Robert Bennett delves in Iggy Pop's solo career...

“Well, I’ll tell ya, one good thing about these bums and these junkies
is they have some CHARACTER. They can be a little nuts some times,
screwed up. At least when they play the damn guitar they play it like
they meant it. Not like these red and white boys nowadays, knowing all
the scores. They don’t even know how to puke.”

Amen to that! Now that Iggy is flogging I-Pods on TV and making albums
that feature Green Day and Sum 41 it seems prurient to cast an eye back
over his uneven solo career. Contrary to what Stooges purists may tell
you, the man produced gems well into the nineties. Sadly, for every gem
there were a couple of turkeys. Post-Bowie albums often meander
musically and dip into self-parody. New Values, Soldier, and Party were
all pretty stinky. A few good rockers here and there but generally
nothing that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Brat-pack movie. The
ponderous and lyrical Zombie Birdhouse is a curiosity worthy of
attention but still lacking in muscle. Only 1993’s American Caesar now
seems truly essential. Just when the bland bid for radio-play that was
Brick by Brick seemed to spell the end of his creativity, Iggy
delivered an album that more than ten years later still has a savage
bite, combining the attack of The Stooges with the gloomy reflection of
The Idiot.

No longer toying playfully with the wild man-child of rock persona,
Iggy is scathing and smart. And for the first time in a long time he
has a band that can carry him: a stripped down, tough, rock band. The
opener Wild America is a grisly Neo-Con nightmare. Racial and gender
codes are trashed as consumer America crashes into chaos, undone by
ugly greed: “They’re so God-damned spoiled. They’re poisoned inside.
They judge a man by what he’s got. All they want is more an more...more
power, more freedom...SLAVES!” Though a more polished, less rudimentary
sound, the music has all the thrust of a Raw Power track. Shit-kicking
drums end the song as Iggy slides into paranoid Republican persona,
yelling “Exterminate the brutes!” You’re left feeling scared and
confused, wondering how the hell at a ripe old age he managed to summon
forth the old demons. Remarkably, it isn’t the only moment on the album
to reach such a height. Plastic and Concrete is equally charged. This
time we are off the streets and on a high-speed romp through suburban
hell: “..I’m glad my mother loved me, I’m sick and paranoid..” Drums
roll to a nasty, repetitive riff full of menace. Walled up in
middle-class America, the protagonist is “a nightmare child” on the
verge of breakdown. It sounds like the prelude to a Columbine-type
shooting.

The music isn’t all blood and guts throughout. The tenderly lilting
Social Life addresses a high-society girl of the Paris-Hilton mould and
conjures spiritual and intellectual decay among the rich. These people
are a long way away from the trauma and confusion of Wild America but
are nevertheless rotting behind the walls of gated communities:

“God-awful art and clothes, plenty of money though, you guess it must
be worth something, what that would be you don’t know.”

American Caesar is highly ambitious in its attempt to portray the
trials of existence at each level of American society. It succeeds,
transporting us from craziness and desperation in the streets to
fulfilment of the American dream and resultant stagnation among the
have-it-alls. The overall drama is that of madness and decay in a
collapsing empire.

In the drone-backed monologue of Caesar, Iggy’s pantomime emperor
alludes to corruption and insanity in the American Government: “Put him
in the fiery pit! HA! HA! HA!” The skit is more sinister than comical
and the ripping version of Louie, Louie that follows comes as a relief.
Iggy is on party form but also throws in some of the cutting lines that
have never failed him even when his music has lagged: “Life after Bush
and Gorbachev, the wall is down but something is lost. Turn on the
news, it looks like a MOVIE! It makes me wanna sing LOUIE, LOUIE!”

The record isn’t flawless. Two tracks stand out as definite filler: 
“It’s Our Love” and “Beside You” are sugary slop-ballads (a genre the
artist has never excelled at) but it doesn’t matter because the rest
falls between great and incendiary. American Caesar: it’s fierce, it’s
clever, and above all it has CHARACTER. 

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