Working with pop architect Andrew Watt, the agelessly incendiary rocker unfurls a parade of timeless archetypes: profane punk, seedy crooner, lovable curmudgeon. It’s Iggy Pop as a jukebox musical.
Iggy Pop’s improbable survival has been part of his act for years—way back in 1996, Trainspotting found the punchline to a joke about the perennially bare-chested rocker in the fact that he was still very much alive. Today, the human being born James Newell Osterberg, Jr., age 75, remains uncommonly lithe and spry, with a million-dollar smile. But for much of the past decade, rock’s eternal real wild child has been slowly crowd-surfing his way into the sunset—he ended the last Stooges album with a pair of battle-scarred, soul-searching ballads and ventured deeper into existential reflection on 2016’s Post Pop Depression, while 2019’s Free suggested his periodic detours into after-hours jazz experimentation had become a more natural end state. All the while, Iggy has seemed perfectly content to ride out his golden years in his adopted home of Miami and play the role of punk-rock priest, handing out blessings to underground upstarts like Sleaford Mods and Chubby and the Gang through his BBC Radio 6 show.
But as history has shown time and again, any assumptions of Iggy’s demise are premature, and with Every Loser, he tosses away the gold watch to reapply his dog collar. Like almost every Iggy Pop comeback album before it, Every Loser was created in close collaboration with a savvy big-name producer—though, unlike past compatriots like David Bowie, Bill Laswell, Don Was, and Josh Homme, this one resides far outside Iggy’s usual avant-rock milieu and age cohort. Andrew Watt won the 2021 Producer of the Year Grammy for his work with mega-stars like Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, and Ed Sheeran, but he’s a modern pop architect with a classic-rock heart: After helping Post Malone get in touch with his inner George Harrison, Watt has emerged as a Rick Rubin-like guru for veteran rockers (Eddie Vedder, Elton John, Ozzy Osbourne) in need of revitalization.
For Every Loser, Watt doesn’t try to turn Iggy Pop into something he’s not but rather gives him the space to be every Iggy Pop he wants to be. Over the course of its 11 tracks, we’re treated to a parade of iconic Iggy archetypes: the profane punk, the seedy underworld Sinatra, the Euro-bound futurist, the lovable curmudgeon, and (via the Warhol-inspired comedic interlude “The News for Andy”) the world’s coolest infomercial pitchman. Watt effectively approaches the album as an Iggy jukebox musical—a shiny, over-the-top, but briskly entertaining celebration of its subject—while surrounding him with a supporting cast of acolytes (including GNR’s Duff McKagan, Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard, Jane’s Addiction’s Dave Navarro and Eric Avery, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Chad Smith, and the late Taylor Hawkins) eager to do their hero proud.
Watt’s platinum touch can be felt even in the album’s most unruly rockers: Iggy has probably written a thousand songs as petulant as the opening “Frenzy,” but this one gets blown up to stadium proportions with a chorus chant fit for a terrace full of soccer hooligans, along with turbo-charged riffs that remold Fun House into nu-metal. Likewise, “Modern Day Rip Off” retrofits Raw Power with funk finesse, yielding a piano-powered rager about how Iggy can’t really party anymore (“I ran out of blow a long time ago/I can't smoke a J or my guts fly away”). But as that song demonstrates, there’s a knowing humor coursing through the record that undercuts the cranky-old-man caricature. A tribute to his beloved Miami, “New Atlantis” has the sort of breezy, sun-kissed vibe you’d expect from an elder rocker singing about his retirement destination, but Iggy’s peculiar words of affection (“a beautiful whore of a city”) and visions of its imminent, climate-change-induced obliteration render the song the anti-“Kokomo.” He saves the album’s best joke for “Neo Punk”: Any aging anarchist could write a sneering two-minute blitz about the dilution of punk into celebrity fashion-spread fodder, but only Iggy could get face-tatted tabloid fixture Travis Barker to agree to play on it. (“I guess he walked right into that one,” Iggy quipped in a recent interview, though to his credit, Barker responds with the sort of furious, snare-busting display that proves he doesn’t just wear Black Flag shirts for show.)
There are moments when Every Loser’s carefree bravado degenerates into puerile silliness (amid the Stonesy trash of “All the Way Down,” you’ll find nuggets like “I’m gonna blow up a turd!”), but such outbursts are balanced by more nuanced, emotionally resonant performances. The synth-streaked “Strung Out Johnny” channels Iggy’s Berlin phase with Bowie, both in its “China Girl”-esque sophistication and its addiction-ravaged lyrics, which function as a sobering sequel to the orgy of excess celebrated on “Lust for Life.” Free of the doom and gloom that marked Iggy's previous attempts to get serious, the elegiac sway of “Morning Show” practically renders it as Iggy’s answer to U2’s “One.” And fittingly for a partnership that began when Watt enlisted Iggy for a feature on the next Morrissey album, Every Loser ends somewhere between the Smiths and the Stooges on “The Regency,” a surge of shimmering jangle that nonetheless goes for the jugular. In its tug-of-war between grace and grit, the song is a distillation of Iggy’s existence—the sound of a celebrity punk who’s survived long enough to be welcomed into the showbiz establishment, yet still very much an outsider even when he’s inside, and still game to burn it all down from within.
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