This came out in 1999 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
Iggy Pop has just realized he’s going to die.
Don’t panic; he’s not going anywhere anytime soon that I know of. No, it’s just that Iggy — who turned the big 5-0 recently — finally seems to have figured out that like the rest of us, he’s not going to live forever. And while that may not be a big revelation to you or me, to a guy like Iggy — the godfather of punk rock who invented stage-diving, the world’s forgotten boy who wrote Lust For Life, the singer who has spent 30 years rolling in broken glass onstage, shooting drugs in his veins offstage and generally thumbing his nose and blowing raspberries at the Grim Reaper on a daily basis — the concept of death apparently came as quite a shock.
“It was in the winter of my 50th year when it hit me,” Iggy explains on the spoken-word opening track to his magnificent new CD Avenue B, a mesmerizing, sombre look at aging, love and loneliness, produced by Don Was. “I was really alone and there wasn’t a helluva lot of time left. Every laugh and touch that I could get became more important… as I considered the circumstances of my death.
“I wanted to find a balance between joy and dignity on my way out,” he says. “Above all, I didn’t want to take any more shit. Not from anybody.”
As if he ever has. From his earliest days in proto-punk quartet The Stooges, Pop — whose mom knows him as James Osterberg — has, like Frank Sinatra, done it his way. Except much, much louder, and with way more swearing and broken glass. But now that the end is near and Iggy is facing the final curtain — relatively speaking — he wants to talk about something more important than the Rich Bitches and Cold Metal he’s been yelling about for years. And to make sure you hear him, he’s going to get up real close and whisper it in your ear.
His relentlessly bleak, acoustic-based Avenue B (named for Iggy’s old New York address), is the quietest, most introspective and intimate disc in Iggy’s long career. Don’t think for a second that he’s gone soft, though. Avenue B still has all the raw power of … well, Raw Power. It’s just the power of emotion that fuels the engine here. Iggy has always been fearlessly honest; willing to offer up his self-inflicted wounds for our examination. This time out it just so happens the scars — of his solipsism, selfishness, and inability to commit — run beneath the surface.
Even so, Pop characteristically dives in head-first, sifting the ashes of his past and owning up to his screwups in a series of starkly intense songs: Provocatively dark, acoustic ballads (Nazi Girlfriend), spoken-word vignettes (She Called Me Daddy), poetry-slam jazz-funk (I Felt The Luxury). Now and then he rocks out, like on the mid-tempo gutter-funk of the self-flagellation Corruption (“It rules my soul”), the Latino groove of Español and a yelping, haunted version of Shakin’ All Over, whose lines (“When you move right up close to me, that’s when I get the shakes all over me”) take on a whole new meaning.
As Iggy admits on the title cut, “I need a miracle tonight.” And you never know, he just might get one. Avenue B is the sound of a man defiantly staring down Death and trying like hell to make him blink. If anybody can pull that one off, it’s Iggy.
