STOOGES - The Weirdness

A Stooges record in 2007 makes little sense, maybe no sense at all. It's like the Stones breaking up after "Exile On Main Street" and reforming in 2000 instead of growing old before our eyes. The idea of "Stooges" – a rock cliché, a byword for punk, for youthful, rebellious, decadent music, blah, blah, blah – is too strong, too crystallized, too untouchable, so thoroughly codified that it has become elusive. Three albums, the breakup, the subsequent adventures of Iggy and the Asheton brothers, more than three decades of popular music history, from "Raw Power" to today. Who wants to tell that story all over again?

(And does anyone know whatever became of James Williamson?)

Not me, who simply greets “The Weirdness” with a smile – a Stooges album in 2007, on which Iggy Pop, the Ashetons and Mike Watt play at being the Stooges and clearly have a great time doing it. Produced by Steve Albini, whose presence, in our view, is neither essential nor decisive – except for giving the drums that typical airy "Albini sound," which, who knows, has little to do with anything here.

Asheton's guitar dominates, Iggy hams it up (granted, Iggy has been hamming it up since the day he was born, but here we reckon he's laying it on even thicker, sixty years old and declaring "my idea of fun is killing everyone"), Watt is there and not there. McKay is there too, yes, the saxophonist from "Funhouse", but here he comes across mostly as a piano-bar session man, melodic when needed and winded when things call for excess.

The songs? Yes, those are there too, a few interesting outbursts ("My Idea", the boorish chorus of "Free & Freaky", "Greedy Awful People", the thoroughly predictable but effective "I'm Fried", the not-quite-successful attempt of "Mexican Guy", which dares to revisit "Funhouse" territory) and a couple of softer tracks: “The Weirdness”, a lumbering ballad fit for a reunion of retired Hell's Angels, and "Passing Cloud", a classic mood piece to close out the tracklist. Then more filler, though not always the same filler: with every listen our favorites change, not because the record is flawless or excellent, but because what emerges above all else from the dozen tracks of “The Weirdness” is the idea of a band putting itself back on stage in light of everything that has been said, written, thought and imagined by others in its absence.

The weight of the decades is too much, and the whole operation sits somewhere between harmless fun and a mockery of both themselves and the paying audience, so it's best - as we said at the start - to just laugh it off and not get too worked up, because "these aren't the real Stooges". As someone else already pointed out, this could be a five or a seven. Caught in the indecision, we'll settle around a passing grade, but without turning the volume down, not even a little.

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08/03/2007