“It’s not great, but it’s not as bad as The Weirdness,” remarked a friend the other week, when the subject of Iggy And The Stooges’ new album, Ready To Die came up. This was damning with faint praise to Dante’s seventh level of hell. The Weirdness was, at best, a conceded pass, a frustratingly flawed record stripped clean of any lingering artistic merit by Iggy’s ambivalent performance (though, against the grain of the album’s prevailing mediocrity, the late Ron Asheton’s guitar work sizzled like it was 1971).
So what of Ready To Die, the first Iggy and the Stooges record since 1973’s Raw Power, and the first full-blown musical collaboration between Iggy and guitarist James Williamson since Kill City in the mid ’70s? Well, James Williamson remains a fiendishly talented guitarist – Burn is replete with the proto-punk metal riffs Williamson foisted upon the world in those dark, inspiring days of yore, and Job gives everything a simple blues riff should give, and then some. Gun is a post-modern take on the Dead Boys’ rip-off of the Stooges and Dirty Deal packs a tough enough punch to wind, if not completely flatten the Stooges’ would-be plagiarists.
And if Iggy was drowning in a pool of his own squalid narcotic lifestyle and narcissistic excess when Raw Power was recorded, in 2013 he’s older, wiser and bathed in the inevitable irony that comes with being a still functioning 60-something punk legend. Iggy’s observations on fatalism, his artistic flaws, the financial politics of sex, specious friendships and the pitfalls of the commercial world are wry, and frequently amusing; on the album’s lighter tracks like Beat That Guy and the subtle self-referential narrative of The Departed (spot the I Wanna Be Your Dog lick late in the song), Iggy adopts the role of punk grandfather, bouncing his many, varied and often impressive imitators on his knee, with hushed stories of a lost world as colourful as it was tragic.
Ready To Die is not as bad as The Weirdness; in fact, it’s a lot better. It’ll never be a Stooges album of lasting consequence, but as Nick Carraway remarked to Jay Gatsby, you can never recreate the past.
BY PATRICK EMERY
Best Track: Ready To Die
If You Like These, You’ll Like: The best of IGGY’s solo albums between 1982 and 2003, latter period RAMONES, and that really good band you saw in your 20s that played a dew Stooges covers
In A Word: Impressive
