Iggy Pop's Lyrical Instinct

I played tag in the auto graveyard
I looked up at the radio tower
Rag tent by the railroad tracks
Concrete poured over steel grid
Pondered my fate while they built the interstate

This opening stanza from “Cold Metal”, the lead-off track on Iggy Pop’s Instinct LP from 1988, succinctly sets the scene for the brutally honest autobiography to follow. In a few lines of naked simplicity, Iggy sketches the background of his humble beginnings like a true Punk Mystic. Picture the boy Iggy here, observing the radio tower and the birth of the interstate highway system, eager to see just where these things will take him. It’s a remarkable example of understatement that evokes a very specific mood of wonderment and conviction. It’s also the opening salvo on an Iggy Pop LP that has never really been given its due.

Largely ignored at the time of its release, Instinct has wallowed in relative obscurity in the Iggy canon. Following more or less right on the heels of the Bowie-produced Blah Blah Blah album from 1986, Iggy was enjoying something of a renaissance and a modest comeback around this time. Bowie’s involvement had garnered some attention and managed to squeak out at least one minor hit for Iggy with “Real Wild Child (Wild One)”, but for the most part the Blah Blah Blah record was considered by many fans to be an over-produced disappointment. In what was perhaps a deliberate display of Iggy’s own personal revulsion at having conceded to make such a commercial-sounding record with Blah Blah Blah, Instinct would have none of its predecessor’s gloss and sheen. Well before the record’s release, the rumor mill was a-buzz with talk of Iggy enlisting producer Bill Laswell and former Sex Pistols’ guitarist Steve Jones for the project. Hopes and expectations ran high. A true return to form, Instinct hit the ground like a rabid beast and fans were much pleased with its rough and rugged sound. Gone were Bowie’s synthesizers and cheesy electronic drums. Iggy himself sounded much more at ease and confident, growling over the din of distorted guitars and heavy drum beats. Home again in the muck and chaos.

Obviously there has been quite a lot written about Iggy over the years. He is forever being lauded as the Godfather of Punk, and rightfully so, but very little has been written about him as a lyricist. For all of his onstage antics and barking beast vocal stylings, it is safe to say that Iggy’s simplistic lyrics were just as much of an influence on Punk as the Stooges’ brutal, brain-pummeling sound. Even King Cantankerous John Lydon would have to cop to that. Iggy’s Instinct stands as testament to guy who always keeps things simple and to the point, often managing to say more with less. Throughout the record, he sounds like a man standing strong and confident against all odds. At the time of this recording, Iggy was already twenty years into a very unlikely career that many thought would have ended in a blaze of drugs and foolishness many years before. Today, another twenty years further down the road, we can look back and see he was justified in his convictions.

“Cold Metal” is an apt metaphor for modern life’s continual barrage of contradictions. It may be “the father of beat, the mother of the street”, but it’s also the dubious “skeleton of the free”. In one couplet alone, Iggy simultaneously celebrates and denigrates “Cold Metal”. Marveling one moment how “it’ll even fly”, seconds later he spits out a reference to the same as “rust buckets in the sky”. The song sounds almost like a metaphor for the glowing pros and unforgivable cons of America itself. In what was surely an unintentional premonition of the environmental movement, Iggy warns us that we “better save a tree”, citing Hendrix and Buddha as inspiration along the way. Chosen as the first single from the record, the song’s title may have been responsible for giving A&M Records the stupid idea to market Iggy as a Heavy Metal artist. This was 1988, after all. By crimping his bleached blond hair and sporting a chain mail vest in many publicity photos and live performances of the time, Iggy himself may have inadvertently sent false signals of his own willingness to play along.

It was around this time that Iggy’s pre-occupation with all things false and phony began its rapid swell into full-blown obsession. His later solo records in the 90s and an eventual reunion with the Stooges would provide him with the platform to call bullshit on everyone and everything within shouting distance, but it was the Instinct record where this foundation was laid. The album’s title track is an incisive scalpel, cutting straight through the bullshit to reveal the ugly truth of the world where Iggy resides.

Already a wise veteran of the industry, Iggy sums up his station with strategic patience…

Standing on the borderline between joy and reason
Tending carefully my fire, waiting for my season

Only three lines in and he’s unable to resist the impulse to snap a quick peripheral nip at the hand that feeds him…

I know who these people are
I know what they stand for
Corruption’s built into their plan
Nothing’s on the other hand
Tricks and trials
Await the child

With full faith and absolute trust in instinct over other impulses and influences, with no other choice or desire but to embrace his fate, our hero bravely dives into the fray…

Instinct keeps me running, running like a deer…
Running through the grinning shadows

Elsewhere on the record we find the unexpectedly shy boy who penned “China Girl” still crooning about how his heart yearns for a simple girl with strong convictions. No one puts a woman on a pedestal quite like Iggy, who invariably likens the object of his desire to some kind of goddess. The Instinct record includes two numbers in this vein. Not content with a single ode to a “Strong Girl”, Iggy also serenades his “Tuff Baby”. In this way, Iggy continues his pattern of pining for things that are simple only on the surface, like the way the most mundane conversation with a woman can carry within in it the weight, wonder and promise of an epic romance.

Always a lively interview subject on Late Night With David Letterman, Dave gleefully invited Iggy back on the program time and time again during the 1980s. Often buoyant and childlike when he found himself in an interview situation to his liking, Iggy’s numerous appearances on the program always showed him barely able to contain his enthusiasm. Bouncing up and down in the chair next to Dave’s desk, Iggy reminisced about his memories of watching Soupy Sales on television as a child growing up in Detroit. Sales always instructed his young viewers to keep their cards and letters to “25 words or less”. Much to Dave’s delight, Iggy claimed that this lesson stuck with him all his life and greatly influenced his spartan songwriting technique.

(Ironically, Soupy’s sons Tony and Hunt Sales would play in Iggy’s backing band in the late 70s and later went on to form Tin Machine with David Bowie.)

Bootlegs from the Instinct tour find Iggy facing typically boisterous and belligerent crowds. Yet his between-song banter would frequently veer into introspective and confessional rants that were often lost on audiences that came to stage dive and slam dance, hoping to see Iggy roll around on broken glass. “This is a song I wrote when I got really pissed off,” he confided to a packed house at Boston’s Channel. “I couldn’t take drugs anymore because my mind got blown. So I thought I’ll just have to get high on you.” He’s losing them but he doesn’t care. They writhe and scream as if the mosh-pit melee were their sole reason for being there. “Everybody wants to feel high,” he continues with uncharacteristic onstage calm. Maybe it’s a soliloquy for his own benefit at this point. “That ain’t no damn crime. Everybody just wants to feel alright whenever they can get away with it. And I’m the same way.” He pauses, mulling it over while the crowd-beast undulates with barely-contained rage. Finally, unapologetically, he declares, “I would never take back all those times I got stoned and every time I stripped off my clothes.” This, it is clear from the recording, the audience can relate to. Finally he leads the band into the song “High On You” from the Instinct album. “But now I’m getting real high… on YOU.”

The U.K. Subs’ former bassist Alvin Gibbs was in Iggy’s band for the 1988 tour, and he later wrote a book about the experience. If we can believe what we read in Neighborhood Threat: On Tour With Iggy Pop, Iggy was still struggling to stay clean at the time. More than once during the tour he succumbed to temptation, though by all accounts he set aside the hard stuff for good around this time. The lyrics on his Instinct record may in fact be a true indication that the man was taking stock of his station at the time, perhaps knowing even then that if he was going to be in it for the long haul that he’d better ditch some bad habits and develop some good new ones and make it stick. Say what you want about his freakish physique and undying insistence to go shirtless 99% of the time, it is no accident that Iggy is in such good shape for a man who will be 65 next year.

All of us bleed the same when we’re cut. Throughout history there have been many producers of pop music that would have you believe that certain artists will bleed pretty pink unicorns and rainbows of healing light and never-ending bliss when you cut them open. Speaking truth to power and railing against the mainstream for over 40 years, Iggy Pop bleeds out the good, the bad and the ugly every time you put him in a studio and press record. Here on Instinct, in a handful of couplets buried long ago and far away on an album released during an era considered by some to be a low point in his career, Iggy Pop conveyed more intensity and more palpable human emotion than most artists do in their whole life. His wild man persona and storied history with the legendary Stooges are well-documented in the annals of rock history. But throughout a career that spans over four decades, Iggy Pop has rarely if ever been taken seriously as a lyricist. Discussions about his work never credit his lyrics for their emotional depth. Perhaps that’s the price you pay when your most famous song is called “I Wanna Be Your Dog”. The final track on the Instinct record (“Squarehead”) makes it all too clear that the very same man who wants to be your dog definitely “ain’t gonna be no squarehead”. And while the truth is that Iggy probably won’t change anybody’s mind with that frank statement alone, slang and street language have always the parlance of his trade and the defiant sentiment of the song is much greater than the sum of its parts. Iggy weaves grime, filth, and iron-clad conviction with hard-won insight and spits out acidic poetry. If you’re looking for a suck-ass brain-dead toady to tow the company line with a big, fake smile on his face, I believe you must have dialed the wrong number.


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[This article originally appeared on Crawdaddy.com in a slightly edited form in July 2011. Special thanks to editor Angie Zimmerman. –rh]