David Bowie owes a good deal of his gold and platinum to Iggy Pop. The mad Michigan daddy of punk is widely believed to have inspired Bowie's glitterrock creation Ziggy Stardust, and two of Bowie's biggest hits were about ("The Jean Genie") and by (an Iggy-Bowie collaboration, "China Girl") the Pop. The Thin White Duke has dutifully repaid that debt over the years: he coaxed Iggy back from drugland in Berlin and produced his robust 77 comeback LPs, The Idiot and Lust for Life. But Blah-Blah-Blah, which Bowie coproduced and largely co-wrote, could be the big payoff; Bowie has finally given Iggy a Let's Dance of his own.
roar of
Fun House and
Raw Power will undoubtedly dismiss
Blah-Blah-Blah as Iggy's big sellout. Indeed, Bowie relies too much on the conventional snap 'n' shine of current electro-dance music to frame his protégé's roguish lyric wit. There is a nagging homogeneity to side one – too many moody circuit-board rockers in a row, with Iggy sliding into his vocals like an evil, oily Der Bingle.
Yet even at its most familiar, Blah-Blah-Blah is as spiritually outraged and emotionally direct as commercial pop gets these days. Appropriately, the album opens with a synthed-up version of a prophetic '58 Buddy Holly romp called "Real Wild Child (Wild One)." Iggy has long outgrown the concrete-jungle-boy act of his manic days with the Stooges ("I'm a streetwalkin' cheetah with a heart full of napalm," from 1973's "Search and Destroy"). There is, however, an urgency to his writing and singing that defies the threat of deceleration in middle age – Iggy turns forty next year – as he confronts, with noble-savage cool, a tense future. There isn't that much distance between the Stooges' caged-animal ennui and the "glass and wire world" of "Winners and Losers" where "surly leeches gain the right/To send their message screaming." Even when he backs away from the bull in "Hideaway," Iggy doesn't leave without a parting shot – "The concrete strips/Raw greed and king TV/They say, 'So what'/I say, 'So this.'"
Blah-Blah-Blah's best performances match Iggy's barbed dispatches with aggressive instrumental change-ups like the surprising Young Rascals-style organ break in "Baby, It Can't Fall" and Kevin Armstrong's stutter-and-strangle guitar against the bittersweet scraping of strings in "Winner and Losers." "Blah-Blah-Blah," a shotgun blast of apocalypso rap, finds Pop facing the holocaust, cackling like the devil's envoy in grim Burroughsian verse ("I'm from Detroit/Blow the reveille/Deatho knocko/That's me little ol' me") over a vicious hip-hop stomp that sounds like "Lust for Life" stripped to the bone. "Cry for Love" is the best of the best, a ripping fusion of classic Iggy rage, Bowie cabaret and unexpected romantic vulnerability. "In searching for/A meaningful embrace/Sometimes my self-respect/To
Helped (once again) by David Bowie and Pistols guitarist Steve Jones, this led to a commercial rebirth for the Igster and received plenty of alt rock airplay for "Real Wild Child" and "Cry For Love." Iggy's throaty croon suits the era very well but "Isolation" is one of the few tracks that still works with the stereotypically '80s drum heavy over-production.
