I remember a cool autumn morning in Pennsylvania, sitting in a windowed room, the teal haze of the city blowing through me like a tractor beam. Cold gusts churned my mind into a diamond, the sleepy month sapped my energy away, and the traffic made me wonder for long hours about what’s to come. I forgot about who mattered most in a bitter apathy.
Recalling this all, I find it jarring to realize I’ve been duped into a false memory belonging to the narrator of Iggy Pop’s album, “Avenue B”— a melancholic foray into self interest and regret.
Iggy Pop is perhaps best known for his time with The Stooges, where he lived the character of a nothing-to-lose punk with not much more than his voice and an attitude. If you like punk - or rock in general - then you’ll already know that he essentially defined the genre—for god’s sake, he invented the stage dive.
So, what’s a moody subdued album like “Avenue B” doing in his discography? If you listen to it from start to finish (in order, too), you’ll find that it’s more poetry than music. Like a lot of poetry, it’s self interested, sometimes insufferable, and by the end of it all you find yourself changed if the author knew what they were doing.
(Quick question too — did anyone else know Johnny Depp is close friends with Iggy Pop? They have matching tattoos, and he’s featured on a B-side track. Small world?)
Some may find it hard to look past some of the racier elements of the album found on tracks like “Nazi Girlfriend” and “She Called Me Daddy” — but Iggy Pop doesn’t want you to. This is where the punk still lives on. He makes you squirm. In the 70s he was performing insane stage antics – too extreme for even this blog – for conservative Vietnam War supporters to gawk at. That’s what got them angry, and maybe thinking, maybe reconsidering. That’s what the shock titles are meant to accomplish here, to get you to pay attention and realize that maybe there’s something more to the album than a middle aged man suffering from chronic self interest.
Amidst the lamentations of “Avenue B”’s narrator are cool melodic guitar tracks and the vulture-gaggling voice that Iggy Pop has come to be known for. He’s not a great singer, but he can shout with anger and spit when he needs it. On softer tracks, like “Miss Argentina,” a frail innocence in his voice works to usher a wave of honesty upon which the simple lyrics delicately float. You can’t help but see your own flawed self in the narrator’s story. Maybe you haven’t broken a heart before, but have you betrayed yourself? And for nothing to boot? Just stupidity fueled by a lack of foresight, and perhaps a crippling fear of loneliness.
I’m no tough-guy New York scumbag, and my guess is you aren’t either. This album exists to remind you of that. The characters we conjure to deal with a world we don’t actually understand are exactly that — characters. “Avenue B” is the construction, and ensuing destruction of one such character. It’s fragile, it begs, it uses deeply personal experiences like chess pieces. Like how we use each other. Pop’s goal at the end of all this is to demand you reconsider. To demand your earnest heart so that you’ll avoid mistakes he didn’t. In his own words on the opening track:
“Above all, I didn’t want to take any more shit
Not from anybody”
That includes you.
You’ll find some unacceptable things said, done, and played with as you listen through. If you make it to the end, you may find yourself changed. If you let yourself get sucked into the solipsistic world of Avenue B, you may discover that you too suffer under delusions of a facade of memories on a melancholy street, and I venture to guess you’ll be as pleasantly surprised as I was when you realize that those memories of a cold foggy morning drinking coffee on the corner are not yours.
Rating: 10/10
Favorite Track: Nazi Girlfriend