Artist: Iggy Pop
Album: Préliminaires
Year: 2009
Grade: 5 pretzels
There comes a time in every music critic’s life where they have to make a very difficult decision. Every once in a while, an album will come along that you feel the need to defend vociferously. These are usually albums that you really like, but you know, for a variety of reasons, that most other critics won’t agree with you. This becomes a challenge because, at best, you’ve got a long, lonely, uphill battle ahead of you whenever you talk about that album or, at worst, you’ll quickly be dismissed by everyone else as a biased, stubborn critic who’s opinions can’t be trusted. These albums challenge your need to stick up for the music you like while still maintaining some level of credibility. Iggy Pop’s Préliminaires is one of those albums and I’ve decided I’m going to defend it with everything I’ve got.
Right off the bat, I have to admit that I’m a huge Iggy Pop fan. He’s one of my various musical idols (however questionable that may be) and I will give anything he releases a fair listen. I’ve written more than one college paper on his work with both the Stooges and his solo career. I’ve read and compared every biography I can find on the man. I don’t think I’m out of line when I say I’m a bit of an Iggy expert. Now, I can hear the skeptics immediately clamoring, saying that all this love for the Iggster has biased my opinion about this album. Oh, but that’s not true! Part of being a true Iggy fan is admitting that he hasn’t released anything truly worthwhile since 1979. Iggy has done nothing in the past thirty years that would give fans hope that a new album would be that good at all. So, I approached Préliminaires with skepticism.
It only took two tracks for that skepticism to fade into the background. The opening cover of the French standard “Les Feuilles Mortes” was an enjoyable departure from Iggy’s usual style (he sings in French, enough said), but the first track to totally floor me was “I Want To Go To The Beach”. I immediately realized why I liked this song so much: it’s a showcase for Iggy’s voice, of all things. Now, of course, Iggy doesn’t have a particularly “good” voice, but that’s the beauty of it. His broken, vibrato-heavy bass is on full display and when the song’s weary melody is added, it creates something absolutely beautiful and sad. It’s a whole new side of Iggy and it works incredibly well. The swampy “Nice To Be Dead” is another chance for Iggy to show off his pipes and he ably delivers, although this time, instead of evoking sadness, his dramatic vocal gives off a sense of anger and frustration, especially when he breaks out the Iggy howling of old on the second half of the song. Hearing Iggy scream like that again almost brought me to tears.
The rest of the album doesn’t have the immediate punch of those two songs, but they provide a diverse background for Iggy to try out more new styles, almost all of which are successes. The stomping “Je Sais Que Tu Sais” reinvents the track “Nightclubbing” from 1977’s The Idiot, while the synth-driven “Party Time” manages to be simultaneously hilarious and serious. Even the drunken New Orleans jazz of “King Of The Dogs” is a solid offering. While Iggy may have the occasional bizarre lyrical turn (“I’ve got a smelly rear and a dirty nose” from “King Of The Dogs” seems to be the most quoted in the media), that’s always been part of Iggy’s appeal to me. He speaks so directly, without bothering to “art-ify” his words. Iggy Pop is a man completely tapped into his personal id.
My only major knock against Préliminaires is that it closes with two superfluous alternate versions of other songs on the album: “Je Sais Que Tu Sais” loses the French vocal line and is retitled “She’s A Business”, while the album ends with an almost identical version of the opening “Les Feuilles Mortes”, now subtitled “Marc’s Theme”. Both aren’t different enough from their earlier versions to justify being included. They also subtract from the album’s true closing number, the astonishing, spoken-word tale of “A Machine For Loving”, which describes the death of a dog in stark, literate terms. From a man who once sang “I wanna be your dog,” it feels like the most appropriate ending to an Iggy Pop album ever.
I honestly believe this is one of the finest pieces of work Iggy Pop has released in his entire career. It’s a moving, emotional and mature artistic effort from a man who has spent so much of his career coasting along on the fame he found early in life. On those terms alone, it would be a monumental achievement. But wait, there’s more! The real kicker about Préliminaires is that it was inspired by a French novel by Michel Houellebecq called La Possibilité d'une île (which translates to The Possibilitity Of An Island). As us Iggy-philes know, the man behind the Iggy Pop persona, James Osterberg, Jr., is a dedicated connaisseur of art and literature. While this may surprise those accustomed to his usual drooling lunacy, this is the flip-side to Iggy Pop that needs to be accepted. As such, I must end this review here, incompleted, until I have read Houellebecq’s book and look at Préliminaires with a full understanding of the source material. My final grade on the album will be decided then. So, for now, all I can say is…
To be continued…
Right off the bat, I have to admit that I’m a huge Iggy Pop fan. He’s one of my various musical idols (however questionable that may be) and I will give anything he releases a fair listen. I’ve written more than one college paper on his work with both the Stooges and his solo career. I’ve read and compared every biography I can find on the man. I don’t think I’m out of line when I say I’m a bit of an Iggy expert. Now, I can hear the skeptics immediately clamoring, saying that all this love for the Iggster has biased my opinion about this album. Oh, but that’s not true! Part of being a true Iggy fan is admitting that he hasn’t released anything truly worthwhile since 1979. Iggy has done nothing in the past thirty years that would give fans hope that a new album would be that good at all. So, I approached Préliminaires with skepticism.
It only took two tracks for that skepticism to fade into the background. The opening cover of the French standard “Les Feuilles Mortes” was an enjoyable departure from Iggy’s usual style (he sings in French, enough said), but the first track to totally floor me was “I Want To Go To The Beach”. I immediately realized why I liked this song so much: it’s a showcase for Iggy’s voice, of all things. Now, of course, Iggy doesn’t have a particularly “good” voice, but that’s the beauty of it. His broken, vibrato-heavy bass is on full display and when the song’s weary melody is added, it creates something absolutely beautiful and sad. It’s a whole new side of Iggy and it works incredibly well. The swampy “Nice To Be Dead” is another chance for Iggy to show off his pipes and he ably delivers, although this time, instead of evoking sadness, his dramatic vocal gives off a sense of anger and frustration, especially when he breaks out the Iggy howling of old on the second half of the song. Hearing Iggy scream like that again almost brought me to tears.
The rest of the album doesn’t have the immediate punch of those two songs, but they provide a diverse background for Iggy to try out more new styles, almost all of which are successes. The stomping “Je Sais Que Tu Sais” reinvents the track “Nightclubbing” from 1977’s The Idiot, while the synth-driven “Party Time” manages to be simultaneously hilarious and serious. Even the drunken New Orleans jazz of “King Of The Dogs” is a solid offering. While Iggy may have the occasional bizarre lyrical turn (“I’ve got a smelly rear and a dirty nose” from “King Of The Dogs” seems to be the most quoted in the media), that’s always been part of Iggy’s appeal to me. He speaks so directly, without bothering to “art-ify” his words. Iggy Pop is a man completely tapped into his personal id.
My only major knock against Préliminaires is that it closes with two superfluous alternate versions of other songs on the album: “Je Sais Que Tu Sais” loses the French vocal line and is retitled “She’s A Business”, while the album ends with an almost identical version of the opening “Les Feuilles Mortes”, now subtitled “Marc’s Theme”. Both aren’t different enough from their earlier versions to justify being included. They also subtract from the album’s true closing number, the astonishing, spoken-word tale of “A Machine For Loving”, which describes the death of a dog in stark, literate terms. From a man who once sang “I wanna be your dog,” it feels like the most appropriate ending to an Iggy Pop album ever.
I honestly believe this is one of the finest pieces of work Iggy Pop has released in his entire career. It’s a moving, emotional and mature artistic effort from a man who has spent so much of his career coasting along on the fame he found early in life. On those terms alone, it would be a monumental achievement. But wait, there’s more! The real kicker about Préliminaires is that it was inspired by a French novel by Michel Houellebecq called La Possibilité d'une île (which translates to The Possibilitity Of An Island). As us Iggy-philes know, the man behind the Iggy Pop persona, James Osterberg, Jr., is a dedicated connaisseur of art and literature. While this may surprise those accustomed to his usual drooling lunacy, this is the flip-side to Iggy Pop that needs to be accepted. As such, I must end this review here, incompleted, until I have read Houellebecq’s book and look at Préliminaires with a full understanding of the source material. My final grade on the album will be decided then. So, for now, all I can say is…
To be continued…
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