iggy Pop of 2012 – beloved, successful, rich – is clearly not capable of summoning up the cocktail of desperation and nihilism that fuelled Raw Power. This is underlined by the fact that Ready to Die becomes really good when he stops trying. It feels an odd thing to say about a Stooges album, but the best moments are the ballads, which have a power and sincerity lacking elsewhere, largely because Pop appears to use them to address topics that matter to him now, in his late 60s...Best of all is the album's closer, The Departed, a meditation on mortality presumably inspired by Ron Asheton's death: it opens with his famous riff from I Wanna Be Your Dog, the distortion of the original replaced by a haunted, shivering slide guitar. It's not the first time Iggy Pop has stared down the grim reaper in song, but he's rarely sounded as vulnerable as he does here. The man who defiantly howled, "Come along on my death trip … we're going down in history" didn't really think he was going to die – it's really a song about the imperviousness of youth. The man lamenting his losses on The Departed isn't impervious at all.
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